Yet these numbers are deceptive: in Hungary’s febrile political atmosphere, the Garda dominated the political and media agenda for several months last year, continues to receive substantial press coverage, and has an effect on political life out of all proportion to its numbers. The Garda has triggered anger and consternation across the spectrum, soured the parliamentary atmosphere, increased social tension between Roma and non-Roma, and disrupted relations with Hungary’s neighbors. Jewish and Roma groups have demanded that the Garda be banned. The late U.S. Representative Tom Lantos, himself a survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust, angrily warned that no Garda member would ever be allowed to enter the United States; Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany proclaimed dramatically that “Fascists were gathering.” Yet paradoxically, the Garda may also have inadvertently provided a useful service for this post-communist country that in some ways is still in transition between two systems, by defining the limits of free—and hate—speech. THE GARDA was launched in August 2007, when its first fifty-six members—a number chosen to commemorate the 1956 revolution—were inaugurated by Lajos Fur, a former minister of defense in Hungary’s first post- communist government, run by the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). They paraded in Budapest’s historic Castle District, in front of the home of Hungary’s president, Laszlo Solyom, holding the Hungarian flag and the ancient “Arpad” banner of red and white stripes. They wore black boots, black trousers, black sleeveless vests and white shirts, and black caps emblazoned with the Arpad stripes. The symbolism seemed obvious: a homage to Mussolini, if not Hitler, and to the fusion between race, state, and national unity. The “Arpad” stripes are a part of Hungary’s coat of arms, but are now associated with the far right, as the Nazi Arrow Cross regime, which ruled the country in the winter of 1944–1945, incorporated the stripes into its flag. Three priests, from Hungary’s Catholic, Calvinist, and Evangelical churches, blessed the Garda’s flag. (The churches later claimed the priests were acting in a personal capacity.) Among those attending the inauguration was Maria Wittner, a member of Parliament for Fidesz. Wittner is a former ’56er, as those who fought in the revolution are known. Her death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, although her cellmate was executed, and her traumatic experiences mean she is granted a certain indulgence. Several dozen members of an even more extreme group, the Nemzeti Orsereg, also attended, wearing khaki paramilitary uniforms. The whole spectacle has so far been viewed on YouTube more than 33,000 times.
LAST EUROPEAN extremists usually fall into one of two categories: disheveled, obsessed pseudo-intellectuals spouting obscure conspiracy theories (Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs now wanted for genocide, was a wild-haired “poet” and psychiatrist) or “skinheads” who like beating people up. Gabor Vona, leader of both Jobbik and the Magyar Garda, is neither. An articulate and well-groomed twenty-nine year-old former history teacher, from Gyongyos, a small town east of Budapest, Vona describes himself as a “first-generation intellectual” from a paraszt background. Paraszt is usually translated as “peasant,” and is often used by city dwellers as a term of abuse, meaning “hick.” But in Hungarian it has another nuance, of a genuine son of the soil, a true “Magyar,” uncorrupted by the cosmopolitan city, with its slick ways and foreign influences.
Vona spotted a gap in the nationalist market after the decline of the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIEP), which lost its fourteen parliamentary seats in 2002. Jobbik and MIEP campaigned together in the 2006 elections, but neither has a single member of Parliament, and the two groups have grown apart. MIEP is led by the elderly playwright Istvan Csurka, who is obsessed with the Jewish ancestry of some of Hungary’s former communist leaders as well as with Israeli investors, who he believes are buying up Hungary on the cheap. MIEP’s focus on anti-Semitism still resonates on the far right, but the political agenda here has shifted somewhat since the early 1990s, when forty years of suppressed anti-Semitism (albeit cultural and political rather than violent) erupted after the collapse of communism. The Garda’s message is based not on negative but positive reinforcement. The Garda is absolutely not anti-Semitic, Vona says. It is not against anyone or anything but only for Hungary. Those who feel themselves to be truly “Magyar” can join, no matter what their faith. The Garda is not against Roma as such, only Roma criminals and “delinquents.” Even Roma can join, he claims, if they fit the membership requirements, although it is more or less unimaginable that any would want to.
