A protester wears a yellow Jewish star as thousands attend a demonstration against Nazism in Budapest in December
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Yet Orban's response did not come until a week after Gyongyosi's speech--though he sent a representative to an earlier protest--and at a Feb. 27 U.S. congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in Central Europe, former Hungarian government minister Tamas Fellegi admitted that the government had at times been "slow and ineffective in its statements and actions." Many outside the government characterize Orban's response to Jobbik's rhetoric as tepid. "At the national level, Fidesz has taken serious steps to combat anti-Semitism," says Feldmajer. "But at the local level, the municipal level, there's often collaboration between Jobbik and Fidesz." Feldmajer claims there are "anti-Semitic voices within Fidesz" that are sometimes indistinguishable from those within Jobbik. One of the most inflammatory of those voices is Zsolt Bayer, a virulently anti-Roma tabloid journalist who was one of the ruling party's founders. After Andras Schiff, the famous London-based Hungarian pianist, wrote a letter to the Washington Post saying he would not return to Hungary because of its current political situation, Bayer wrote a newspaper column in which he referred to Schiff and a pair of foreign Jewish critics of the Hungarian government as "a stinking excrement called something like Cohen from somewhere in England." Bayer, who remains close to Fidesz leaders, maintains that he was criticizing them for their political beliefs, not their religion.
Orban's own nationalist rhetoric doesn't help. In his efforts to revive Hungarian patriotism, his government has permitted towns to build statues of and name streets after Miklos Horthy, the regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944. Horthy sought redress for the dismemberment of Hungary after World War I but also collaborated with Hitler--if unwillingly at times--and was in power during the deportation of much of Hungary's Jewish population. Orban's Education Ministry also introduced Hungarian authors like Jozsef Nyiro--who was a member of the World War II--era fascist Arrow Cross Party and whose works include anti-Semitic themes--into school curriculums. Kumin responds that authors like Nyiro are being taught for their literary value, not their politics. Yet Imre Kertesz, who won Hungary's only Nobel Prize for Literature, was removed from the curriculums' classification of "Hungarian authors." (Kertesz, who lives in Berlin, is Jewish.) Some critics also see subtle attacks in Orban's efforts to reduce the influence of foreign banks on the Hungarian economy and of liberal dissenters in the Hungarian media. "[He] knows how to speak in codes that tap into certain stereotypes," says Magdalena Marsovszky, a visiting lecturer at Germany's Fulda University of Applied Sciences. "Cosmopolitan, foreign, liberal--these can be code words for Jews."