Central Europe's rightward slide: The repercussions of Hungary's election reach neighbors and all

the way to Brussels.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/europe/100415/central-europes-rightward-slide?page=0,1

"But Hungarian voters are in the process of distinguishing their country in more ways than one. Hungary was the one model transitional democracy in the region. Now ongoing nationwide elections have both catapulted right-wing populists to power and handed 17 percent of the vote to an upstart neo-fascist party. If the second round ballot later this month mirrors the polls as closely as Sunday's did, a single party — Fidesz — will amass a super majority, giving it the two-thirds majority necessary to pass legislation at will and even alter the constitution.

Like other successful populists in central Europe, Fidesz revolves around a single personality, namely the 46-year-old Victor Orban. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Orban and a group of fresh-faced law students banded together to form Fidesz, a stridently anti-communist but thoroughly liberal party intent on modernizing Hungary at record tempo. Over the years Orban shaped Fidesz into his own vehicle, straying from a liberal path as the political winds dictated. Orban reinvented Fidesz as he went along: from free-market liberal to agrarian folk party to national conservative.

The country’s third force is now the ultranationalist Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary), which preaches a greater Hungary (to its pre-World War I boundaries) and hate against Gypsies, Jews, gays and other supposedly “non-Hungarian” elements in the country. Jobbik even boasts its own paramilitary arm, the Magyar Guard, which marched around Budapest in World War II fascist uniforms until the constitutional court banned it. Jobbik scored particularly well in the hard-hit parts of northern and eastern Hungary where unemployment often tops 20 percent and large Gypsy, or Roma, populations live.

“Jobbik appeals directly to racist cliches about the Gypsies, like that they are ultimately responsible for crime and the joblessness of the worst-off regions. They appeal to a racism that has a lot of currency in Hungary,” said Jeno Kaltenbach of the European Center for Roma Rights. “This is why it works so well.”