Ivan Kalmar. Patterns of Prejudice. Volume 54, Issue 1-2, 2020.
In the late summer of 2017, one couldn’t take a walk in Budapest without being accosted by a large image of George Soros, the American financier. The posters and billboards featuring his age-ravaged visage featured the message: ‘Don’t let Soros have the last laugh!’ Like Goldstein’s in Orwell’s 1984, Soros’s larger-than-life face was meant to symbolize the people’s number one enemy. Like Goldstein, Soros was Jewish. Many of his most outspoken enemies inside and outside Hungary saw him as leading an international cabal that included other Jews such as the Rothschilds, as well as Freemasons and Illuminati. The billboard and poster campaign had been ordered, at a reported cost of more than US$21 million, by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. Soros himself protested what he saw as antisemitism. The Jews of Budapest, forming one of the largest surviving communities in Europe, were upset. The Israeli ambassador, Yossi Amrani, expressed his dismay. Yet, to everyone’s surprise, the Prime Minister of Israel distanced himself from the furore. A few days later, on a cordial visit to Budapest, he and Orbán fell over one another in expressing their mutual support. As it turned out, Netanyahu hated Soros too. The head of the Jewish state joined the head of a European country whose historical relationship with its Jews is, to say the least, controversial, in a common distaste for an influential rich man who, though neither of the leaders would openly acknowledge it, is known to millions of online and offline haters as a typical Jew. How could this be?
The second decade of the twenty-first century was characterized at the eco-nomic and political level by what the major Swiss bank Credit Suisse controversially labelled ‘the end of globalization’. People left outside the liberalization/globalization bonanza were feeling deeply disappointed in the promises of liberal democracy, which had almost irretrievably allied itself with neoliberalism. Everywhere, the rural and small-town populations, the old and the less educated were being seduced by the anti-liberal, neo-nationalist stance of the populists. At the international level, the formerly Communist countries of East Central Europe, which had undergone the greatest transfer of public to private ownership in human history, represented a ‘semi-periphery’, with the cultural and some of the economic elites fully allied with first-world capital and benefitting from its expansion, while much of the slowly depopulating countryside seethed with resentment.
A new crop of theories has appeared in an attempt to explain this fast-developing situation at a general, global level. Some rightly see East Central Europe, and specifically Hungary, as part of the worldwide rise of populism that resulted in the election of Donald Trump in the United States and of several populist formations in Italy, and has informed the strategies of political formations in France, Holland, Denmark, Germany and elsewhere.
Hungary is the longest-established example in the Euro-Atlantic world of contemporary populism in government. In the past, studies of populism in Europe focused on it mostly as an oppositional political ideology. More current work has had to come to terms with the possibility that populists can govern. Those wishing to investigate how they come to power and how they perpetuate it have an important stake in understanding Hungary.
At issue here is not so much the rationale of populism, as it was investigated perhaps most importantly by Ernesto Laclau, but its mainstreaming: how it comes to power by becoming acceptable to the political ‘centre’ or, better, the majority. Christopher Bail has proposed one specific theory about how this happens, and his example is the United States. He suggests that, for fringe populism to conquer the mainstream, there has to be a critical catalyst (this was the 2008 financial crisis) that makes the media search for ‘both sides’ of the understanding of the issue, thus giving, in the public’s mind, equal weight to the established experts and their previously unknown critics. This, Bail believes, brought Islamophobia from the lunatic fringe to the political centre.
In Hungary, the critical event was the ‘migration crisis’ that saw hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim migrants trek through the country on their way to Western Europe, until the Orbán government stopped the ‘invasion’ by erecting a wire fence. However, as we shall see, the far-right, fringe populists, then led by the infamous, traditionally antisemitic and anti-Roma Jobbik party, were not the leading exponents of the Islamophobic reaction to the events. This role was taken on by the ruling Fidesz party of Viktor Orbán himself.
