The following essay from the Hungarian daily Magyar Idők discusses the bizarre characteristics of the unnatural entity known as the European Union, and especially those of Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament.

CrossWare, who translated the piece for Gates of Vienna, had difficulty finding a direct translation of a particular Hungarian idiom. She said:

In Hungarian we have an expression for a super-bureaucratic office, where no decision is ever made and there is only the pushing of paper from one side to the other. It’s called sóhivatal, a “salt office” — in the Middle Ages that was the expression for bureaucracy and red tape.

I couldn’t come up with anything, either. There seems to be no precise analog in English that isn’t cumbersome. “Paper-pushers” describes the inhabitants of a salt office, and “make-work” describes what they do. Their positions may be “sinecures”. But we Anglophones don’t seem to have a concise, pithy term for the office itself.

The Hungarians have a useful expression in sóhivatal. English loves borrowing foreign words, so I suggest we borrow that one and make it our own idiom. If we can ever learn how to pronounce it, that is.

The translated essay:

Circus by Ottó Gajdics

January 17, 2017 Martin Schulz is clearly clay-brained. We could prettify him, saying he has too big a coat on, and is undereducated for his position, but it’s best to say it bluntly: The president of the European Parliament has utterly lost common sense. Otherwise, he would not continue with his arguments — even beyond the transfer of national powers to Brussels — when his salt-office EU has been unable to respond with a single able-bodied decision in its entire existence. He would stop smearing the Orbán government, because the prime minister is fighting tooth and nail to keep our country’s sovereignty, when more and more countries realize that nobody will protect them against the flood of migrants and the inevitably intensified terror threats, if they do not establish their own independent security measures. Schulz would not force the abnormal vision of the United States of Europe, if he were normal. They say the fish rots from the head. The validity of this saying is demonstrated perfectly by the stupidity — they do not have to go to next door for it — of the representatives of the European Parliament. To provide proof, we collected examples from the magazine Politico to showcase what is keeping the elected ladies and gentlemen busy within the tingling safety of their astonishing salaries, while criminals, rapists and thousands of terrorists have flooded the continent, abusing our feelings of solidarity with the truly needy refugees. First off, here is the proposal of Catalan Socialist MEP Javi Lopez about reviving the tradition of finch-singing tournaments, which were banned by the wicked Catalan government under pressure from the EU. The finch must first be caught, which contradicts the Catalan aspirations for independence, and the preparation for the competition is not animal cruelty but just the opposite: a convincing demonstration of the integration model, proving that the boringly-repeated basic values of European socialists can be accepted by anyone from finches to jihadists.