Vona is especially proud of the Garda and Jobbik’s Internet presence. The Internet, he says, allows interested allies to sidestep the lies of the liberal media and find out for themselves what the Garda is and what it stands for. Five years ago, the Garda would never have been so strong, he says. The Garda has a Web site, www.magyargarda.hu, as does Jobbik: www.jobbik.hu, in Hungarian, and www.jobbik.com in English and French. In mid-January 2008 jobbik.com was down for maintenance, but on previous viewings it offered, in fluent and grammatically correct English, FAQs, e-mail newsletters, news feeds, and lengthy articles about Jobbik and the Garda. Vona writes, or has someone write, frequent letters to the local English-language press denying that Jobbik and the Garda are racist, fascist, or Nazi sympathizers. The message is calm, steady, and endlessly repeated: the Garda is not against anyone, but only for Hungary. Jobbik also runs www.ciganybunozest .com, (www.gypsycrime.com) detailing alleged crimes committed by Roma.
Vona welcomes interviews with the foreign press. The Garda’s black uniform is nothing to be worried about, he explains. The boots, black trousers, and waistcoat are merely the traditional outfit of a Hungarian peasant lad, and only the paranoid, hysterical, fear-mongering liberal left media can somehow see an echo of the SS or Mussolini in these clothes. On one level, Vona is correct, as can be witnessed at any folk-dance evening, where the males often do wear precisely these clothes. But in a part of Europe where heraldry and symbols still have a powerful resonance, the “peasant-lad” uniform is useful on two levels: it allows Vona to deny fascist symbolism and it links the Garda to traditional Hungarian culture, so positioning the Garda within the mainstream rather than the neo-Nazi fringes. The difference is, of course, that folk dancers dance, and don’t march through villages demanding apartheid for Roma.
The Garda’s second major public event, the inauguration of six hundred new members in historic Heroes’ Square in October 2007, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1956 revolution, was also filmed. The slickly edited result can also be seen on YouTube. The recruits march into Heroes’ Square in military formation, before walking forward one by one to be received into the Garda, while several thousand onlookers clap and cheer. Whatever Vona’s protests, there seems little doubt that the overall intention, and effect, is to evoke the 1930s and the sublimation of confused and angry personalities into the greater, organic, national good.
HUNGARY, A MEMBER of the European Union and NATO, is governed by a coalition of Socialists who were once the reform Communists and Free Democrats, a liberal centrist party. Prime Minister Gyurcsany is a deeply polarizing figure. One of the richest men in the country, he made his fortune during the early 1990s, in the time known as “wild capitalism.” Many suspect that as a former leader of the communist youth organization, KISZ, he used his personal connections to build up his business empire. He denies any wrongdoing. His third wife, Klara Dobrev, is the glamorous granddaughter of Antal Apro, a notorious communist leader during the Stalinist 1950s. Despite his communist pedigree, Gyurcsany is a modernizer, well regarded internationally, and currently imposing painful cuts to the bloated public sector to try to reduce Hungary’s budget deficit.
But his government and personal standing were severely damaged in the autumn of 2006. Days of violent riots—some apparently organized by far-right extremists—erupted after a tape of Gyurcsany admitting that the government had lied “morning, noon, and night” about the state of the country was leaked to the media. The police, with little experience of handling public disorder in this generally peaceful country, reacted in the time-honored communist-era fashion: by cracking heads and beating up demonstrators, dozens of whom were hospitalized. Such is the conspiratorial nature of Hungarian politics—a leftover from the communist era, when everything was decided behind closed doors—that some Hungarians believe that the violence, and the attacks on the police, were organized by agent provocateurs working for the Hungarian secret service to raise fears of right-wing extremists. A cynic, or Fidesz supporter, might argue that with the Socialists lagging far behind Fidesz in the polls, the Magyar Garda was a useful gift, to frighten the voters with the specter of resurgent fascism.
