Discontent reigns as Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia struggle with their post-communist transformation

Source:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703180180mar18,1,6705319.story
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."