The big issue – which you won’t read in the international media because they’re not covering it but you know if you’ve followed Hungarian media – is that liberal left is cozying up to Jobbik, a far-right party with a long history of anti-Semitism and extremism. Check out this disturbing photo of one raising the Nazi salute at the party president’s wedding two years ago.
In a fit of profound soul-searching, here’s what these two liberal commentators had to say on a radio program yesterday:
“Is it right to cooperate with pro-Nazi anti-Semites, while these people are still in the leadership of Jobbik?” asked György Bolgár. “What can we expect from them, considering they were like that two or three years ago?”
“These people [Jobbik] who devote themselves to such radical views honestly believe that they are right,” answered Péter Róna, a senior advisor to LMP. “Fidesz is a very cynical party,” he continued, “We can and should say many things about Jobbik, but not that they would be cynical and corrupt.”
“So then cooperating with them is OK?” asked Bolgár, to which Róna said, “Yes.”
Get that? Because they’re not cynical, because they honestly believe that they are right.
They may deny the Holocaust. They may raise the Nazi salute. They may spit in the “Shoes on the Danube Bank,” the Holocaust memorial in Budapest. They may call for “an end to the Holocaust industry in the film business” and say that “we cannot allow the gypsies to become a majority in our sacred homeland.” Never mind. That’s ok. Because they’re not cynical. They really “believe that they are right.”
Now, any international journalists ready to take me up on my challenge to ask the opposition leadership the same question – Is it right, given that these people are still in the leadership of Jobbik, “to cooperate with pro-Nazi anti-Semites?”