NOVANEWS
‘A dark day and a wake up call for Europe,’ says Jewish leader as ‘xenophobic, unashamedly neo-Nazi’ party surges
Times of Israel
Hungary’s surging far-right Jobbik won 18 percent of the vote in the country’s parliamentary elections Sunday, with incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party winning nearly 50 percent.
Orban appeared to have won a clear victory in the vote, with exit polls giving his party a wide lead over the opposition.
Fidesz won 48 percent of the vote, well ahead of the left-wing opposition alliance on 27 percent, with the openly anti-Semitic and anti-Roma Jobbik winning 18 percent, the exit polls showed.
Earlier polls showed Jobbik could receive up to 20 percent. In the 2010 parliamentary elections, Jobbik won 16.7 percent of votes, mainly from rural voters. Two years later, in 2012, it made headlines when one of its MPs called for a list of all Jewish lawmakers for “national security” reasons.
By 2014, the party had succeeded in winning more support from the Hungarian public, though it was still only the third-largest party in the country.
Official results were due later Sunday.
Reacting to the exit poll results, European Jewish Congress president Moshe Cantor said Sunday that the “unashamedly neo-Nazi” far-right party’s electoral gains should “serve as a wake-up call for the whole of Europe.”
He said the elections marked “a dark day for Hungary” and for Europe at large.
“Once again in Europe we are witnessing democracy being appropriated by those are the enemies of democracy,” Kantor said in a statement.
“This is a party that feeds on hate,” Kantor continued. “The new Hungarian government must ensure now that this hate is not tolerated, not by the government, not in parliament and not on the streets of Hungary.”
He also warned of a “strong tailwind” from Sunday’s results going into the European Parliament elections, set to take place in May.
“It is the duty of both European leaders and voters to ensure that a strong message is delivered by supporters of democracy throughout Europe to show these racists and xenophobes that hate has no place on our continent,” he said.
But incumbent Prime Minister Orban seemed unconcerned with Jobbik’s growing popularity. Since winning a super-majority in 2010, Orban has made the most of his prime ministership with a legislative onslaught shaking up the media, the judiciary and the central bank.
Critics, including Brussels and Washington, have expressed concerns about vital checks and balances on key democratic institutions in the EU member state.
The fate of the media has sparked particular alarm, with state outlets merged into one tame entity and independent publications starved of advertising. All are under the close eye of a new watchdog run by Orban lieutenants.
“The Internet is where you go to find out what is really happening in Hungary,” Aranka Szavuly, a freelance journalist fired from state media in 2011, told AFP.
Many of these reforms have been written into a new constitution, meaning that even if the opposition were to win, it would need a two-thirds majority to change them.
Orban first rose to prominence as a long-haired student dissident, calling in a 1989 speech for Soviet troops to leave the country and for free and fair elections.
Since then he has turned the Fidesz movement that he formed with like-minded young liberals into a potent political force.
He was first elected prime minister aged just 35 in 1998, but lost to the Socialists four years later before returning to power in 2010.
Orban says his changes are aimed at turning Hungary into a “race car” after eight years of economic and political Socialist mismanagement before 2010 had reduced it to an “old banger”.
But despite some rosy economic data, Orban’s nationalist rhetoric and unorthodox economic policies have scared away much-needed foreign investors, economists say.
