Bush did that here when he was inaguarated - reminded me of Red Square.

Jim your post was timely, interesting and appropriate. Our country is like Hungary in many ways. We trend towards excessive socialism and we need to stop it. There are many nazi lovers born here in America every day. thanks

Slovaks have problem with immage because they have three powerfull enemies, two of them being their former masters in Budapest and Praque, whom still can not take the independent Slovakia and the last one are Jews, whom claim that Slovaks mistreated them in the first Slovak Republic in 1939-1945. While I admit that treatment of Jews in those years was a huge shame on Slovaks and I personally feel badly for that, Magyars and Czechs do not have any such a claim against Slovaks, except some wild wet dreams of lost dominance over them.

In Slovakia there are two nationalistic parties: Slovak National Party and Magyar (Hungarian) National Coalition. While you may find it strange that in one nation can be two nationalistic political parties it is nevertheles true. I find it zany too - Hungarian coalition is akin to have Mexican Natioanl Party active in USA with only goal - to get back to Mexico what used to be Mexican - California, New Mexico and I do not know what else (sorry). Magyar (Hungarian) coalition is openly irredentist and was part of Slovak government from 1998 until now. Europe then was happy and content and you did not read that it would be “shuddering”. Why not??? Why suddenly whole western Europe shudder when Slovak National Party comes to the government of Slovakia. Not Hungary Jim, but Slovakia. They do not shudder from neo-nazi party winning regional election in Germany, but they definitelly shudder from tiny Slovakia. I find it definitely strange.

IMHO - the Jewish elite in Hungaria, similar non-native, (not necceserily Jewsih) elites in Russia (among which I have personal friends), etc have to be very careful in how they use their influence, power and panache. They will always be look at by natives with caution and suspicion. And if they stumble, they better be prepared to silently go away, because natives see them as expensive and diva-like employee administrators, and reserve the right to fire them at such times. If they see a resistance to such firing they interpret it as a seizure of power and stealing their land from them.
That is when the centuries of civilization wash away and the proud barbarian Hunn pick up the mace.
Which is bad for everyone including the Hunns themselves. That is how fascism starts.
Intellectuals, social engineers, international bankers and young and restless political advisors to the office of US President - beware.

BUDAPEST: Skinheads rioting in the streets of Budapest, populist twins running Poland and a far-right party that once made Western Europe shudder now a part of the Slovakian government. What is happening to central Europe?

Well into their second decade since the collapse of communism, many of Europe’s newest democracies are struggling with weak governments and polarized societies and worrying their Western neighbors that they may become the problem children of the European Union.

“For 10 years, all of these countries had to go through very radical reforms and natural conflicts were suppressed because there was an overriding objective to join the European Union,” said Jiri Pehe, a political analyst and a past adviser to the Czech Republic’s former president, Vaclav Havel, in Prague. “Some of the things that should have played out are now coming to the surface.”

That pattern was on full display last week when rightist, nationalist demonstrators clashed with the police, hijacking what was to have been a solemn commemoration of Hungary’s failed 1956 uprising against Soviet domination a half century ago.

The triggers for the unrest were relatively mundane: heavy handed efforts by the police to control protesters incensed by a recently leaked tape recording of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany admitting that he had lied to the public about the economy to win elections in April.

But there is something more fundamental going on. Many people in central and eastern Europe never had a say in the massive upheaval of 1989 when “velvet” revolutions dismantled the communist regimes of the former Soviet bloc, and many feel that they have suffered as a result.

“It was a negotiated revolution, and that limited the people’s participation in creating the new system,” said Istvan Stumpf, a political analyst and former minister in the Hungarian government. “Most people describe themselves as losers in the change of systems and in joining the EU.”

The region has been swept by a strong nationalistic impulse that is being promoted and exploited by populist politicians.

It began in Poland, where the conservative Law and Justice party won elections last year. The twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, now the country’s president and prime minister respectively, have alienated much of the obsessively tolerant EU with their conservative Catholic, anti-homosexual attitudes and talk of Poland’s assuming its “rightful” place on the Continent’s political map.

The Kaczynski’s choice of coalition partners has not helped: the League of Polish Families, representing the country’s religious right, and Self Defense, led by a populist potato farmer.

In Slovakia, meanwhile, the nominally left-leaning Smer party formed a coalition of its own with two far-right parties: the ultranationalist Slovak National Party and the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, led by Vladimir Meciar, whose autocratic style partly isolated the country from Western Europe while he was prime minister in the mid-1990s.

Even the Czech Republic has been touched by the trend: It has had no real government since June elections left it with a deadlocked Parliament that is deeply and near evenly divided between right and left.

“In all of these countries, reformers and populists are fighting each other,” said Krisztian Szabados, director of the research organization, Political Capital, based in Budapest.

