Fringes
tugging at Central Europe
Discontent
reigns as Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and
Slovakia struggle with their post-communist
transformation
By Tom
Hundley
Tribune Foreign
correspondent
BUDAPEST, Hungary -- When
British
Holocaust
denier David
Irving (above) is the honored guest at your
National Day celebrations, you
 David
Irving comments: IN FACT Mr Irving did not mention
the Jews once during his speech to the
vast audience (picture below). See the
transcript of his speech [English
| Hungarian
| Hungarian
pdf].
It seems that they
want to be the bride at every wedding
and corpse at every funeral. |
know something nasty is brewing
in the body politic.But there was Irving, fresh from serving
his
jail sentence in Austria, firing up a large
crowd in Budapest's Heroes' Square last week on
the 159th anniversary of the 1848 Revolution,
the upheaval that brought Hungary its first
taste of independence from the Habsburg
emperors.
He was invited to speak by the far-right MIEP
party, and his
anti-Semitic message was tiresomely
familiar: Hungary's present left-wing
government was no better than the communist
dictatorship that ruled the country for nearly
half a century, and, he said, all European
politicians were pretty much "in the pay of big
money and foreign powers."
Leaders of Hungary's Jewish community didn't
have to read between the lines. They advised
their members to stay off the streets.
These days the parliament building in
Budapest is ringed with an ugly double barrier
of steel anti-riot barricades, the result of
several days of running battles last fall
between police and protesters outraged by Prime
Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany's candid
admission that his party had lied "morning, noon
and night" about the state of the economy in
order to win last year's election.
Hungary is not alone in this state of
political muddle. Its Central European
neighbors, Poland, the Czech Republic and
Slovakia, also are wrestling with the demons of
post-communist transformation. Each case is
different, but a common thread of discontent
binds them together.
`We
don't know where to turn'"Especially in Central Europe, you find that
we are still fighting the Second World War and
the Cold War," said Maria Schmidt, a
right-wing commentator who also is director of
the House of Terror, a quirky museum located in
the Budapest building that once housed the
Gestapo and later the communist-era secret
police.
Irving
visits the Budapest House of Terror in
Andrássy ut, Budapesst, earlier this
month"We had great hopes for democracy and
capitalism, but these turned out to be
disappointing for many people, and now we don't
know where to turn for answers," she said.
Populism, left and right, seems to be on the
rise in Central Europe. Meanwhile, the drive for
structural reform -- so focused when these
countries were outside the European Union and
desperately hoping to get in -- has flagged.
On the other hand, their economies are going
great guns, fueled mainly by foreign investment.
Each country experienced growth of 5 percent or
better last year. That provides politicians with
a soft cushion against hard economic choices,
but many economists predict the bubble will soon
burst.
In Poland, by far the largest and most
important of the Central European countries to
join the EU in the 2004 expansion, the political
agenda is now dominated by the Kaczynski
twins -- President Lech and Prime
Minister Jaroslaw -- right-wing populists
who have eschewed economic reform in favor of
purging ex-communists from every nook and cranny
of the bureaucracy.
A new "lustration" bill signed earlier this
year by President Kaczynski has opened millions
of volumes of communist-era secret police files
in a belated attempt to slay "the post-communist
monster" that the twins claim still haunts
Poland. This month, they launched a major purge
of the state radio.
Although elected with just 27 percent of the
popular vote, they have moved swiftly to
consolidate power. In just 18 months they have
dismissed five finance ministers, two foreign
ministers, their handpicked prime minister and a
highly regarded defense minister.
Cabinet ministers aren't the only ones
packing their bags. Martial law in the early
1980s produced a baby boom in Poland that is
just coming of age, but its benefits are being
squandered as tens of thousands of the country's
best and brightest young people leave the
country to look for better-paying jobs.
"We not using these people; we're exporting
them to the EU," said Maciej Krzak, an
economist at Lewiatan, a pro-business research
group. "Unless we make the structural reforms
necessary to keep these people home, it's an
opportunity wasted."
But the attention of the twins' Law and
Justice Party and its main parliamentary ally,
the ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families, is
focused elsewhere. In recent weeks, lawmakers
have proposed new bills to ban gay-rights
"propaganda" from schools and to crown Jesus as
the symbolic "King of Poland."
Even the Polish bishops have blanched at the
latter.
Not surprisingly, a recent survey found that
66 percent of Poles think the country is heading
in the wrong direction.
Neighboring Slovakia rescued itself from
pariah status nine years ago when voters ousted
the semiauthoritarian regime of Vladimir
Meciar and supplanted it with a
reform-minded government headed by Mikulas
Dzurinda. But now the pendulum has swung
back.
Robert Fico, a left-wing populist,
became Slovakia's prime minister last year after
forming a governing coalition with Meciar's much
diminished People's Party and the xenophobic
Slovak Nationalist Party.
Fico's winning formula was a pledge to halt
the painful economic reforms. Last month he
further exacerbated worries in the EU when he
paid a controversial visit to Moammar
Gadhafi's Libya; next month he tours
Venezuela as the guest of Hugo
Chavez.
Czechs
under shaky coalitionMeanwhile, the Czech Republic was without a
functioning government for an astonishing 230
days after a deadlocked election last June. A
shaky center-right coalition finally was cobbled
together in January, but its prospects for
survival look bleak.
While the right-leaning governments of the
Czech Republic and Poland have recently stirred
unhappiness in the EU by so readily agreeing to
accept the U.S. missile defense shield on their
territory, left-leaning Slovakia and Hungary
have irritated the EU by trying to cut their own
energy deals with Russia.
It's not a question of left versus right, or
ex-communists versus anti-communists, but rather
modernizers versus populists, according
Krisztian Szabados, an analyst at
Political Capital, a Budapest research
institute.
"In the Czech Republic, the former communists
are the populists; in Hungary and in Poland the
so-called right wing are the populists," he
said.
At Hungary's National Day celebrations last
week, Prime Minister Gyurcsany, a former
communist youth leader who
later made a fortune in real estate,
limited his public appearances to an
invitation-only speech at concert hall outside
the city center.
His efforts to reform and modernize Hungary's
economy have won the approval of investors and
his Western European counterparts but earned him
single-digit approval ratings at home. In recent
interviews with European journalists, he warned
that Hungary and its neighbors were in danger of
slipping into the "isolation of radical
nationalism."
He also accused his main rival, Viktor
Orban, the former prime minister and leader
of the populist Fidesz Party, of tolerating
anti-Semitism.
Fidesz politicians reject the anti-Semitism
charge, and they were careful to steer clear of
last week's appearance by Irving. But their own
National Day rally drew about 200,000
supporters, many of whom carried the red and
white striped Arpad flag that was the symbol of
the pro-Nazi government of 1944-45.
At the rally, the charismatic Orban railed
against the "criminal regime" that was running
the country and the "new aristocracy" of
wealthy
ex-communists. His supporters sang songs
to the glory of the days when Hungary's
territory included much of Slovakia and
Romania.
Szabados, the analyst, said the Fidesz was
"absolutely an old-fashioned left-wing socialist
party ... [but] tactically they are not
willing to distinguish themselves from
right-wing extremism."
Copyright
© 2007, Chicago Tribune
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