Book contents
7 - Love and Hatred
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Summary
On December 2, 2012, more than ten thousand Hungarians filled Budapest's Kossuth Square to protest against resurgent anti-Semitism in that country. Marton Gyongyosi, a parliamentarian of the radical nationalist party, Jobbik, had called for Jewish citizens to be put on a registry because they were possibly a national security risk. Later, he said he had only meant to warn of the danger posed by those Hungarian Jews who served “Zionist Israel.” The demonstration was called not only to protest Gyongyosi's outrageous statement but also the growing threat to Hungary's fragile democracy from a rise of nationalism, racism, and anti-Europeanism. As elsewhere in Europe, extreme love of country brought risks of renascent hatred.
Jobbik had appeared in the early 2000s with a viciously anti-Roma, anti-Semitic, and generally fascistic program and a violent, skinhead fringe. In this sense, it was not much different from other far-right parties that arose in Eastern and Central Europe over the past two decades (Mudde 2007). But the association of the term “register” with the lists of Jewish citizens that the Nazis had used in liquidating more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews in 1943 sent shivers across Hungary. The despair deepened when polls showed that 8 percent of the electorate supported Jobbik, a number that likely accounted for the reluctance of the country's ruling Fidesz Party to immediately condemn Gyongyosi's statement. In the past few years, trying to ward off the extremist threat to its right, the governing Fidesz Party had remained silent about the growing cult of Miklos Horthy, Hungary's wartime leader, who stood by as the Nazis deported his compatriots. Fidesz also pushed through a number of antidemocratic laws and a new constitution that elevated the Crown of St. Stephen to the status of a mythical religio-nationalist symbol (Scheppele 2000). As is traditional in this part of the world, rising nationalism brought anti-Semitism in its wake: the Economist reported that Orthodox Jews on the streets of Budapest now expect to hear racist remarks “almost as a matter of course as they go about their business” (December 8, 2012, p. 56).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Language of ContentionRevolutions in Words, 1688–2012, pp. 165 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013