GABOR VONA promises he and his Jobbik party colleagues will wear the black uniform of the illegal neo-Nazi Hungarian Guard to the opening of parliament. And the leader of Hungary’s xenophobic far-right party, triumphant at its 17 per cent vote share in Sunday’s general election, has also reprised his election theme, a crackdown on “Gypsy crime”, widely understood as a physical threat to the country’s Roma. The group has marched through Roma villages bearing flags reminiscent of the Nazi era.
Jobbik’s worrying success mirrors that of other far-right groups in recent elections and polls around Europe – whether Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in French regional elections, the anti-immigrant Northern League in Italy, or anti-Islamic Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party in the Netherlands, now polling 25 per cent ahead of June’s general election.
It is a trend that has set off alarm bells around capitals and in Hungary has stolen the thunder of the real election-winner, Victor Orban. His conservative Fidesz party won 53 per cent of the vote and, in the second round voting next week, may make up the two thirds of seats needed to effect constitutional change. Fidesz capitalised on widespread disillusionment with the Socialists whose eight-year grip on power was tarnished by a succession of corruption scandals, the need for a €20 billion IMF bailout, and a taped admission by Ferenc Gyurcsány, former prime minister, that he had lied about the state of public finances to get elected.
Orban’s comfortable majority will make single-party government possible for the first time in 12 years and allow him to distance himself from Jobbik despite the two parties’ friendly links in the past. But Orban and Fidesz, a populist/nationalist rather than fiscally conservative party, also make international markets nervous. The party has opposed government plans for fiscal consolidation and suggested that must await growth in the economy. It has already spoken to the IMF about leeway on budget deficits and some commentators question whether it has the stomach for necessary structural reform of the parlous economy.
A clear two-thirds majority in the second round – or support from Jobbik – would also allow Fidesz to play provocatively to nationalist sentiment by extending Hungarian citizenship to Hungarian minorities abroad – nationalists, for example, refer to Slovakia as “Upper Hungary”. That is a dangerous prospect that would play very poorly with the neighbours.