Fear and Loathing in Hungary The Anti-Semitic Jobbik Party Keeps Rising.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/fear-and-loathing-in-hungary-1429053336
Rising extremism in Hungary is one of the most alarming political developments in Europe. The latest sign came Sunday when voters in the country’s western Tapolca district elected a candidate from the far-right Jobbik party in a special vote. If the result is officially confirmed, it will be the first time Jobbik has won a parliamentary seat in a by-election rather than through party lists.
Jobbik is the third most powerful party in Hungary. In last year’s general election, it garnered 20% of ballots. The party is openly anti-Semitic. A Jobbik leader in 2012 called on the government to “tally up people of Jewish ancestry” since they “pose a national security risk.” A Jobbik member of Parliament has spat on a Budapest Holocaust memorial.
The party’s leaders are also among Europe’s loudest cheerleaders for Vladimir Putin and the Iranian regime. Márton Gyöngyösi, Jobbik’s foreign-policy spokesman, has described Russia’s annexation of Crimea as the “triumph of a community’s self-determination” and denounced the Islamic Republic’s international isolation at the behest of “Israeli interests.”
Jobbik’s rise has come at the expense of the ruling Fidesz party, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has no one to blame but himself. Mr. Orbán, who as a young man in the 1980s cut his political teeth as an anti-Communist, now embraces illiberalism. “I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Mr. Orbán said in a speech last year, citing Russia, China and Turkey as exemplars.
To that end, Mr. Orbán has nationalized pensions, made it more difficult for foreigners to buy Hungarian farmland, and proscribed “imbalanced” news coverage. Fidesz and Jobbik have found common cause in targeting the country’s Roma, or gypsy, minority. And Fidesz has long promoted the false narrative, popular among Hungarian nationalists, that the country was mostly a blameless victim of World War II, rather than a Nazi-allied state.
A Kremlin-allied Hungary would be a strategic liability at the heart of Central Europe. In December, the U.S. Senate voted narrowly along party lines to confirm President Obama’s candidate for the next U.S. Ambassador to Hungary: soap opera producer Colleen Bradley Bell.
Comments are closed.
