“Gypsy of the worst kind,” reads a post from one of the party leaders, a trusted confidant of the party’s president. Although the party is plagued by racist and anti-Semitic scandals, the left continues to defend its ally.
“You would never win without the Gypsies, but you get support where you come from.” “How does it feel to be a Gypsy of the worst kind?” These sentences were part of a Facebook post by one of the leaders and trusted colleague of the president of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party.
Jobbik politician Gabor Horvath posted the abusive, anti-Gypsy comments on Facebook after Sunday’s parliamentary interim elections where Jobbik’s candidate – who enjoyed the full support of Hungary’s opposition parties – was defeated by the governing parties’ candidate.
Reacting to the election results, Gabor Horvath wrote, “From today, (Hungary’s) Borsod county, flying the Italian tricolour, joins the ranks of Washington. You would never win without the Gypsies, but you get support where you come from.”
The comment was clearly targeted at the ruling parties’ candidate, Zsofia Koncz, who won Sunday’s ballot because, “it’s public knowledge that she worked as a foreign policy staff member at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington DC from 2017. The second sentence clearly reveals that Jobbik’s politician considers Ms Koncz to be a Gypsy and suggests that she was only able to win with the help of Gypsies, due to her background,” according to the Hungarian Pesti Sracok news site.
With his next post (How does it feel to be a Gypsy of the worst kind?), Gabor Horvath continues the same train of thoughts, suggesting that Zsofia Koncz is not only a Gypsy – something he already claimed in his previous post – but she belongs to “the worst kind.”
In his subsequent comments, the trusted confidant of Jobbik’s president describes the entire Borsod county (in northeastern Hungary, where the by-election took place) as a “cesspool” and calls it shameful – in a rather condescending way – that the entire Roma population of a small Hungarian town voted for Hungary’s governing party, Fidesz.
The losing candidate of Sunday’s by-election – Jobbik’s Laszlo Biro, backed by the entire Hungarian opposition – has also been marred by a series of scandals. Many of his former employees who used to work in his sewing shop say they have not been paid.
Mr Biro’s anti-Semitic slurs on social media – when he described Jewish people as Yiddos with lice-infested earlocks and called Budapest Jewdapest – have caused an even stronger general outcry.
Apparently, all this did little to discourage opposition parties from lining up behind their joint anti-Semitic candidate, nor did Jobbik’s track record of numerous anti-Semitic and racist scandals do much in the way of preventing opposition parties from cooperating with the far-right Hungarian party.
On the contrary. The vice-president of the Hungarian Socialist Party admitted in a television programme that the left made a bid to win votes from Borsod county’s racists by nominating Biro.
Hungary’s rainbow alliance is spearheaded by failed former PM Ferenc Gyurcsany. Mr Gyurcsany’s wife, Klara Dobrev, is a member of the European Parliament (EP) in the group of Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Although Ms Dobrev often discusses European values in the EP, they appear to be unperturbed by anti-Semitism, racism or anti-Gypsy sentiments.
Mr Gyurcsany made a bid to exonerate his far-right ally as early as during last year’s European parliamentary election campaign. “Some years ago Jobbik embarked on a process to transform itself into a people’s party and choose a path that leads in a normal, conservative direction. This is still under way,” he said.
Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony, who consulted with Frans Timmermans, the Socialist Vice-President of the European Commission, several times before and since his election, also had a go at absolving Jobbik when the party threw its weight behind him – along with other leftist-liberal parties – during last year’s municipal elections.
Not so long ago Gergely Karacsony, a friend of Timmermans, was talking about “not having room for Jobbik in the kind of opposition cooperation that I have in mind” adding that “there are still Nazis in the party, only now they are not active because they have been banned from practicing their Nazism.” Mr Karacsony, however, has had a change of heart and spoke at length in defence of Jobbik in a recent TV show, in an attempt to relativise the party’s anti-Semitic, racist scandals.
“This is a rough way of putting it”, he said, reacting to an earlier proposal by current Jobbik MEP Marton Gyongyosi, who came up with the idea to list members of Jewish descent in the Hungarian parliament. “I don’t think this, in isself, would be Nazism,” he said then.
A lawmaker of Hungary’s green LMP party also talked about Jobbik’s change, once the all-out collusion of opposition parties has become a increasingly hot topic. Antal Csardi was of the opinion that Jobbik did not deserve to be demonised, because they have become an acceptable party.
“We should not deny the fact that Jobbik has gone through a significant change, which I think will have a great impact on the extent to which cooperation is possible with them,” the politician said.
MEPs of the liberal Momentum party sit in the Renew Europe group. Although they regularly attack Hungary and emphasize the importance of the rule of law, their party chief was willing to land his support to an anti-Semitic politician, thinking a simple post-factum apology would do.
“Laszlo Biro openly apologised to anyone he had offended. It was up to the people to decide if they believed him or not. To me, the past 3-4 years of Jobbik’s political messaging conveys one key gesture, that the party is becoming more moderate and began moving towards the middle,” Momentum party chief Andras Fekete-Gyor explained.
The parties of the liberal left take every opportunity to emphasize the “change” of Jobbik in an attempt to find an excuse for forming an alliance with them. There are many, however, who frown on this even outside Hungary. The president of the World Jewish Congress, for example, expressed his concern last year about the Hungarian left’s cooperation with Jobbik, notorious for its anti-Semitic scandals.