Fidelitas, Fidesz’s youth organization, had a congress where all the big guns, with the exception of Viktor Orbán, delivered rousing speeches about the great future that lies ahead for the organization. Even so, there was some restrained criticism that Fidelitas activists were unable to achieve the desired Fidesz victory at the municipal elections. The fact is that the vitality of Fidesz has dissipated in recent years, and it is becoming more and more difficult to recruit talented, devoted young propagandists with an eye on a party career.
The presence of top Fidesz leaders was supposed to revive the young would-be politicians’ enthusiasm. Instead, the occasion turned out to be a huge embarrassment for the government party, which has been super careful never to allow a whiff of anti-Semitism to come from responsible Fidesz politicians. If anything, Fidesz tries to give the impression of devotion to Israel and to Jewish causes. Viktor Orbán and Benjamin Netanyahu are known to be not just political allies but soulmates who instinctively understand each other. Admittedly, Viktor Orbán has never had the support of the mainstream Jewish umbrella organization Mazsihisz, but he found a willing accomplice in Rabbi Slomó Köves from the Chabad movement. So far, the cooperation between the Hungarian government and Slomó Köves has been mutually profitable. The Orbán regime has been lavishly supporting the small Chabad community, which has no native roots in today’s Hungary. In return, Köves comes in handy when Orbán needs a willing Jewish partner to demonstrate to the world his zero tolerance policy as far as anti-Semitism is concerned.
So, under the circumstances, it was more than embarrassing when one of the deputies to Viktor Orbán, Lajos Kósa, delivered an anti-Semitic speech, because this is exactly what happened yesterday at the Fidelitas congress. Yes, Lajos Kósa is considered to be a buffoon whose repeated incoherent or outright stupid statements are the object of public ridicule. Kósa has also had some business dealings that smacked of corruption and graft. Yet Kósa is still a member of the top brass, apparently because Fidesz has a shortage of younger cadres. A couple of years ago, Orbán recruited Gergely Gulyás and Katalin Novák as his new deputies in the party. But by this September, Gulyás either had had enough of the job or Orbán had had enough of him in the party. He was replaced by Lajos Kósa, who, it seems, was shaken by the losses his party suffered at the municipal elections on October 13.
According to MTI, the Hungarian news agency, Kósa expressed his surprise that “the Arrow Cross men voted for liberals; anti-communists teamed up with the globalists; national radicals voted for the left-liberal side that has always turned against the nation; and because anti-fascists paired up with new Arrow Cross men, the Jews were forced—or possibly even enjoyed—voting for Gergely Kulcsár, who was seen to spit into the shoes alongside the Danube.” This version of the MTI report was reprinted verbatim in Magyar Nemzet, Origo, and Magyar Hírlap. Other government-critical media outlets merely summarized the objectionable passage without mentioning the name of the Jobbik candidate for the Hajdú-Bihar County Assembly.
János Gadó of Szombat, a Jewish weekly, summarized the crucial passage as “the Arrow Cross men voted for liberals; anti-communists teamed up with the globalists; national radicals voted for the left-liberal side … the Jews were forced—or possibly even enjoyed—voting for an Arrow Cross knight in the Hajdú-Bihar County Assembly.” Mérce simply called the new Jobbik member of the County Assembly “the Arrow Cross man.”
What distressed Kósa, of course, was the anti-government parties’ winning strategy of pitting only one opposition candidate against Fidesz’s choice. Fidesz tried to turn the left-liberals against Jobbik but, it seems, with one or two exceptions, without any success. I understand that this is an odd political configuration, which many people on the left also find difficult to swallow. But what do “Jews” as an ethnic group have to do with the election of the “Arrow Cross man” in the Hajdú-Bihar County Assembly? Fidesz has an overwhelming majority in Debrecen and the county. The County Assembly has 24 members, 16 of whom are from Fidesz. Jobbik has three members, DK and Momentum two each. MSZP has one member. Getting worked up about the composition of the County Assembly is by itself a strange phenomenon under the circumstances.
And how on earth did Kósa decide that Jews were a voting bloc in this county election? I understand that Fidesz wants to dramatize the oddity of a formerly anti-Semitic party joining forces with the liberals and tries to emphasize the absurdity of it, but Kósa went too far with his accusations. Even Slomó Köves distanced himself, in his own way, from Kósa’s remarks. But the most serious criticism came from András Heisler, president of Mazsihisz, who put up three questions on his Facebook page. (1) Doesn’t Lajos Kósa know that in 1944 practically all Jews were deported to Auschwitz from his county? (2) Is it not clear to him that with the few hundred Jews who still live in the region one cannot win or lose the municipal elections? (3) Or, has the “declared zero-tolerance simply been abrogated?” He posted a photo of himself, which his grandson calls “the angry papa.”
The angry András Heisler of Mazsihisz
János Gadó of Szombat considers Kósa’s reference to Jews’ possible joy in voting for an Arrow Cross man “the most vulgar insult anyone can imagine.” It is matched only by Soviet propaganda, which compared Israel to Nazi Germany and Israeli soldiers to members of the SS. Gadó points out that, after the losses at the municipal elections, “irrational emotions can be seen within the government party, which are eroding the minimum standards of civilized behavior. At such times, anger against Jews is the first to come to the surface.”
Slomó Köves more or less agrees with the absurdity of the joint action of liberals and Jobbik but notes that, by equating liberals and Jews, Fidesz criticism of liberals acquires an anti-Semitic flavor similar to the 1993 attacks on Jews and liberals by the anti-Semitic István Csurka. He still doesn’t believe that Kósa is an anti-Semite, but “the duty of a well-meaning public figure cannot be anything else but to clarify concepts and not to obfuscate them.” He thinks that Gábor Miklósi of Index was wrong in demonstrating his negative opinion of a song that means something to many people, but anti-Semitic posters and Jewish caricatures are the worst possible answers. One can criticize the liberals, but taking a page from the anti-Semitic leader of the Our Homeland Movement is not the way to go. In his position, this kind of a balancing act is understandable, but riding two horses at the same time is a difficult proposition.
I suspect that this is not the end of the story, because this is the first time that a high-ranking Fidesz politician made a clearly anti-Semitic remark. Admittedly, Kósa is not a wordsmith, but I have the feeling that his accusation was not just a slip of the tongue.