In recent days, foreign correspondents have been expanding their knowledge of Hungarian. Szar, we learn, means shit, baszni means fuck and picsa signifies the, er, C-word. Our language tutor is Ferenc Gyurcsány, the prime minister of Hungary, whose leaked speech to fellow Socialists was laced with obscenities.
It is easy to see why the 45-year-old millionaire wanted to bond with his comrades. He was trying to persuade them to abandon everything the Hungarian Socialist Party stood for: fiddling the books, covert subsidies, pseudo-reform. So, of course, you swear like a trooper. It was, says an aide, a wake-up call to Hungarians to embrace the modern world. His Clause Four moment.
For Zsuzsa Frigyes, however, the obscenities were a sign of cynicism. “What he calls a whorehouse, a kurva orszay, is in fact our homeland,” says the schoolteacher. She is one of a clutch of members of the far-right, nationalist Hungarian Truth and Life Party (MIEP) who have gathered in front of the Hungarian parliament. Later, the crowd will swell to about 30,000 and, later still, young skinheads, perhaps steered by the MIEP, will provoke the police.
The point is to demonstrate that a Hungarian government can introduce market-orientated reforms only against the will of the people. And that only the nationalists understand this. Gyurcsány, by using alley-cat language – and by admitting that he had lied to the nation – has deprived himself not only of political legitimacy, but also of his status as a Hungarian. “He is no longer of this country,” says Zsuzsa.
The Hungarian unrest has echoes across eastern Europe. From Poland to Bulgaria, from Slovakia to deep in the Balkans, there is a surly resistance to globalisation, to the crushing power of international markets. Increasingly, it is the far right that exploits this most deftly. Like István Csurka, leader of the MIEP, it creates the image of a warm, protective homeland ruled by old-fashioned values. In Csurka’s case, that means ransacking the political toy-box of the 1920s for such old standards as anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism and anti-Bolshevism. This 72-year-old playwright was once deemed a crazy neo-Nazi, one of whose discoveries was that more than a hundred Hungarian estate agents were Jewish and part of a conspiracy to sell out Hungary. You do not get much madder than that. Yet Csurka is now part of the conservative mainstream, integral to the alternative to Gyurcsány.
Actually, you can get more insane than Csurka. Take Ján Slota, leader of the Slovak National Party. He says he wants to force the Hungarian minority out of Slovakia, if necessary at gunpoint. He is offering gypsies ?500 each to be sterilised and favours putting them in ghettos. Prostitutes should be physically beaten. And guess what? Slota is in government.
Slow down globalisation
His party is one of a three-horse coalition that rules Slovakia, a European Union state with one of the fastest-growing economies in the region. It is a government that explicitly wants to slow down globalisation and foreign influence, to put the Slovak back into Slovakia. The prime minister, Robert Fico, is a left-wing populist who calls himself a Social Democrat. His other ally, besides Slota, is the same right-wing group that under the autocratic Vladimír Meciar brought Slovakia close to collapse in the 1990s. This strange triad intends to abolish the 19 per cent flat tax that made Slovakia so attractive for foreign capital. It is slamming the brakes on privatisation. Press leaks suggest it plans a new tax on dividends.
No other central European EU member has gone that far. Yet Poland, run by the Law and Justice Party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is deeply suspicious of Germany, Russia and Brussels. Kaczynski’s allies are national clericalists such as the League of Polish Families and – until a recent row over the budget – Self-Defence, the xenophobic peasants’ party led by Andrzej Lepper, a garrulous, solarium-tanned man in the Csurka and Slota mould. Even if Lepper walks out, the govern ment will still boast an education minister who wants more patriotism in the curriculum. And it still funds an anti – abortion hotline where women den ounce doctors performing the all-but-illegal operation.
Despite their poor image abroad, Poland’s Kaczynski twins (Prime Minister Jaroslaw, President Lech – you tell them apart by the cat hairs on Jaroslaw’s trousers) are not anti-Semitic. They do, however, share the view of many in the Catholic Church in Poland that communism was put in place by Jews acting against Polish interests – it slips into their conversation occasionally. Add to that a virulent homophobia and an almost neurotic sensitivity to criticism, and you end up slightly queasy. After writing two mildly critical articles on the twins recently, I was savaged by Polish bloggers: one attracted 500 nasty comments about me, another 800. The criticism was fuelled by a Catholic, ultra-nationalist radio station doing its bit to turn Poland inward.
Yet, at one level, it is possible to understand Kaczynski-style nationalists. They want to reclaim Polish sovereignty. For them, that was the whole point of the struggle against communism. Poland’s liberating moment should have come in 1990 when communist rule collapsed, but instead communists were allowed to convert their political power into economic influence; many became rich. Kaczynski nationalists want to unravel this arrangement because, they argue, it stops Poland reaching true sovereignty. Former communist managers strike deals with western capitalists (or, worse, with the Russian new rich); they pretend to be reformers but in fact are intent only on personal enrichment and selling out the country. This suspicion runs through all the nationalist movements of central Europe.
I remember, before the fall of communism, watching at close quarters the developing feuds between the various dissident and communist factions. The arguments usually came down to the question of openness. How open should society become? How open to its history, to criticism, to foreign capital, to Russia, to neighbours? Some of the debating dissidents, such as Jacek Kuron and Jiri Dienstbier, became ministers; others became embittered outsiders. Yet they all retained an openness of vision: the post-communist world, it was clear by the 1980s, would embrace western-style democracy and turn its back on the “Asiatic” authoritarianism of Russia. But what of western capitalism? Nobody was quite sure about the limits of tolerance for a capitalist revolution.
The class of 1980 and its arguments are today largely irrelevant. Few Poles take issue with the Kaczynskis when they make the case that Poland’s policy goal must be national sovereignty. The problems arise only in the hidden detail: does being Polish mean being opposed to something or someone? If so, to what or to whom? How exclusive is national identity? Who is left out? Polish nationalists talk of being “True Poles” – and sometimes this can mean that Poles of Jewish origin do not belong.
The true people
The region is now full of True Slovaks, True Hungarians and True Romanians. As unemployment becomes the future of a second post-communist generation, there is a retreat to community. The old frictions flare up. To be Hungarian in Slovakia is not pleasant; a motorist will find that his car goes to the back of the petrol queue; a diner can expect to eat his Slovak schnitzel cold. German correspondents in Warsaw are abused in the streets; Polish tourists are beaten up in Moscow.
These animosities are stoked partly by the polarising effect of globalisation. Western ma nufacturers are building factories in the west of eastern Europe because of ease of access, and western stretches of Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic are becoming richer than the rest. Employment is healthier, and disposable income high enough to encourage Tesco. Meanwhile, out east, the poor are becoming poorer.
The mass migration under way in the EU is largely the story of these eastern fringes, where villages are emptying and where, in deindustrialised wastelands, families wait for envelopes with a few quid sent by relatives working in Britain. For a while it seemed as if the left would give voice to the resentment, but it is the right that is strutting with confidence, claiming to be the true anti-globaliser. Even in eastern Germany, the protest vote is drifting right. The neo-Nazi National Party of Germany leapt into regional prominence in elections on 17 September, while support for the ex-communists sagged.
Should we worry? Yes. The EU is failing to make its case in eastern Europe. And the Russians may follow the Continental drift: there is little to stop the Kremlin disappearing under a nationalist cloud once Vladimir Putin steps down in 2008. Tough times ahead.
Roger Boyes writes for the Times
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