In this paper, I focus on what happens to the relationship between the mainstream and the political fringe as the former adopts and adapts the rhetoric of the latter. I concentrate on anti-migrant Islamophobic rhetoric, which has played a major role in propelling populism to the political mainstream in the wake of the ‘migrant crisis’. My period begins with that event, beginning in 2015 and culminating in 2016. It ends in the immediate aftermath of the April 2018 parliamentary election that cemented Orbán’s political domination. I suggest that, during this period, Hungary exemplifies a pattern that may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to other countries as well.
When a mainstream political formation seizes the opportunity to gain votes by espousing Islamophobic populism, four things happen:
Step 1: the mainstream formation adopts Islamophobic, ethnonationalist and anti-liberal rhetoric from the fringe;
Step 2: the mainstream sanitizes its own Islamophobic rhetoric by rejecting antisemitism;
Step 3: the leadership of the fringe formation does the same (rejects antisemitism);
Step 4: the die-hard antisemites of the original fringe leave the fringe party and found their own movement.
By 2018, Steps 1 and 2 allowed the ‘mainstream’ Islamophobic Fidesz to retain and increase its predominance. The ‘far right’ Jobbik, in the meantime, reached Step 3 (claiming to give up antisemitism) and predictably went on to Step 4 (splintering).
Step 2 is necessary because, even in Hungary, memories of the Holocaust still necessitate the banning of overt antisemitism from respectable discourse. Moreover, explicit antisemitism is sure to raise loud criticism internationally. Politicians who wish to exploit the hatred of Muslims must, therefore, go through the ritual of disassociating themselves from hatred of Jews. This is what I call ‘anti-antisemitism’ in this paper.
The term ‘anti-antisemitism’ was employed in a significant way by Jonathan Judaken in his study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Question. He used it to refer to French intellectuals who were opposed to prejudice and institutionalized discrimination against Jews, but without necessarily understanding or having sympathy for them. One of the aspects of anti-antisemitism is that it may reverse ‘the dictums of antisemitism without problematizing’ its underpinnings, and ‘thereby end up duplicating aspects of the problem that anti-antisemites seek to resist’. This generally applies to the Islamophobic anti-antisemites as well, with the difference that, in their case, their underlying antisemitism may be more obvious. It is indeed an essential part of their disingenuous strategy, to gain the support of antisemites without appearing to be antisemitic themselves. Anti-antisemitism can be, and often is, crypto-antisemitism.
Essential to the process here described as Steps 1 to 4 is that, when the fringe leaders, or some of them, recognize that their populism and racism have been ‘stolen’ by the mainstream to great electoral effect, they want it back. They themselves adopt anti-antisemitism, hoping to become an acceptable mainstream party too. When they do this, they leave behind the recalcitrant fringe members for whom antisemitism is often more important than a potential ministerial portfolio. The die-hards hold on to their unadulterated neo-Nazism, while their more opportunistic peers move on.
Anti-antisemitism allows populists to promote Islamophobia openly without the fear of being labelled Nazis. Indeed, they often point a finger at what they say is the antisemitism of the Muslims. They loudly affirm their support for Israel. And yet, we will see that anti-antisemitism allows for an optional anti-Jewish reading, allowing populists to have the antisemitic cake and eat it too.
In examining the specific Hungarian case, I focus on the government’s promotion of the conspiracy theory that blames the Hungarian-American-Jewish billionaire, George Soros, for trying to destroy Hungary and Europe’s traditions and independence by sponsoring the ‘invasion’ by Muslim migrants. Some of the data come from a longitudinal study of online Islamophobia, including that associated with the Soros conspiracy theory, in which I am currently engaged.
The political lay of the land
Hungary is a country of 10 million, located on the eastern flank of the European Union. Most Hungarians belong to the ethnic group known in old-fashioned English as ‘Magyars’, of whom another approximately 5 million live outside the country. Many of these are residents of neighbouring Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia, in areas that were once part of the historic kingdom of Hungary. Orbán’s government, which considers itself as a representative of Magyars everywhere, gave the vote to Magyars outside of Hungary in 2011. It has been reported that the grateful votes of Romanian and other non-resident Hungarians in the 2018 election pushed Fidesz over the two-thirds mark in Parliament, which entitles it to change the constitution unilaterally.
