Europe April 20, 2010, 8:20AM EST

What's Behind Hungary's Far-Right Jobbik

Hungary's right-wing Jobbik party has burst into the news after its strong showing in the recent election. But its roots run deep—and aren't limited to Central Europe

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Last week, Europeans woke up to the sinister news that in the heart of Europe a thoroughly far-right party, the Movement for a Better Hungary, or Jobbik, had won 17 percent of the vote in general elections, almost beating the governing Socialists into third place.

Most European nations have their share of far-right fringe groups. But Jobbik is openly anti-Semitic and anti-gypsy. It is the founder of a rapidly growing, jackbooted and black-uniformed paramilitary, the Magyar Garda, and it is allied to pariahs such as the British National Party and France's Front National in the EU Parliament. How could such an out-and-out fascist outfit climb so vertiginously high up the greasy pole of politics in the modern era?

It is the clearest sign yet that the economic crisis has woken Europe's most frightening demons.

Or so runs the media narrative.

Long-time watchers of the far-right in Europe describe this version of the story as "lazy." Certainly, the crash, which hit Hungary harder than many European nations – it was the first EU member state to run to the IMF – played a role in last week's vote, but the tale is, they say, longer and more complicated.

"The frustration I have with the sudden burst of media coverage is that for most of the time, the far-right phenomenon is not treated seriously," complains Graeme Atkinson, the European editor of the UK's anti-fascist monthly, Searchlight. "They're treated as cranks, so papers don't write about them, don't notice them. And then suddenly something like this happens and they think the sky is falling."

"I don't go for either picture. It's not that the crisis has suddenly caused this. This is a phenomenon that goes back much further than the last two years...Of course it exacerbates the situation – it would be surprising if the crisis did not result in some increased support for the far-right. But it's a long-term phenomenon that needs monitoring and countering. It's no reason to panic and then forget about it once the next big news item happens."

Mr Atkinson actually lays the bulk of the blame on the centre-left establishment in Europe: "Social democrats everywhere have abandoned their traditional constituency. This is the vacuum the far right are filling."

As socialist and labour parties have, pace Tony Blair, embraced business, backed privatisation and instituted social spending cuts, he argues, extremist ideas provide an easy answer to the thousands that feel disoriented by the slings and arrows of the free market.

The Perspective Institute, a Budapest polling firm, demographically backs this analysis, noting already in an analysis after last year's European elections in which the party scored 14.8 percent that left-wing voters were en masse turning toward Jobbik: "The Hungarian extreme right doesn't primarily recruit its supporters from the centre-right but instead from the leftist camp disappointed with the governmental performance of MSZP [the Socialists]. Jobbik, in certain cases, succeeded in doubling its nationwide share of the votes in cities that had been Socialist strongholds."

Support for far-right ideas doubles in ten years

Hungarian liberal think-tank Political Capital meanwhile has been measuring support for far-right ideas across Europe for a number of years. According to its latest Demand for Right-Wing Extremism (Derex) index, which gauges people's predisposition to far-right politics in 32 European countries, 21 percent of Hungarians are open to extreme right-wing ideas, the highest percentage of any European country other than Bulgaria, where 24.6 percent of the population is so predisposed.

Just seven years ago in 2003, only 10 percent of Hungarians had such a propensity, according to the think-tank's surveys. Poland at the same time also had a score of 10 percent. This has since fallen to 6.5 percent.