Fringes tugging at Central Europe
zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
Mon Mar 19 09:54:17 EST 2007
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703180180mar18,1,6705319.story
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
March 18, 2007
BUDAPEST, Hungary -- When British Holocaust denier David Irving is
the honored guest at your National Day celebrations, you 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.
"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 coalition
Meanwhile, 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."
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