The rise in nationalism has reinvigorated old regional feuds, particularly between Hungary and its neighbors over the treatment of ethnic Hungarians living in land that once was part of greater Hungary.

Some of the Hungarian rioters last week carried the red-and-white striped flag of the medieval Arpad dynasty, which gave Hungary its first kings. The flag has become an emblem of Hungarian nationalists in recent years, but many people see it as an ominous reference to Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross party, which adopted the flag during its brief 1940s reign of terror.

“We reject the Treaty of Trianon,” said a young man who gave his name as Gergo, carrying an Arpad flag last week amid a small crowd of protesters outside this country’s huge, neo-gothic parliament building. He was referring to the post-World War I treaty that dismembered Hungary and left it a third of its original size. His sweatshirt was emblazoned with a map showing the borders of Hungary before and after World War I.

“The so-called Christian middle class with roots in regions taken away from Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon believe in their historic right to govern the country, compared to ‘non-Hungarians,’ of Jewish, Austrian or German heritage whose capital has financed our modernization,” Gyurcsany said during a meeting with foreign reporters in the Parliament building last week. “References to ‘the will of the people’ are nothing more than an expression of this nationalist right as opposed to republican ideals.”

The nationalist trend is being marshaled by Viktor Orban, a former prime minister and leader of Fidesz, the country’s main opposition party. He has led calls for Gyrucsany’s resignation and has held a series of rallies that have drawn tens of thousands of protesters into the streets.

He denies that his party has had anything to do with the far-right fringe that has been responsible for the recent violence, but analysts say that his appeal to the far right has been deliberate. For years, Orban has tried to capture all of the country’s rightist voters, no matter how radical, in hopes of winning a rare majority in Parliament.

The strategy has drawn votes away from the country’s small far-right parties, which failed to win the minimum 5 percent necessary for parliamentary representation in the latest elections. Without a party to represent them, analysts say, the ultraconservative right has taken to the streets, encouraged by Orban’s massive anti-government rallies.

“Orban is now one of the most dangerous populists in the region because he’s the most successful,” said Szabados.

But Fidesz party leaders say that the real problem is that Gyurcsany is ignoring the will of the people.

“Gyurcsany is playing with fire,” said Janos Ader, a Fidesz Parliament member and deputy speaker of Parliament. “This government is hurting more and more sectors of society and sooner or later these people will go into the streets,”

The opposition party has proposed a referendum for next year that they hope would block some of the unpopular changes that Gyurcsany has vowed to push through, including new fees for university and doctor’s visits. Gyurcsany says the changes are a necessary part of a larger program to reduce government spending and rein in the country’s budget deficit, which at 10.1 percent is one of the largest in Europe, so that the country can adopt the euro as its national currency in the coming years.

“In western democracies where the political culture is more advanced, politicians find a way to reach a consensus and put aside their differences and form coalitions and talk to each other,” Pehe said.

“But central European political culture is still very much rooted in communist times.”

“It’s a Bolshevik mentality,” he said. “Your opponent is your enemy and you try to destroy him. There is no culture of dialogue.”

The populist drift appears at a time when the EU is weaker than it has been in years, its focus blurred by the influx of new members and its failure to win support for a European constitution last year. But most analysts believe that the EU is still strong enough to tame the trend.

“Brussels sets the limits and though politicians in the region hit back, it’s out of the question that any of these countries would pull out of the EU,” Szabados said. “Populists may come to power but after a while they will fail because their policies don’t fit in a global economy.”

Pehe said that under different historical conditions, all of this could go very badly, as it did before World War II when there were nascent democracies that collapsed into authoritarian regimes. But he added that European Union membership has all but eliminated that threat.

“The international environment here in Europe at this stage is so conducive to democracy building, it is basically almost impossible for these nations to get out of this framework,” he said. “It would be economically disastrous for them. Populist leaders can only go so far.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/29/news/hungary.php

Barbarism is barbarism, and expo facto rationales do nothing to expunge the crimes or the record.

Today’s demos in Budapest are more about the zest for power of nationalistic Fidesz headed by former Prime Minister Viktor Orban and of the wide spectrum of ultra-nationalistic groups and parties, then about the freedom. Viktor Orban is a man who proclaimed that he was a Prime Minister of all Magyars - something akin to Mr. Fox in Mexico claiming the same for Mexicanos - even if living in California or New Mexico. According to media the very same claimed to be for Serbs late Milisevic. Magyars are again not only under their Nyilas Party banner but waving with maps of their pre-Trianon Hungary and proclaiming rather death then abandonment of their Great Hungary. It is pure hatred at the streets!

Fangs? Fangs?

Sounds more like Transylvania than Hungary.

(And will this aside provoke a surge of comments on whether Transylvania should be considered part of Hungary?)