While Fidesz's candidate considers the by-elections held in Ferencváros on January 11th as a form of early elections, the Socialists are playing on disinterst, and the Free Democrats are preparing to hold their ground, the national radicals are talking about gauging power. Irrespective of what the final result will be, the definite winner is Jobbik. Gábor Vona's party was the only one that could actually stand at the starting line. MIÉP, which has seen better days, and is today on the verge of falling apart, was caught forging registration nomination slips, just like the blogger, Tamás Polgár, who organises his community on the internet and is planning to stand for the elections as a member of the Hungarian Social Green Party. (See our writing in frame; the candidate of the Party for Social Justice, established by László Zsinka, former MIÉP candidate for the position of mayor, who has since left MIÉP, didn't even get to the point of accumulating registration nomination slips.)

Jobbik, which has become the leading force of the national radical right, has already launched an offensive: it named lawyer Krisztina Morvai as its most probable candidate for the European Parliamentary elections several months ago, and due to the Hungarian Guard, the party is getting a lot more media coverage than before. Although the Hungarian Guard Association has been dissolved by the court of first instance, they continue to march about in the country, for the movement is allowed to operate. With this, Jobbik has acquired a serious weapon, for the guards who march about, protesting against "Roma criminality" have a much wider supporter-base than the traditionally right-wing base of Hungarian society.

By keeping this topic of Roma criminality on the agenda, Jobbik is - knowingly or unknowingly - following the example of those successful foreign parties that attack the establishment from the right. All those Western radicals who got good results at the polls managed to find an issue that interests a significant stratum of society, and triggers real anger and fear, and that is the question of immigration and the integration of Muslims. We know that a considerable proportion of those who participate at the European Parliamentary elections tend to vote as a form of protest. They might vote for parties that they would not support at general elections. The French MPF (Mouvement pour la France - Movement for France), striving to stop the building of mosques and to suppress the wearing of chadors on the streets, acquired almost 8 percent at the European Parliamentary elections of 2004, while Philippe de Villiers, who is head of the party, got only two percent when he ran for the Presidency of the Republic in 2007. Another reason for the popularity of "anti-regime" parties at the European Parliamentary elections is that the participation of voters is traditionally lower.

Thus, we shall find out in June where the third wave of Europe's extreme- and radical right stands today. The first wave lasted from after the Second World War up to the middle of the 1980's. At the time, the positions of the European radical right were weak, except in the authoritarian systems of Southern Europe (the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, and Francoism in Spain collapsed in the seventies, and Greece, living in a military didtatorship, slowly became more democratic). There was no real strengthening even after the left-wing revolts of 1968: the German NPD, for example, reached its best ever result at the parliamentary elections of 1969, but could not get into parliament with its 4.3 percent of the votes.

A great hope of the European extreme right of the time was the Italian MSI, which took on the heritage of Mussolini, but could not really influence Italian politics, where the Christian Democrats and the Communists reigned. After a whole row of defeats, the party turned its back on the past. In 1995, it was remodelled under the name of Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), with a more subtle form of politics. The president, Gianfranco Fini, was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Silvio Berlusconi's government, at present, he is President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The days when Fini hailed Mussolini and Fascism in parliament have long passed.

The Alpine and immigration

According to a study concerning the European extreme right, written by the French Jean-Yves Camus, the second wave dates from the early 1980's to the end of the 1990's (possibly until 2002). This period was characterized by the dominance of the French FN (Front National - National Front). Party chairman, Jean-Marie Le Pen, understood that it was no longer possible to build a new mass movement along the lines of outdated, compromising principles. And although - at the beginning - there were some members who had collaborated with Nazi Germany, and Le Pen sometimes made anti-Semitic remarks, the central theme of the party - founded in 1974 - was immigration. And by doing so, it reached a stratum of society (for example former Communist workers living in housing estates around Paris) that had never before supported a formation of the extreme right.

In the 1980's - 1990's, the National Front was an example to the whole of the European radical right, so much so that parties with similar names were formed (for example in Belgium), but none of them managed to be as successful as the French party. The summit of Le Pen's career - who is even today a member of the European Parliament - was when he overtook the Socialist Lionel Jospin in 2002 by 17 percent and got into the second round of presidential elections. He could not repeat this performance later, for the French center right, led by Nicolas Sarkozy, took away the majority of the Front National's voters. It is now his daughter and successor, Marine Le Pen, who shall try to reshape the party that faces a crisis. For the hard-core circle of the National Front, she resembles decadent French society: she is divorced, is lenient regarding the issue of abortion, and as leader of the presidential campaign in 2007, she had a photo of a black girl placed on one of the posters advertising the National Front.

