Like Monica Porter, who wrote in last week's JC, I’ve many friends in Budapest. I’ve worked with the Jewish community and love the beauty of the city, including the stunning Dohany Synagogue. However, I cannot share Porter’s optimism about Victor Orbán whose nationalist, populist and nativist politics are sliding into antisemitism.
The University of Surrey is perhaps an unlikely Hungarian Jewish community but until recently its Jewish Society has been run by a succession of Budapest-born students, who if they hadn’t been able to enter the UK as EU citizens, might have well claimed political asylum.
I recall one student coming into my study asking me whether she could study Judaism and Jewish history: “I don’t know much about my own culture but I need to understand it and understand why they hate us. Why did we need to come here to be safe?”.
Many told me they’d left a country where antisemitic attitudes were common. According to the latest published global survey by the Anti Defamation League around 40% of Hungarians hold antisemitic views. This compares to 12% in the UK, 16% in Germany and 17% in France.
There’s a long and complex history of antisemitism in Hungary. In recent years antisemitic rhetoric has been ramped up by the neo-fascist Jobbik Party who today garner around 20% of the vote. In recent years, Orbán and his Fidesz Party have moved rightwards: stealing Jobbik’s political space and in doing so have won big at the ballot box.
Orbán has simultaneously become more nationalistic and authoritarian, removing constitutional checks and balances, whilst his speeches are increasingly racist and xenophobic. He never uses the word ‘Jew’. Instead he uses well-know antisemitic tropes. Tomi, a Budapest Jewish leader told me “Orbán is racist, homophobic, xenophobic and a master of mixed messages when it comes to Jews”.
As part of this nationalist agenda, Orbán, has claimed that Hungary’s wartime leader, Miklos Horthy, an ally of Hitler, was ‘an exceptional statesman”. Horthy, a self-proclaimed antisemite, enacted many anti-Jewish laws and played his role in the deportation of Jews.
Nora, a Budapest Jewish friend, who works as a political analyst told me, “When they decided to erect the memorial remembering the national loss due to the Nazi German occupation in 1944, it was not only an attempt to dismiss and silence the unspeakable responsibility of the then ruling Hungarian nationalist Horthy-government, which assisted in the deportation and death of Jews,… but was done to strengthen Orbán’s own new nationalist political discourse”.
Antisemites have often used a well-known Jew to caricature the whole group. Traditionally, it was a Rothschild. Orbán’s bogeyman is the Hungarian-born Shoah survivor and philanthropist George Soros, who has invested strongly in democratic institutions in the country of his birth. In a speech earlier this year Orbán attacked Soros:
“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.”
In Hungary newspapers amplify these memes: ‘internationalist’, ‘financier’ and ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ have only ever been coded words in Hungary for ‘Jew’.
“You have to understand”, says Nora “that when you wake up on a morning and 80% of all available billboards around the country is covered by the picture of a well-know Jew, it is a morning you wont forget. Before, you were only told of this sort of thing by your grandparents”
One of my students, Sara (not her real name), has gone back to Budapest to study at the Central European University. a Soros-funded institute. She says “the whole anti-Soros campaign is based on the old idea of the wealthy, conspiring Jew with an international network out to destroy local values, using his money as his influence. They claim that anyone merely affiliated with any of his "network", e.g. a CEU student like myself, is a traitor.”
CEU is moving next year to Vienna. As for Sara, she says” I love living in Budapest but after graduating I’m not sure”
For now, it’s safe to walk through Budapest with a yarmulke and to enjoy Jewish cultural festivals. However, we all need to be concerned by Orbán’s rhetoric. There’s a twin tide of antisemitism emerging in Europe: from the hard left and the far right: once on the fringes, it’s sadly flowing into mainstream party politics. And Orbán is very much part of that.
Alexander Goldberg is the Chief Executive of the Carob Tree Project and Jewish Chaplain to the University of Surrey.
