PM Wins Second Term and Anti-Semites Enjoy Increased Support in Hungarian Election

Yesterday Hungarians voted in a
parliamentary election, and the results are worrying.

Fidesz, the center-right party led by Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán, is officially projected to win 133 of the 199 seats. Jobbik,
a nationalist and

antisemitic party,
won almost 21 percent of the vote, an increase from the election
four years ago, and is projected to have 23 seats in
parliament.

Last year, Jobbik supported the building of a
statue of Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian wartime leader and
Hitler ally who passed a range of antisemitic laws and allowed
hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to be sent to Auschwitz.
Protesters, some of whom wore yellow stars, clashed with supporters
of the statue when it was presented.

Under Orbán’s leadership, Hungary adopted controversial changes
to the constitution that have
been criticized for weakening judicial independence, allowing
for religious discrimination, and weakening freedom of political
speech. Back in 2007, when he was an opposition leader, the
Economist awarded Orbán the Politics of the gutter
award (jointly shared with then-Prime Minister Ferenc
Gyurcsány) for his “cynical populism and mystifyingly authoritarian
socialist-style policies.”

The British libertarian Conservative Member of the European
Parliament, Daniel Hannan, reminded readers of his
blog of Orbán’s most recent predecessor back in 2012:

Developments in Hungary need to be seen in the context of what
happened in the 1990s. As in other Communist states, the people
best positioned to profit from the transition were often those who
had done well under the old system. Ferenc Gyurcsány, who served as
prime minister between 2004 and 2009, was typical. He happened to
be President of the Communist Youth Organisation when the
revolution came, and used the opportunity to sell himself
party-owned property, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the
country. Other members of the nomenklatura did the same thing,
becoming known as the ‘red bourgeoisie’.

While it might be the case that Orbán replaced former
communists, this does not excuse what Hannan
has described as the “autocratic proclivities of the Fidesz
regime.”

It is a sad reality that over 60 percent of Hungarians who voted
in yesterday’s election backed either a revolting antisemitic party
or a party led by a man who has overseen some very worrying
erosions of personal liberties. Next month there will be European
Parliament elections. Many will be keeping an eye on Jobbik which,
as Cas Mudde of the School for Public and International Affairs at
the University of Georgia, told
Reuters, is one of the most extreme as well as popular of
Europe’s far-right parties.