The capital, Budapest, was the one major area that resisted the Orbán landslide. With a population of about 1,750,000, it is home to almost 20 per cent of the country’s inhabitants. Only 6 of its 18 electoral districts elected a Fidesz candidate, one less than the 7 won by the Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSzP, Hungarian Socialist Party). Its urbane, cosmopolitan traditions are often felt to be in conflict with the more traditional countryside. The migrant issue was the deciding factor for rural voters, who voted overwhelmingly for Fidesz; in the capital, however, the migrant issue was of much less interest, even for Fidesz voters.
Fidesz’s first mandate was won on a relatively liberal platform, in coalition with two smaller parties. Led by Orbán, Fidesz ruled from 1998 to 2002, when it was narrowly defeated by the MSzP. In 2004 Ferenc Gyurcsány, a wealthy entrepreneur, became prime minister at the helm of the Socialists. His government pushed through painful austerity measures unpopular with much of the citizenry. In an atmosphere of growing dissatisfaction, in 2006 Gyurcsány was recorded admitting that he and his party had lied to the people. Many were also incensed by what they saw as Gyurcsány’s lack of patriotism: in the recording he referred to Hungary as ‘this fucking country’ (ez a kurva ország). In the 2010 elections, Orbán returned triumphantly, winning 67.88 per cent of the seats in Parliament for Fidesz and its faithful sidekick, the Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt (KDNP, Christian Democratic People’s Party).
By helping his oligarch friends to acquire much of the media and applying pressure to government-run broadcasting, Orbán set out to muzzle critical opinion. Fidesz instituted a complicated electoral system, widely considered to be designed to keep the party perpetually in power by fracturing the opposition. One of the means has been to grant money to any ‘party’ that signs up 13,500 voters. The government’s election office kept in evidence 121 parties leading up to the 2018 parliamentary elections, including the Oxygen Party, the Platonic Party and the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party. Although, in principle, a party has to pay back the funds if it does not achieve a given threshold of voter support, in practice no party has ever had to return the cash.
Yet Hungary is still not Russia. Serious opposition parties do survive and even dare to hope, someday, to combine and defeat Fidesz. In the 2018 parliamentary election, these included Gyurcsány’s Democratic Coalition (DK). The other parties that managed to elect deputies in 2018 were the MSzP, the Lehet Más Politika (LMP, Politics Can Be Different), Eggyütt (Together) and, above all, Jobbik, which with 13.07 per cent of the parliamentary seats had by far the best result behind Fidesz’s 66.83 per cent.
Anti-antisemitism and the Soros Myth in Fidesz
Orbán ran his campaign almost exclusively on migration, and against Soros, who he said was orchestrating it. He continued to lead the opposition of several eastern member states to the mandatory resettlement quotas that were imposed on countries by the European Union, and that would have required Hungary to accept 1294 migrants. Despite the fact that Hungary eventually accepted about 1300, Orbán continued to protest that the migrants placed not only Hungary’s, but Europe’s Christian values under attack. He and his associates repeatedly depicted Western European neighbourhoods in which Muslims were visible as sites of decline and violence, and vowed to protect Hungary from becoming the same.
Orbán and Fidesz blamed George Soros for just about everything they opposed, including the migrant crisis. Born in Budapest in 1930 as György Schwartz, this American-Jewish investor was initially most famous for shorting the British pound in 1992, earning him US$1 billion and the nickname, ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’. Later Soros became a major philanthropist. In 2017 he gave his Open Society Foundation (OSF) US$18 billion, making it the world’s third largest charitable foundation, and the largest dedicated primarily to human rights. Soon after the fall of the Communist regime in Hungary, the OSF became an important force in the building up of Hungarian democracy and civil society, including opportunities for Roma and other disadvantaged groups.
