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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