Certainly, Gyurcsany has repeatedly played the fascist danger card. In March 2007, I interviewed him for Times of London, as protesters gathered outside Parliament. A vocal minority were associated with the far right, but most were just ordinary people, still furious over the notorious “lies” speech. Gyurcsany angrily accused Fidesz leader Viktor Orban of exploiting anti-Semitism and blurring the lines between conservatism and right-wing extremism. “There is something horrible happening. There have never been so many anti-Semitic remarks as now,” he said. This was not true. Although there were several anti-Semitic outbursts during the protests, unlike the early 1990s, anti-Semitism is not generally part of Hungarian political discourse. Jewish life in Hungary is thriving. The country is home to a hundred thousand Jews, the third-largest community in Europe. Many Hungarian Jews were furious at Gyurcsany’s attempts, as they saw it, to use anti-Semitism for political purposes.
Either way, Hungarian politicians are certainly not mature enough to handle the Garda in a sensible manner. Nowhere was this more evident than at the five-party press conference, called by Ibolya David, leader of the MDF, to condemn the Garda after her former colleague Lajos Fur’s embarrassing endorsement of the group. David, one of Hungary’s most popular politicians, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Garda, describing it as a “shadow army.” It’s quite a shift of position from her times as minister of justice in a Fidesz government, when she declared in 1999 that “the experience of the post-Communist era revealed a great societal need for the representation of Christian-conservative values, based on national traditions.” That same year, a plaque was unveiled at Budapest’s Military History Museum commemorating the notorious Gendarmes, the Hungarian paramilitary police force, who impressed even the SS with their enthusiasm for rounding up and torturing Hungarian Jews before dispatching them to Auschwitz. Fortunately, the politics of memory—and of anti-Semitism—have since moved on. Hungary has postcommunist Europe’s only Holocaust museum, an excellent, modern institution, housed in a former synagogue in Budapest. It was a Fidesz government that in 2001 initiated Holocaust Memorial Day, and Fidesz leaders attend the annual commemoration ceremonies.
Instead of presenting a united front against the far right, David’s press conference quickly degenerated into a public exchange of abuse as Gyurcsany and Fidesz leaders accused each other of being anti-Semitic. The Garda has proved most troublesome for Fidesz, as it wants the far-right’s votes. Jobbik and MIEP got 119,000 votes in the 2006 election. If Fidesz had received these votes, it might have won the election. There is an apocryphal story that years ago, Fidesz’s leader, the charismatic Viktor Orban, was advised by Helmut Kohl, then German chancellor, never to let himself be outflanked on the right in terms of vote-gathering. Orban seems to have followed that advice, keeping Fidesz in the mainstream European Christian Democrat camp while sending out coded messages to the far right that they will be “safe” with Fidesz. In the summer of 2005, as Fidesz moved toward economic populism, Orban gave a now notorious speech in Baile Tusnad, a town in the Transylvania region of Romania with a large ethnic Hungarian population. He said, “We need a national left wing. But many are skeptical. They say that different—maybe saying genetic is going too far—but at least different historical characteristics make the chances of a national left emerging very slim.” The speech caused an uproar in Budapest. For many, the clincher was the word “genetic.” Subtext: leftist ideologies have traditionally been imposed in Hungary by foreigners. For these, most people read Jewish.