Misconstruing the billionaire’s notes on migration in Project Syndicate, Orbán and Fidesz claimed that there was a ‘Soros Plan’ aiming to force Hungary to accept migrants at its own expense. Soros was represented as the hidden master of all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and, indeed, of the forces in the European Union and in several national governments that fostered the agenda of multiculturalism and supported issues such as gay rights and gender equality, an agenda that was seen by the conspiracy theorists as an attack on the values of the Christian world. The settling of Muslims in Europe and Hungary was seen by the conspiracy theorists as part and parcel of the same plot.
In form, the Soros Plan or the Soros Myth, as I shall call it, is a close descendant of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the widely read and believed Russian forgery from 1903 that accused a group of Jewish elders of congregating to dominate the world through secretly supporting political and economic movements, both capitalist and communist. This image of financial manipulators supporting the anti-capitalist left is reproduced in the Soros Myth, but there are more specific connections as well. The head of the conspirators in the Protocols is the banker Rothschild, and much of the anti-Soros rhetoric, especially the less censored variety on social media, associates Soros with the current Rothschild banking house. Moreover, both the Protocols and much anti-Soros rhetoric today links the Freemasons and/or their associates, the Illuminati, with the plot.
It is not clear where the Soros Myth began, but it goes back a good way before the ‘European migrant crisis’, which gave it an unprecedented impetus, including in Hungary. A likely candidate for the dubious honour of originating it is the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), founded by the far-right American commentator Lyndon LaRouche. An article in the 1 November 1996 edition accuses the financier of manipulating the world’s finances in partnership with the Rothschilds, who ‘launched Soros’s career’. In 1997, the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, whose country was reeling from substantial foreign exchange losses, blamed Soros for the world’s financial crisis. Datuk Abdul Kadir Jasin, the editor-in-chief of Malaysia’s New Straits Times, repeated the allegations, and added details that he admitted came from the EIR report.
Since then, Soros has been blamed for everything from a government crisis in Macedonia, to gubernatorial elections in the United States favouring the left, to unrest in Venezuela, to the fall of President Mugabe in Zimbabwe, to the troubles during the far-right demonstration in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. One important accusation concerns his alleged behind-the-scenes manipulation of the 2016 US elections in favour of Hilary Clinton. (The comedian Roseanne Barr, who appears to believe in the Soros Myth, even saw Soros’s hand in Hilary’s daughter Chelsea’s marriage, and falsely alleged that she was married to a Soros relative.) But where the anti-Soros accusation has received the most traction, certainly in Hungary, is the false claim that he funded the mass migration of mostly Muslim migrants during the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015-16, and pulled the strings at the European Union to influence their admission.
Russia appears to have been the source of this Islamophobic twist on the Soros Myth. There, Soros had been blamed by the Putin government for the anti-Russian ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine and Georgia. NGOs associated with him were banned from the country in November 2015. Our social media research indicates that ‘colour revolution’ is often mentioned to this day in anti-Soros posts in many languages, including English. This makes it possible, and given what we know about Russian trolling even likely, that such posts originate in, or under the influence of, Russia.
It is Russian sources that appear to have first added an Islamophobic twist to the Soros Myth, by blaming Soros for the ‘migrant crisis’. On 7 October 2015, Konrad Stachnio, a Pole and a regular contributor to a Moscow-based online magazine called NEO/New Eastern Outlook, published an article headlined ‘game over europe—a “colour revolution” is coming’, in which he suggested that George Soros financed the Muslim migrant ‘invasion’ as he had the colour revolutions and with the same purpose of destabilizing Russia and Europe. The next day, the much more widely read Sputnik News took up the story, attributing it to ‘an independent Polish journalist’.
