What Facebook Tells Us About Far-Right Populism in Hungary

When  the Hungarian right-wing party Jobbik won 15 percent of the vote in the 2009 general election, many drew the conclusion that the party had successfully mobilized the “traditional” voters for far-right parties: the unemployed, poorly educated working classes—the “losers” in the transition from Communism.  Indeed, Jobbik gained most of its votes in the least developed northeast Hungary, while it had relatively low support in Budapest and the more developed west of the country. The theory that Jobbik is the party of the “losers” has remained the widely held view among journalists and analysts alike.

But new results challenge this view. Two think tanks—Demos (UK) and Political Capital (Hungary)—surveyed over 2,000 Facebook fans of the Jobbik party—the largest data set about Jobbik sympathizers. The results show that Jobbik supporters are predominantly young men, and a significant proportion of them (22 percent) have a university or college education. Perhaps more surprisingly, Jobbik supporters under 30 are less likely to be unemployed than the national average. Jobbik Facebook supporters are motivated in large part by a desire to protect a perceived Hungarian identity and culture—rather than economic concerns.

Of course, Facebook fans are not perfectly representative of the Jobbik voter base—but they are not far off. Jobbik supporters spend more time online than supporters of any other party and their Facebook group has over 40,000 fans. Indeed over 80 percent of the sample report having voted Jobbik at the last election. Moreover, a 2011 poll of Jobbik voters collected by the Tárki Social Research Institute in 2011 and analyzed by the Political Capital Institute revealed that the Facebook fans of Jobbik and its voters are not that different: the concerns, the backgrounds, the views are all much the same.

In one respect, Jobbik supporters are fairly similar to similar nationalist populist parties across Western Europe. Two recent studies, one by Chatham House and the other by Demos, both found that supporters of parties like the Front National, the Swedish Democrats, or the English Defence League were motivated by fears about identity rather than economics and were often better educated, or more likely to be employed, than national averages.

But supporters of Jobbik do differ in significant ways when compared against similar groups in Western Europe. They are driven more by worries about Roma populations than immigration; are more pessimistic; and are often anti-Semitic and pro-Palestinian (in stark contrast to the concerns about Islam among Western European supporters of similar parties). Jobbik supporters are also more likely to agree that violence is acceptable to achieve the right outcome. Although this does not mean they are personally violent of course, it is of concern that at its last party congress, Jobbik leader Gábor Vona claimed that “Hungary should prepare for a war.”

All this matters greatly if mainstream parties and civil society are to formulate a response. To dismiss all Jobbik supporters as fascist is dangerous on two counts. First, it ignores the more nuanced reality. It seems that the party merely grows in popularity every time they are labelled as such, reveling in their self-appointed role as outsiders brave enough to stand up to a liberal, out-of-touch establishment. Second, it ignores that the things Jobbik campaigns on are not that far from the Hungarian mainstream. Jobbik supporters are most likely to cite a lack of Roma integration as the biggest threat facing the country; while one recent poll showed over 60 percent of all Hungarian voters thought that Roma “have criminality in the blood.”

Jobbik supporters have extremely high levels of distrust in political parties, the mainstream media, and the legal system—but this too reflects a national malaise: the Eurobarometer showed that the Hungarian public also had among the lowest scores on these measures too. Jobbik, seen from this angle, appears as a more amplified version of frustrations across Hungarian society (or indeed, even Eastern and Central European concerns).

In some respects, then, this renders the situation more difficult. The fact that Jobbik is able to tap into wider societal worries with such ease is an indictment of how polarized Hungarian society has become in recent years. But it might also offer a crumb of hope: that supporters might be brought back into mainstream politics again.