Before Barack Obama’s re-election Tuesday, numerous stories made the rounds revealing that US president was much more popular than his opponent among people outside America. To further underscore how big the landslide among non-American non-voters was, it turns out that among Barack’s backers was Jobbik!
Late yesterday, Márton Gyöngyösi, the deputy group leader of the far-right Hungarian nationalist party, issued a statement said that Jobbik welcomed Obama’s re-election with “relief” because his program was much closer to their program than the “neo-liberal” schemes of Mitt Romney. But perhaps just to show he was being even-handed, Gyöngyösi conceded that Obama, like any US president, wouldn’t really be able to escape the clutches of the Zionist lobby.
Meanwhile, for most of the day the government was largely silent on Obama’s re-election, save for a rather bland but still sort of awkward set of comments made on the radio by Ferenc Kumin, who is in charge of international press relations for the other “Big O” in these parts (Prime Minister Viktor Orbán).
Kumin said that while on paper the politics of the Republican Party were closer to those of a center-right European government like Hungary’s, in reality they weren’t really in total alignment. He did not, however, just come out and say the obvious, which is that nationalists from different countries never really get along because the whole point of nationalism isn’t getting along with other nationalists.
He also pointed out that the election’s result means the “colors” of the administration won’t change, without stopping to realize that this is probably not the best choice of words when you are a white guy talking about the re-election of a black guy. But he then went on to note that a widely-expected change at the top in the US State Department could be important for Hungary without pointing out that it is currently held by a girl, or that it’s sort of interesting that it’s held by a girl and that her job is being a “secretary.”
