A far-right for the Facebook generation: The rise and rise of Jobbik (Hungarian far-right party)

[pampango]

http://euobserver.com/?aid=29866

Most European nations have their share of far-right fringe groups. But Jobbik is openly anti-semitic and anti-gypsy. It is the founder of a rapidly growing, jackbooted and black-uniformed paramilitary, the Magyar Garda, and it is allied to pariahs such as the British National Party and France's Front National in the EU Parliament. How could such an out-and-out fascist outfit climb so vertiginously high up the greasy pole of politics in the modern era? It is the clearest sign yet that the economic crisis has woken Europe's most frightening demons.

Or so runs the media narrative. Long-time watchers of the far-right in Europe describe this version of the story as "lazy". Certainly, the crash, which hit Hungary harder than many European nations - it was the first EU member state to run to the IMF - played a role in last week's vote, but the tale is, they say, longer and more complicated.

"The frustration I have with the sudden burst of media coverage is that for most of the time, the far-right phenomenon is not treated seriously," complains Graeme Atkinson, the European editor of the UK's anti-fascist monthly, Searchlight. "They're treated as cranks, so papers don't write about them, don't notice them. And then suddenly something like this happens and they think the sky is falling." Mr Atkinson actually lays the bulk of the blame on the centre-left establishment in Europe: "Social democrats everywhere have abandoned their traditional constituency. This is the vacuum the far right are filling." As socialist and labour parties have, pace Tony Blair, embraced business, backed privatisation and instituted social spending cuts, he argues, extremist ideas provide an easy answer to the thousands that feel disoriented by the slings and arrows of the free market.

The Perspective Institute, a Budapest polling firm, demographically backs this analyis, noting already in an analysis after last year's European elections in which the party scored 14.8 percent that left-wing voters were en masse turning toward Jobbik: "The Hungarian extreme right doesn't primarily recruit its supporters from the centre-right but instead from the leftist camp disappointed with the governmental performance of MSZP . Jobbik, in certain cases, succeeded in doubling its nationwide share of the votes in cities that had been Socialist strongholds."

"the far-right phenomenon is not treated seriously...They're treated as cranks". Sounds like how many here view the Tea Party. I imagine that 10 years ago many Europeans viewed Jobbik, the BNP and National Front as "cranks". Not so much anymore.