Hungary battles black-sheep status in Europe with rise of extreme-right party

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It was a celebratory speech that has sent a chill across Europe.

Gabor Vona, whose far-right Jobbik party attracted almost 17 per cent of the vote in the first round of Hungary's national elections on Sunday, made front pages across the continent Tuesday after exultantly declaring that his party "is not preparing to conduct peaceful and near-invisible politics. … We are preparing to conduct very distinct and very spectacular politics, not only in words and appearances."

Specifically, he said, that meant he would wear the uniform of the illegal neo-Nazi Hungarian Guard to the opening of parliament and crack down on what he described as "Gypsy crime" - a phrase widely understood as a physical threat to the country's Roma minority.

Those words, along with reminders of his party's frequent rhetorical attacks on Jews and immigrants, have eclipsed the news of the majority victory of the more moderate right-wing Fidesz party.

As a result, Hungary's prime minister-elect, the youthful Fidesz leader Viktor Orban, has been forced to devote virtually all his time and political capital since the election to international fears arising from Jobbik.

"Orban is going to have to do something very fast to distance himself and his party from Jobbik, for both political and for national-image reasons, because the whole world is watching and the investment climate is being harmed," said Krisztian Szabados, a Budapest-based political consultant.

After watching their country slide to the bottom of Europe's economic heap with a devastating credit collapse and painful bailout from the International Monetary Fund, many Hungarians fear the election has put their country on the path to becoming a European pariah.

For Mr. Orban, whose party parlayed the failure of the long-reigning Socialist party into a convincing victory in part by drawing on language and imagery used by the far-right Jobbik leaders, it is a day of reckoning.

For the past year, his Fidesz party has allowed its MPs to maintain close relationships with Jobbik and Hungarian Guard figures while encouraging party-controlled media to link the two parties, all in an apparent effort to win over angry, xenophobic voters whose prejudices have been inflamed by the economic crisis.

"This had been the Fidesz strategy - they delivered messages appealing to Jobbik supporters," said Mr. Szabados. "But it was a strategic mistake by Fidesz - they didn't realize it was a snake they were feeding, and they were legitimizing racism and anti-Semitism, and by the time they realized it, it had become an anaconda."

With Fidesz winning 53 per cent of the vote - probably enough to give it 60 per cent of the seats after a second round of voting on April 25 - it will have no reason to do Jobbik any favours, and most analysts expect its leaders to shift their rhetoric toward the centre.

Tuesday, facing international pressure, Mr. Orban dismissed the Jobbik threat, vowing never to work with that party in parliament.

"The best prescription we can offer the Hungarian people is good government," he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "I am convinced that better management of the government will lead to a weakening of the extreme right."

Many international observers weren't satisfied with this, noting that the seven-year-old Jobbik party, once a marginal political force, will now enjoy government funding and a media platform for its views.

"Twenty years after the end of communist dictatorship, Hungary has turned into a grubby hive of nationalism in which far-right blood-and-soil ideologies are flourishing," the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung editorialized Tuesday.

The Jobbik result mirrors a political trend across Central and Southern Europe, where extremist parties in Austria, Italy and France have posted strong showings recently.

Hungary's situation seems to have driven many voters to the fringes, and there are signs that much of the support for Jobbik was a protest against the mainstream parties, none of whom have comported themselves well.

The governing Socialists, a moderate-left party in office for eight years, have managed to oversee an economic collapse in an environment where much of the economy is still controlled by the public sector, while exposing themselves to numerous corruption scandals.

Fidesz, which began as a centre-left anti-communist movement in the 1980s, forbidding anyone over 30 from joining, has become socially conservative while endorsing economic policies that often seem more left-wing than those of their opponents.

This protest-vote element has reassured some observers. The 17-per-cent Jobbik result, said the Czech journalist Lubos Palata, "isn't all that worrying in view of the delicate situation Hungary is currently in. … There will be no catastrophe in Hungary. And Hungary is not the black sheep in Central Europe either, it's just another part of the herd."