Anti Semitic Hungarian far-right politician Dies at 77

Istvan Csurka, a leading Hungarian playwright and politician whose hypernationalistic, anti-Semitic views antagonized Communists when they ruled the country and all manner of people afterward, died on Feb. 4 in Budapest. He was 77.

Mr. Csurka led the Hungarian Justice and Life Party, the first far-right party to enter Parliament since World War II. His views paralleled those of his friend Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the rightist National Front in France.

Mr. Csurka appealed to embittered older Hungarians with his evocation of the nation’s glory days, before it lost more than half of its territory and population in the World War I peace settlement. He decried the dilution of Hungarian genes and declared that Hungary needed more “living space,” the phase Hitler had used to justify attacking his neighbors. He used innuendos like “dwarfish minority” to refer to Jews and Gypsies. He defended violent neo-Nazi skinheads.

One of his many conspiracy theories, espoused in a newspaper he owned, was that Israel would become overcrowded or beaten down by the Palestinians, and would then try to take over Hungary as a second Jewish state.

Mr. Csurka propounded his odd, often hurtful views as Hungary felt its way from Communism to democracy, and he served as deputy president of the country’s first governing party, the Hungarian Democratic Forum. After Prime Minister Jozsef Antall became fed up with his controversial statements at a time when Hungary was eager to attract foreign investment, Mr. Antall fired him in 1993.

Adding sting to Mr. Csurka’s remarks was Hungary’s history as a Nazi ally and collaborator in the annihilation of 569,000 Jews during World War II. The Hungarian author Jozsef Debreczeni called a widely read pamphlet that Mr. Csurka wrote in the early 1990s “manifest Nazi ideology.”

In October 1994, Mr. Csurka became chairman of the Justice and Life Party, which he helped found. It won enough seats to be part of Hungary’s Parliament from 1998 to 2002.

Gaspar Miklos Tamas, a political philosopher and former Parliament member, was once quoted by the BBC as saying that the party was not Nazi or fascist, adding, “although, of course, it is racist, chauvinist, anti-Semitic, xenophobe, anti-democratic, anti-republican and anti-constitution.”

Istvan Csurka (pronounced ISHT-van TCHOOR-kaw) was born in Budapest on March 27, 1934. His father was a journalist whose politics were conservative.

During the Hungarian uprising against the Soviets in 1956, Mr. Csurka was detained for leading a college militia. After Communism ended in Hungary in 1989, he admitted that while incarcerated he had been recruited by the government to be an informer, though he insisted that he had been coerced into accepting that role and had written no reports.

Later he wrote short stories and novels, and went on to great success as a playwright. At one point in the 1970s, he had five plays running in Budapest, to full houses. The Toronto Star called him “the most significant and most representative writer in Hungary today.”

He nonetheless walked a political tightrope, not least for his penchant for satirizing the government. The Communist authorities reprimanded him for anti-Semitism in his writing and for critical comments he made about the Hungarian government while visiting the United States, Canada and West Germany in 1986. Russian officials castigated him for calling for Romania, another Communist nation, to return parts of Transylvania to Hungary. He called Communism a failed system.

He was also critical of Hungary’s ready acceptance of Western culture, especially deriding the long lines in front of a McDonald’s in Budapest. “Before we worried about dependence on Moscow,” he said in 1988. “Now we have to worry about dependence on the West.”

From the 1990s on, Mr. Csurka — who is survived by a son and two daughters — devoted himself mainly to politics. Last month, in one of his last speeches, he urged “the Christian Hungarian masses” to defeat what he called the international forces trying to annihilate them.

NY Times