New wave

The third wave of the European extreme right started sometime in the mid-nineties, with the founding of new parties, and the strengthening of already existing ones. Today, it is this "postmodern" range that defines the image of West European right-wing radicalism and populism. One of its representatives is the Belgian Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang. The so-called "Alpine radicals", the Austrian FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreich - Freedom Party of Austria) and BZÖ (Bundnis für Zukunfts Österreichs - Alliance for the Future of Austria), the Northern League, fighting for the autonomy and secession of Northern Italy, the Swiss Christian Blocher and his followers, and the Scandinavians: the Danish People's Party and the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet - Progress Party. What they have in common is that - not counting a few of Jörg Haider's remarks, which he made as chairman of FPÖ, in which he praised the social policy of the Third Empire - they have no ties with European totalitarian traditions. Generally, they profess a liberal economic policy, yet regarding moral issues they are conservative, and oppose immigration in defense of the "man in the street". They are anti-Muslim, would like to strengthen public safety , they criticize the political elite and fight against the European Union.

Another similarity is that the forces of the center-right are willing to govern with them; this never arose as a possibility in the case of the National Front. It is true that there is a price to this amicability: the European Union almost ostracized Austria when the center-right People's Party formed a coalition with FPÖ in 1999. At the Danish general elections held last November, the Danish People's Party, which was founded in 1995 and calls itself anti-Muslim, got 14 percent of the votes, and supports the centre-right Rasmussen-government from outside. Moreover, it is one of the major protectors of pensioners, so it can count on a large proportion of their votes. Their chairman, Pia Kjærsgaard, is a real professional when it comes to dealing with the media, she speaks the language of Danish housewives when putting embarrassing questions to the "elite". The attraction of the party can be seen from the fact that its single member within the European Parliament was formerly a Social Democrat MP.

The profile of the Norwegian Progress Party is similar, and more manual workers vote for it than for the Social Democrats. The formation is market-friendly, pro-Israeli and pro-American, and sometimes it is called the party of motorists, for it strives to lower the environmental tax on petrol. In 2005, the Progress Party got 22 percent, and it caused quite a stir in Norway that the party had used in its campaign the number of foreigners who had committed criminal offences. However, not only does the party intend to police the activities of immigrants, it also wishes to withdraw funds from the institutions of the Lapp (Sami) minority.

Charismatic leaders

The two right-wing, populist parties of Austria, FPÖ - led by Heinz-Christian Strache - and BZÖ, acquired altogether 29 percent of the votes in September, often using similar methods. Jörg Haider was a decisive figure of both formations: he led the FPÖ from 1986 to 2005, then left the party and created the new alliance. The politics of Haider and the FPÖ were based on anti-Muslim and anti-immigration views, but he was also against the Slovenian minority in the province of Carinthia. As governor of the province, he had the topographic road signs with bilingual place names removed.

The politician couldn't enjoy the results - eleven percent - that his new party, BZÖ, reached at the parliamentary elections held last September, for he died in a fatal car accident on October 11th 2008. It turned out that on the night of his death, he had been visiting a bar for homosexuals, and his successor in the party's chairmanship, Stefan Petzner spoke about Haider as "the man of his life" (Lebensmensch). In other words, it was confirmed that radical right-wing beliefs and homosexuality do not exclude each another. And this was not the first example: the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, formerly a Social Democrat, who was murdered in 2002, openly professed to be "different", and stated in several interviews that the reason he opposed immigration in large numbers was due to the fact that young Muslims did not tolerate the sight of male couples holding hands in public in Dutch towns.

At the parliamentary elections, just a few days after he was murdered, his party, the Pim Fortuyn's List, managed to get 17 percent and became a member of the government coalition. However, since the party lacked a charismatic leader, the internal arguments soon led to a loss of importance, and last year, the party finally ceased to exist. Geert Wilders' Freedom Party took over its role, more or less, and got six percent of the votes in 2006; Wilders became famous thanks to his anti-Muslim short films and for demanding that the Koran be banned.

Cheating competition in Ferencváros

A simple by-election is turning into one of the greatest attempts at cheating. This is the balance of the elections to be held in Ferencváros next Sunday. The story commenced on December 20th. The delegate of Jobbik's local electoral committee announced that following the examination of the registration nomination slips, he came to the conclusion that most of the nomination slips of MDF's candidate, Mihály Dézsi, one-time police spokesman (and earlier the cabinet chief of Tibor Pál, Socialist under-secretary of the Ministry of the Interior) were forgeries. The same suspicion arose in the case of radical blogger Tamás Polgár, running in the colours of the Hungarian Social Green Party, and MIÉP. Following an investigation by the State Printing Company, where the documents are produced, it was found that seventy percent of the registration nomination slips submitted by the three organisations were actually forged. The local electoral committee has disqualified all three candidates, the Budapest Metropolitan Court has dismissed the appeals. Meanwhile, the campaign chief of the Free Democrats has resigned from his office in the electoral committee after Hír TV made public a video-recording where Ferenc Janás offered money to activists in return for the registration nomination slips.