Fidesz initially reacted slowly to the Garda, not realizing the political threat posed by the group. Hungarian politics remain a zero-sum game between right and left and consensus issues are rare. If the Socialists said the Garda was bad, such reasoning goes, then maybe it was not. So Fidesz leaders refused to condemn the Garda, and instead defended its members’ right of assembly. However as it became clear what a public relations disaster the Garda is for Hungary, Fidesz shifted position. The German press in particular has had a field day with stories of rampant fascism on the march. Pressure from European Union ambassadors and mainstream European conservative parties, angry at Fidesz’s equivocation, helped inspire Fidesz leaders to drastically shift position against the Garda. So did Tom Lantos’s warning that any party that failed to condemn the Garda would not be taken seriously as a partner by the United States. Orban still refused to join the chorus, merely stating that the Garda was the “wrong answer” for Hungary. Fidesz officials also wrote to leaders of Hungary’s Jewish community, assuring them of the Party’s support.
VONA MAY HAVE inadvertently performed a public service to his homeland, although not in the way he expected. Beyond Gyurcsany’s vocal, almost hysterical condemnations of the Garda, the government, too, has appeared confused about how to react. This is in part a legacy of Hungary’s four decades as a communist dictatorship, when all independent political organizations were banned. There is a general reluctance to outlaw political groups, unless they specifically incite violence. The Garda is a legally constituted organization, and it is not illegal to march around wearing black uniforms and waving medieval banners. But incitement to racial hatred is illegal, and it seems the Garda went too far at the December 2007 rally in Tatarszentgyorgy, when speakers demanded segregation of Roma and non-Roma.
Eight days later the Budapest prosecutor’s office filed a request at the city court to disband the Garda, on grounds of racial discrimination, violating human dignity, and causing fear among Hungary’s Roma, which is estimated to number around 800,000, almost 8 percent of the population. This followed a meeting between Albert Takacs, the minister of justice, and several ambassadors from European Union countries, in which he was strongly pressed to take action against the Garda. At the same time, President Laszlo Solyom, who is respected as a neutral arbiter and who initially was reluctant to condemn the Garda on civil liberties grounds, has now spoken out against the group, saying, “No well-intentioned person can tolerate affronts to human dignity or question our equal rights.” Solyom has also expressed his support for Hungary’s minority ombudsman, Erno Kallai, who defends Roma rights. He even called for all Hungarians to put away their Arpad flags, out of respect for the memory of Holocaust victims and survivors. The Garda may also accelerate the passage of a new law governing hate speech, which Solyom has so far refused to sign on civil liberties grounds.
Hungary next goes to the polls in 2010. The indications are that electoral support for the far right will not greatly increase from the steady 3 percent or 4 percent. It’s a truism of Hungarian politics that the two blocs that always turn out to vote are the hard-core liberals and the fascists, and the numbers remain steady. Yet numbers don’t tell the whole story. With its black uniforms and Arpad banners, the Garda is now a brand, instantly recognizable, one that will always have some share of the market. Hungary is a young, sometimes not very confident democracy, its nascent institutions still taking root and its civil society underdeveloped. Cynicism and apathy about the established political parties are widespread. For many politicians, Parliament is a path to self-enrichment rather than public service, and voters know this.
This is fertile ground for new political forces. The far right may never return to Parliament, but it is gaining strength and confidence, especially after the violence in autumn 2006. Its activists are busy, not in voting rooms or the corridors of power, but on the streets and in cyberspace. Vona rejects violence, and there is no evidence that Garda members have been involved in violence. But other extremists have been. Masked “skinheads” disrupted last year’s Gay Pride Parade in Budapest, hurling bottles and missiles at the floats. Far-right protesters follow Gyurcsany around the country, screaming abuse and throwing eggs. A Web site much further to the right than even the Garda—www.kuruc.info—calls for the names and personal details of those who trigger its ire, which it then publishes. The site has been especially critical of Sandor Csintalan, a Socialist Member of Parliament and television presenter who crossed over to Fidesz but has been vocal in his condemnation of the extreme right. Last December, Csintalan was hospitalized after being beaten up in his garage by several masked men. A group calling itself the “Arrows of Hungarians National Liberation Army” later claimed responsibility. The word “Arrows” was widely considered to be a reference to the Arrow Cross regime. Like Gabor Vona, they too, understand the power of symbolism.
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