Israel’s New Friends in Right-Wing Places

This past weekend, Austria’s conservative People’s party, which won the most votes in October’s national elections, successfully concluded its coalition talks with the farther-right, anti-immigration Freedom party. With the blessing of Alexander Van der Bellen, the country’s president, Austria has thus become the first West European member of the European Union with an avowedly right-wing government. Given that the Freedom party has a history of harboring anti-Semitic elements, this development has stirred fears that, along with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant feeling, an older hatred may also be making a return to the mainstream of Austrian politics.

In neighboring Central European Hungary, similar apprehensions have long since attained a high pitch. There, the surging popularity of the far-right Jobbik party has been attributed in part to its anti-Jewish messaging. Although Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s controversial prime minister, is not a member of Jobbik, he isn’t totally detached from it, either, and in the opinion of some observers has added hints of anti-Semitism to his already heated nationalist rhetoric.

Early this past summer, for example, Orbán praised a Nazi-era Hungarian leader, and his Fidesz party plastered posters around the country attacking the Hungarian-born American philanthropist George Soros, an act of political opportunism widely interpreted as anti-Semitic. (Although the prime minister’s allies later claimed the Soros posters were simply highlighting the Jewish billionaire’s pro-immigration globalism, few believed it.) To make matters more worrisome, Hungary’s Jews have reported a rise in right-wing anti-Semitism, ranging from verbal assault to physical attack.