From there, the story spread like wildfire across the western world. Ideas about the extent of Soros’s control grew until 4 July 2017, when an Italian social media user published an organizational chart representing dozens of NGOs supporting migrants (including Médecins sans frontières, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) and the links among them, all allegedly Soros-financed puppets. The chart went viral in many languages. The Hungarian website, Világvége, published the Italian chart on 19 July 2017, claiming to have got it from the US portal ZeroHedge. By then, the Orbán government’s anti-Soros campaign had clearly had its impact on the country’s population. According to worldwide data we gathered using the social data intelligence tool Radarly, by far the greatest number of posts on social media platforms and websites that included the keyword ‘Soros’ came from the United States: 195,031 between 12 July and 8 August. Hungary was second with 4404, followed by Germany with 4161 and Russia with 1674. Per capita, the proportion of Hungarians who posted about Soros (0.0449 per cent) closely approached that of the United States (0.0599 per cent), far ahead of Germany (0.0050 per cent).
A few months earlier, the first major anti-Soros initiative was undertaken by the Orbán government, directed at the Central European University (CEU), located in Budapest. Soros’s Open Society Foundation had played a decisive role in founding the institution in 1991, soon after the fall of the Communist regime. The University quickly attracted an excellent international faculty and a student body drawn largely but not entirely from Hungary and the rest of East Central Europe. On 28 March the government submitted a bill to Parliament that would bring in new regulations for foreign-operated universities. Universities operating outside the EU, such as the CEU was deemed to be, were to be required to open a campus in the country of origin, in this case considered to be the United States. All non-EU personnel, including currently employed professors, would have to apply for work permits. (Eventually, most of the CEU’s operations would be forced to move out of Hungary.)
A number of high-profile anti-Soros initiatives followed. The dissemination of large billboards and posters, mentioned at the beginning of this article, began in the summer. A ‘national consultation’ about a so-called ‘Soros Plan’ took place in October 2017. All citizens were asked to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Soros’s alleged instructions to the European Union, including: ‘Brussels should force all EU Member States, including Hungary, to pay immigrants 9 million Hungarian forints in welfare’; ‘migrants [should] receive milder criminal sentences for the crimes they commit’; and ‘the languages and cultures of Europe [should be pushed] into the background so that integration of illegal immigrants happens much more quickly’.
On the 2018 campaign trail, Orbán ridiculed Soros as ‘Gyuri bácsi’ (Uncle George) and pictured him as the nation’s Public Enemy Number One. He spoke of an enemy that is
unlike what we are. It is not national, but international. It does not believe in work, but speculates with money. It is not generous but vengeful, and always aims at the heart, especially when [the heart] is red-white-and-green [the colours of the Hungarian flag] … Europe and Hungary are in the very midst of a civilizational struggle.
His speech was widely understood, as had been the CEU affair, the poster campaign and the national consultation, as drawing on antisemitic tropes. And yet, Orbán never strayed into explicit antisemitism. Worldwide, anti-Soros rhetoric occurs in two variants: a more public, official one and a more subterranean, popular one. The first avoids explicit antisemitism, leaving it to the second to spell it out. This ploy makes it possible to present the Soros conspiracy theory as free of antisemitism, even though everyone is aware of its antisemitic undertones.
Another way to avoid charges of antisemitism by those who care is to propagate the false story of Soros having collaborated with the Nazis and their Hungarian allies during the Holocaust. This canard had already appeared in the defamatory original 1996 European Investigative Report (EIR) piece mentioned earlier in this article. In the version presented by Soros, he was able, as a teenager in Hungary, to save his own life by carrying false papers showing that he wasn’t Jewish and, on one occasion, assisted a non-Jew who protected him and whose job it was to collect confiscated Jewish property. The message of the defamers is clear: ‘I am not an antisemite when I criticize a Jew who is himself an antisemite’, a ‘Jew who is not a Jew’, in the words of the 1996 EIR article.
