The European financial crisis certainly prepared the ground for the growth of nationalist parties throughout the continent, particularly along the eastern frontier. Jobbik in Hungary, Ataka in Bulgaria and Golden Dawn in Greece all benefited from the economic downturn. But amid all the attention the media has focused on this nationalist surge, it’s important to remember that many parts of the region already saw an earlier rise and fall of extreme nationalism in the immediate post-Communist era, according to The Huffington Post.Cluj, a large city in the Transylvanian region of Romania that has an ethnic Romanian majority, is a good illustration of the limits of nationalist politics.
In 1992, Gheorghe Funar became mayor of Cluj, and he immediately set about instituting his own brand of ethnic cleansing. Signs in Hungarian disappeared from the streets. Funar tried to ban the ethnic Hungarian political party. He even denied that there was such a thing as Hungarians in Romania. „Here there are only Romanian citizens,” he declared.
Funar served a dozen years as mayor, and if anything, his politics moved further to the right. He eventually joined the extremist Greater Romania Party (Romania Mare), served in the national parliament, and ran for president in the 2014 elections where he garnered less than 0.5 percent of the vote.
Funar was a prime example of a „second-order leader,” sociologist Istvan Horvath told me in an interview in May 2013. Horvath and I were meeting in a restaurant in Cluj that catered particularly to the Hungarian minority in the city.
„These second-order leaders realized that the Hungarian claims for a new status were a good way of legitimizing themselves as ‘founders of the nation,'” Horvath observed. „This stratum could administer the cities; they were efficient. But they were vulnerable because they had worked for the Communist Party before. They had to acquire legitimacy. There were few ideologies that people could recognize.”
And thus, many of these second-order leaders, like Funar, turned to nationalism. Funar invoked the fear among some Romanians that Hungary intended to reclaim its former realms in Transylvania. He painted ethnic Hungarians as a kind of fifth column helping Budapest in this aim. This nationalist ideology helped Funar whip up the necessary enthusiasm – and fear – to win elections. But it didn’t last forever.
„Eventually the elites around Funar proved to be lazy city administrators,” Horvath continued.
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