Thursday, October 25, 2012

Odd Stirrings in Hungary

There is a nationalist political movement in Hungary called Jobbik, see the Reuters article on Yahoo News. It is anti-Roma (gypsy), and perhaps a bit anti-Semitic too. Still a minority party, it is nevertheless growing in strength and being compared, by those who don't approve of it, to fascists or Nazis.

What I find interesting about the article (scroll down) is Jobbik's accurate claim that the Hungarian people are Turkic in origin. At least their language - Magyar - was Turkic in the dim past. Magyar is one of the few languages in Europe that is not Indo-European in origin.

Jobbik suggests that Hungary should not join the EU and instead seek alliances and support in Central Asia and the Middle East. That would be a very unusual strategy for a European nation to follow.