The strongest ‘I am not an antisemite’ argument was provided to Orbán by Binyamin Netanyahu. Soros’s human rights foundations in Israel have been severely critical of the country’s conduct vis-à-vis the Palestinians, and were coming under restrictions similar to those planned or already instituted by Putin and Orbán. This gained support for the Soros Myth not only from the Israeli Prime Minister, but also his important American allies among Jewish Republicans and Christian evangelicals. It may well have been Netanyahu himself who recommended the services of the American-Jewish political consultants Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum to his Hungarian friend. Finkelstein (who died in 2017) helped Netanyahu as far back as the latter’s successful campaign in 1996, and Birnbaum was his disciple and collaborator. According to an investigative article in the Swiss paper Tages Anzeiger widely referred to in the global press, it was Finkelstein and Birnbaum who first advised Orbán, against some initial reluctance, to build up Soros as Public Enemy Number One. As mentioned earlier, Netanyahu defended his Hungarian counterpart against charges that the anti-Soros campaign was antisemitic. After his decisive win in 2018, the grateful Orbán accepted his Israeli friend’s invitation and announced that Israel would be the second country he would visit with his newly acquired mandate, after Poland, Orbán’s most important ally in his fight for ‘illiberal democracy’ in East Central Europe and the European Union.
Jobbik takes up anti-antisemitism, too
As for Jobbik, in a desperate attempt to provide a meaningful opposition to Orbán, it made some noises opposing Orbán’s anti-Soros rhetoric. In October 2017, the party sued Soros with the declared intent of discovering in court if the government’s charges against him were true. If not, said the Jobbik spokesperson, then it would be revealed that they are nothing but ‘a giant act of brainwashing, a giant lie’. The court rejected the case. Fidesz responded by accusing Jobbik of being, as one article put it, ‘Muslim-friendly Soros-lovers’.
It is true that the old Jobbik’s attitude to Islam and Muslims had been relatively positive. The party’s charismatic leader, Gábor Vona, even went so far in 2010 as to proclaim that ‘today mankind’s last remaining bastion of traditional culture—experiencing the transcendent in everyday life—is the Islamic world’. Vona’s sympathies for Islam can partly be understood in the context of Jobbik’s obscurantist espousal of a ‘Turanian’ ideology that has long roots in Hungarian radical nationalism. This holds Magyars, who are often confused with Slavic-speakers but are not, to be racially akin to traditionally nomadic peoples of the steppe, from the Turks (Vona has been a vocal supporter of the Turkish president, Erdogan) to the Mongols.
However, an even more powerful source of Jobbik-style Islamophilia was the party’s originally passionate anti-Zionism and explicit antisemitism. In 2010 a Jobbik leader suggested that all other parties were part of a Jewish conspiracy that supported Israeli designs to ‘buy up’ Hungary. So radically antisemitic was the early Jobbik that, when it was discovered that Csangrád Szegedi, one of its top leaders, had Jewish ancestry, he was expected to, and did, resign (and emigrate to Israel).
Jobbik’s mild Islamophilia, or certainly Turkophilia, put it in the wrong place at the time of the ‘migrant crisis’. It meant that the party did not immediately understand the potential for political exploitation of the situation via Islamophobia. In October 2017, a poll suggested that the migrant issue was owned more by Fidesz than by Jobbik: more of the ‘mainstream’ party’s voters showed negative attitudes to migrants (and Soros) than those belonging to its ‘far-right’ competition.
The dominant group within the party’s leadership, headed by Vona, realized that things had to change. To defeat Fidesz, Jobbik needed allies from the opposite end of the political spectrum, to the left of Orbán. But there, none of the leaders, including Gyurcsány (who had a Jewish wife), could be expected to link up with self-professed antisemites. Vona therefore reinvented himself as a moderate democrat. ‘The kind of anti-Semitic expressions which took place in Jobbik earlier’, he said, would now ‘naturally draw the most severe sanctions’. In 2016, for the first time, Vona sent Hanukkah greetings to the Jewish community, an exercise he repeated the following year.
