Word: jobbik
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Dates: during 2009-2009
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...help cut through this muddle, TIME looks at four parties - the BNP, France's Front National (FN), Hungary's Jobbik and the PVV - their sometimes clashing ideologies and policies, and the misjudgments of mainstream opponents that have helped boost their extremist appeal...
Xenophobia Now Far-right parties in western Europe tend to steer away from signs and symbols that might recall the darkest period of the continent's history. But Hungary's Jobbik - its name derives from job, a word meaning "right" or "better" - garnered 14.8% of the votes in the country's European elections with a campaign themed around the Arpad stripes, the nationalist flag that was co-opted by Hungarian fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. The party's chairman, Gabor Vona, 30, also chaired the Magyar Garda - or Hungarian Guard - a private militia that appeared at Jobbik rallies...
...Jobbik may look different to its corporatized Western European counterparts, but it's being lifted by the same underlying forces: fears of invasive foreign cultures and of global competition, and a profound disaffection with mainstream politics. The excitement with which Hungarians embraced multiparty politics after the fall of Communism has curdled, with confidence in mainstream parties damaged by their perceived failure to tackle the country's economic woes. "It is a kind of vacuum," says Attila Pok, a historian with the Institute of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. "A great number of voters do not believe...
...Jobbik's platform is plain and simple: it is distrustful of outsiders, opposes foreign ownership of agricultural land and is proudly Christian. After the group was founded in 2003, it erected crosses across the country in protest against the foreign commercialization of Christmas. "We provide the most authentic and clearest answer for problems," says Vona. "And we express the wish of a lot of people that Hungary should belong to Hungarians." (Read: "Murder Mystery: Who's Killing Hungary's Gypsies...
Just how powerful might the far right become? Such parties are now in a position to influence European legislation, though most advocate withdrawal from the European Union. Addressing a Jobbik rally last year, the BNP's Griffin invoked the memory of Hungary's 1956 revolution, suppressed by Stalinist troops. "Where is the power hunger and the corruption of the Soviet kleptocracy now? ... It is in Brussels," he said. "The European Union is a threat to all the free peoples of Europe...