EUOBSERVER / INTERVIEW - Even in a season of surprising EU appointments, the person who has been nominated as Hungary's next commissioner is something of an outlier. An economics professor and member of the board of directors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, but also an author of 11 books in English and Hungarian and the editor-in-chief of Hungary's main left-wing academic journal, Laszlo Andor is more the donnish intellectual than the seasoned political operative....Mr Andor is an ardent Keynesian, a school of economics which advocates government intervention in the economy, or "post-Keynesian" (the term he prefers) and a strong critic of those he calls the "Market Maoists" or "market fundamentalists" of eastern Europe since 1989.He was an opponent of the Iraq war and regularly rubs shoulders with the "galacticos" of the left-liberal universe. His quarterly journal, Eszmelet (Consciousness) - essentially a Hungarian Le Monde Diplomatique - publishes texts by the likes of Ignacio Ramonet, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek and Arundhati Roy. He believes the Maastricht criteria are misguided, that Europe suffers from a democratic deficit and blames the financial crisis on the "anglo-American" economic model.
...Mr Andor is an ardent Keynesian, a school of economics which advocates government intervention in the economy, or "post-Keynesian" (the term he prefers) and a strong critic of those he calls the "Market Maoists" or "market fundamentalists" of eastern Europe since 1989.
He was an opponent of the Iraq war and regularly rubs shoulders with the "galacticos" of the left-liberal universe. His quarterly journal, Eszmelet (Consciousness) - essentially a Hungarian Le Monde Diplomatique - publishes texts by the likes of Ignacio Ramonet, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek and Arundhati Roy. He believes the Maastricht criteria are misguided, that Europe suffers from a democratic deficit and blames the financial crisis on the "anglo-American" economic model.
