Feminine face of Hungary's far-Right Jobbik movement seeks MEP's seat

Rasp

Senior Editor
Feminine face of Hungary's far-Right Jobbik movement seeks MEP's seat

Krisztina-Morvai_1409120c.jpg


Hungarian politican and lawyer Krisztina Morvai

On paper, Krisztina Morvai is the kind of woman that any political party would like on their ticket: an attractive blonde working mum, who juggles a high-flying legal career with bringing up three children.

Yet for someone notably more photogenic than many of her party followers, Dr Krisztina Morvai gets called some ugly names.

"I am a decent politician and a mother of three children, yet you in the West keep on po
rtraying me as a Nazi and a fascist," scolds the would-be MEP for Hungary's Jobbik movement, just one of many extremist parties hoping for a breakthrough in next month's European Parliamentary elections. "Don't think you can keep doing this forever."

Meet the coiffeured, fragrant new face of the Far Right in Europe, whose blonde bob, customary red jacket and campaigning feminist background make her arguably the world's only cross between Hillary Clinton and British National Party leader Nick Griffin.

Or rather, don't meet her. Having agreed to be interviewed by The Telegraph in Budapest last week for an interview, she changed her mind at the last-minute after taking offence at British newspaper reports linking Jobbik to anti-Semitism and anti-Roma violence.

"I am seriously considering as a lawyer to sue because of the damage they have done to my reputation," she warned, the red, lipsticked smile that radiates from billboards all over Hungary suddenly fading.

Yet for all the
claims of being misrepresented - or perhaps because even because of them - parties like Jobbik are finding ready audiences across Europe before the June 4 polls, capitalising on mounting joblessness and social unrest caused by the global economic meltdown. Continent-wide, they are expected to return at least 25 MEPs into the 736-seat parliament, passing a threshold that entitles them to status as a formal political bloc, and annual funding worth up to £1 million.

In Britain, where Mr Griffin has been tipped as the bloc's possible leader, the key to success has been to drop any bootboy image in favour of suited respectability. But in Hungary and elsewhere, the approach has been to combine the two.

While Dr Morvai will be its respectable face in Brussels, the Jobbik, whose name means "Movement for a Better Hungary", also has its own uniformed street militia, the Hungarian Guard. A self-styled citizens' defence force, its stated aim is to prevent crime by the country's half-million strong
Roma community. But critics say it bears a disturbing resemblance to the Arrow Cross, Hungary's Second World War fascist militiamen, who collaborated with the Nazis in killing tens of thousands of Hungary's other prominent minority, the Jews.

"We are not racist or Nazi," protested Jobbik spokesman Zoltan Fuzessy, whose party insists the Hungarian Guard's uniforms are simply national folk costume. "But there is a problem with the Roma and we need to talk about that."

Be they Boy Scouts or modern-day Brownshirts, Dr Morvai, 46, is still an unlikely bedfellow for such a movement. Indeed, her CV looks more like that of a polician of the liberal left. A professor of law at Budapest University, she is a practising human-rights lawyer, the author of a respected book on domestic violence, and won a Red Cross "Freddie Mercury" prize for promoting Aids awareness.

Her politically correct halo slipped, however, after she was ousted from a United Nations committee on gender rights, where the Isr
aeli government objected to comments she made about the plight of Arab women in the Palestinian territories. Since then, she has drifted ever rightwards, flirting first with the conservative Fidesz opposition party, and last year joining Jobbik as it sought wider electoral appeal.

While she is careful to avoid inflammatory talk on race, her campaign speeches play directly to a populist sense among Hungarians that they have been treated as "second class citizens" since joining the European Union in 2004.

"We are getting further from West-European countries, being reduced to an almost colonial level," she said. "Hungarian businesses, farmers, growers go bankrupt one by one."

Jobbik has also capitalised on widespread disillusionment with Hungary's domestic politicians, who are seen to have squandered its early advantage as the most Western-leaning and economically dynamic of all the ex-Eastern bloc countries. Since then, Hungary's low-cost, high tech manufacturing sector, making everyth
ing from car to circuit boards, has been among the hardest hit in Eastern Europe by the global economic crisis, and unemployment has hit an 11 year high of 8.4 per cent.

Like her party, Dr Morvai denies being anti-Semitic, homophobic, or racist in any way, dismissing such criticisms as the "favourite topics" of an "ignorant and misled" European Union.

But magazines supportive of her party’s aims openly play on such fears. One publication available at the venue of a Jobbik press conference last week contained an item entitled “Who decides?"� on Hungary’s future. The non-Jobbik options were either a dreadlocked Jew, a pair of naked homosexuals, or a dark-skinned thug.

Such inflammatory rhetoric comes amid a recent wave of violence against Hungary's Roma community, in which Roma homes have been petrol-bombed and in which seven people have died.

But it has gone down well in towns like Pomaz, a well-heeled commuter settlement nestling in the forested Pilis hills outside Bu
dapest, where Jobbik held a rally last week. Aside from a few skinheads hanging at the door, the assembled company of middle-aged couples with their children could have been a school parents' evening.

"Is this paramilitary clothing?" asked Jobbik's grey-haired, donnish vice-president, Balczo Zoltan, as he gestured to the local Hungarian Guard members in their uniforms of black boots, trousers and waistcoasts with white shirts. "No, it is traditional Hungarian clothing and they have no weapons, not even a stick."

Local Guard organiser Timea Karsai, a demure, bespectacled 33-year-old whose day job is as a psychiatrist, added: "We demonstrate in towns where families have been attacked by gypsies, but we also help gypsy families themselves when they have been threatened by other gypsies. I am not a racist, just a nationalist."

Indeed, it is the "respectable" votes of people like Ms Karsai, who do not consider themselves bigots in any way, that is likely to do most to boost the showing of
the Far Right in the elections. Far from signalling a new wave of Neo-Nazism, many analysts say it shows how mainstream parties have simply dismissed understandable concerns about racial problems and future immigration from Africa and Asia.

"Mainstream political parties avoid dealing with sensitive issues like Roma and immigration by dismissing it as the talk of the Far Right," said Robin Shepherd, a Europe expert at the Henry Jackson Society, a London thinktank. "But that is an easy and lazy designation, which plays into extremists' hands."

All the same, many Hungarians still find Jobbik's image unpalatable. "We are disappointed by the main parties because they are always quarrelling and lying," said Peter Nehoda, 29, an IT worker drinking coffee in a Budapest cafe. "But I wouldn't consider voting for Jobbik. The Roma people are not the only ones to blame for our problems."
 
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