by Farah Rasmi
An onslaught of political campaigns has ravaged the cities of Hungary in recent years. Each campaign presented a new enemy of the people, a new reason behind the woes of the country, and a new direction for rallying the citizens together against a common threat. Most recently, the Fidesz party launched a campaign against the Jewish Hungarian-American billionaire, George Soros. Amidst the rising xenophobia, the allegedly anti-Semitic campaign against Soros, accusing him of being behind the refugee crisis, gave the public a new and more physical target, causing a tremor in the country’s Jewish community.
At the outset of this research, the focus of the study was on anti-Semitism and finding whether the current politics had increased it as some had alleged. Upon further exploration, the entire premise of this work changed from a bottom-up approach (looking at whether anti-Semitism was there), to a top-down one. The goal thus became studying today’s Hungarian political narrative and how it responded to the migration crisis and subsequently understand how it affected the Jewish community. In other words, anti-Semitism and its effects on the Jewish community are but a (perhaps unintended) consequence of the politics of hatred in the current Hungarian dialogue. This paper attempts to demonstrate this by examining the political scene through a combination of interviews conducted in Budapest and various secondary sources.