As the party ostensibly abandoned its antisemitism, it fought ‘accusations’ that it was pro-Muslim and pro-migrant. Although it labelled Fidesz’s policy simplistic, it agreed with the government’s refusal of EU-imposed quotas for settling refugees, and its building of the anti-migrant fence in 2016. During the campaign for the April 2018, elections, Jobbik’s posters featured a large portrait of Vona with the message:
we’ll shut out the migrants
we’ll raise wages
we’ll lock up the thieves
there’s a limit to everything
Vona’s move did not fail to excite opposition among many of Jobbik’s die-hard supporters. The party’s erstwhile paramilitary wing, the Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard), had been banned for its racist activities (and possibly as an intended blow to Jobbik as Fidesz’s rival) in 2010. The Guardists openly praised the Nyilaskeresztes Párt (Crossed Arrow Party), the puppet rulers of Hungary after the German invasion of 1944, who were instrumental in the deportation of most of Hungary’s Jews outside Budapest to death camps. In 2008 a series of racially motivated killings of Roma in Hungary was associated with former Guard members who acted on their own as they found the Guard to be ‘ineffectual’.
However, after the ban, Vona, who had been the Guard’s president, distanced himself from the efforts of former Guardists to continue as a ‘cultural organization’, preferably registered in the United Kingdom so that, after Brexit, it would not be subject to EU jurisdiction. He similarly disassociated himself from other unrepentantly antisemitic and anti-Roma replacements of the Hungarian Guard, such as the Magyar Nemzeti Gárda (Hungarian National Guard) and the Szebb Jövőért Polgárőr Egyesület (Civil Guard Association for a Better Future), whose name references the Arrow Cross greeting, ‘For a Better Future!’.
According to a letter signed jointly by Amnesty International, the NGO Human Rights First and the European Roma Rights Centre, as late as March 2011, Vona personally incited the Civil Guard Association as it bullied Roma during a rally in Gyöngyöspata. Six years later, however, with his political facelift in full swing, Vona suggested that he wished to focus not on the ‘unfortunate’ past but on the future, and that he’d ‘never seen Jobbik as an anti-Roma, anti-Semitic, racist party’. In reaction, some far-right groups chose to support Fidesz rather than Jobbik in the 2018 elections. The leader of the obstinately antisemitic and anti-Roma motorcycle association, Gój Motorosok (Goy Bikers), signed a proclamation that included a long list of Fidesz’s achievements, and concluded with the endorsement: ‘in the absence of a better alternative, on April 8 vote for the candidates of Fidesz-KDNP, so that Hungary can go on developing!’
The triumph of Orbán’s efforts to steal Jobbik’s racist thunder, without appearing to endorse its openly antisemitic or radically anti-Roma rhetoric, could not have been greater. On the other hand, Vona’s move in the opposite direction, from the right to the centre, was only mildly successful. In 2018, under his new ‘moderate’ leadership, Jobbik won 20 per cent of the popular vote, like in 2014, and 26 seats in Parliament, compared to 23 in 2014, a marginal increase. Yet the ‘moderates’ were no doubt encouraged by the fact that, in the 2018 election, Jobbik for the first time became the leading opposition party. In 2014 a left-and-centre coalition had been in second place after Fidesz with 38 seats, 15 ahead of Jobbik. In 2018 Jobbik was 6 seats ahead of the next list, that of the MSzP-Párbeszéd alliance. Jobbik’s role as the leader of the opposition was secured.
Now that there was much less ideological difference between Orbán’s mainstream populists and the mainstreamed mavericks of Jobbik, there was reason to expect that Jobbik might take over the regime someday by appealing to some of its voter base. This may well have been Vona’s calculation when, after the election, he resigned his leadership, and reportedly supported the ‘moderate’ Tamás Sneider, who became his replacement. Predictably, Hungary soon reached Step 4 of the scheme outlined at the beginning of this paper. In June 2018, the hard-line leader László Toroczkai founded his own party, Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (Our Homeland Movement). With the Fidesz majority all but unassailable due to its sanitized, anti-antisemitic takeover of much of Jobbik’s right-wing rhetoric, Vona retired from politics, at least for the moment. In the meantime, his followers hoped that their own anti-antisemitism might give them a chance to gain enough respectability to lead an opportunist right-left alliance of all the opposition, which alone would have a sliver of a chance to unseat Orbán and Fidesz.