LASZLO CSATARY, a 97-year-old former police officer, is the centre of a storm that touches Hungary’s past, present and future. Now under house arrest in Budapest on suspicion of war crimes, he protests his innocence. But the belated investigation has polarised a country already deeply divided by the past. Police are investigating an extreme-right website that offered a 100,000 forint ($420) reward for information on Jewish students who called a flash-mob demonstration outside Mr Csatary’s house and plastered his apartment door with swastika stickers. The contact details were quickly forthcoming, triggering a wave of threats and intimidation.

While the far-right swaggers, Jews feel increasingly uneasy. Some leading figures say the atmosphere is the worst they can remember since the collapse of communism. In April a representative of the extremist Jobbik party gave a speech in parliament reviving the medieval blood libel, that Jews use the blood of Christian children. A spate of Holocaust-memorial desecrations and other outrages followed. Pigs’ trotters were placed on a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews. Orthodox Jews say they face gibes on the street. Some Jewish families are considering emigrating.

Viktor Orban, the prime minister, forcefully and promptly condemns anti-Semitic incidents. His government repeatedly assures the Jewish community of its security and valued place in society. When a thug abused Jozsef Schweitzer, the former chief rabbi, in the street, Janos Ader, the president, visited him at home to show solidarity.

But some also scent a troubling nostalgia in government circles for the authoritarian past, including for the wartime leader, Miklos Horthy, a fierce anti-communist who entered an uneasy alliance with Hitler that ended in the deportation of 430,000 Jews to Auschwitz. Israel recently cancelled an invitation to Laszlo Kover, the speaker of parliament, after he presided over a commemoration in Romania for Jozsef Nyiro, an admirer of the Nazis whose works have recently been reintroduced into the school curriculum. The government supports every attempt to rehabilitate Horthy and his supporters, says Krisztian Ungvary, a historian, even as anti-fascist writers and poets go uncommemorated.

economist.com