Hungarian Far-Right Recruitment in Serbia’s Vojvodina: Not Going to Plan

For his part, Szabo tried to explain away the low turnout to BIRN by blaming it on a lack of advance planning and called the event “improvised”. It was also on a Monday, he pointed out, “a workday”. Such a poor showing runs counter to what anti-extremism think tanks have repeatedly warned European policymakers in recent years about growing right-wing extremist movements. Hungary’s Our Homeland and its youth wing, the Sixty-Four County Youth Movement (Hatvannegy Varmegye Ifjusagi Mozgalom, or HVIM), share many of these groups’ political views. They are ultranationalist, attached to Christian heritage, conservative about gender roles and inspired by interwar fascists. They use racist, antisemitic and xenophobic tropes to denounce immigration. Our Homeland and its HVIM youth wing are often singled out in public policy research as prime examples of a dangerous trend: extremist right-wing groups are expanding their membership, with a special focus on recruiting in ethnic Hungarian communities in neighbouring states. “HVIM is not only active in Hungary,” extremism expert Edit Zgut-Przybylska warned in a 2024 briefing book, “but also recruits members in various parts of Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine.” “A significant number of ethnic Hungarians in these countries [are] members or sympathisers,” Zgut-Przybylska claimed. However, the video showing Szabo’s failed effort to mobilise young people for an Our Homeland event in Vojvodina raises questions about these dire warnings. As does Szabo’s admission to BIRN that HVIM does not currently exist in the Serbian province. “Right now, they are not here,” he replied to BIRN’s question about the group’s status in Vojvodina. So, in January 2026, BIRN travelled to Vojvodina to meet with Our Homeland activists, local politicians and ordinary Vojvodina Hungarians, seeking answers to questions such as: If Hungarian right-wing groups are recruiting in Serbia’s ethnic Hungarian minority community, are they achieving success? What should experts consider as evidence of successful recruiting? If far-right activists are in fact running into difficulties, what demographic conditions are hindering their recruitment efforts? What reasons do Vojvodina Hungarians give for refusing to join? How do Our Homeland activists in Vojvodina explain their failures? BIRN visited Subotica, a city of 100,000 that is the centre of Vojvodina Hungarian political and cultural life, where 30 per cent of its residents are Hungarian. BIRN also visited Senta, 50 kilometres to the southeast, which is Subotica’s demographic inverse: of the town’s 14,500 residents, 70 per cent are ethnic Hungarian and the rest Serb. Senta is also noteworthy because it has one of the region’s only Our Homeland-affiliated elected officials: veteran far-right figure Laszlo Szabo Racz, who has held a position on Senta’s local town council for more than a decade. Roland Szabó, regional organiser of the Hungarian extreme right-wing Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazánk), speaks in front of a small gathering of supporters in Ada, a city in Serbia’s northern Vojvodina region, October 2025. Photo: Screenshot / YouTube / Mi Hazánk Mozgalom Demographic headwinds in Vojvodina Vojvodina’s Hungarian minority has been undergoing a rapid demographic decline over the last two decades. The last two Serbian censuses, which took place in 2011 and 2022, showed a 27.4 per cent decline in the region’s Hungarian population. Today, fewer than 180,000 individuals in Vojvodina identify as Hungarian. The population is also aging rapidly. Today, the average age of a Vojvodina Hungarian is 48.5 years, up from 45 in 2011. Emigration to Hungary is the largest driver of population decline among Vojvodina Hungarians, and is especially high among young men. “The age group most likely to leave,” Hungarian sociologist Erik Palusek writes, “is also the same group ready to start a family (or they already have children and they emigrate together with their families).” These rapid demographic changes in the Vojvodina Hungarian community’s size and composition are making it more difficult for far-right activists to recruit. Unemployed young men are more likely to join far-right movements, according to anthropologist Agnieszka Pasieka, who documented her participatory research with right-wing paramilitary groups in the 2024 book Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe. The elderly and women are the two fastest-growing demographic groups in today’s Vojvodina Hungarian community. Yet they are also the least likely to join extremist movements like Our Homeland and its youth wing HVIM that have a reputation for vigilantism and violence. Image: BIRN In the central Vojvodina town of Temerin, groups of young Serbs and Hungarians brawled with each other in 2000. Inter-ethnic youth violence broke out again in 2011 and 2012, a time when HVIM’s leader was Laszlo Toroczkai, who is today president of Our Homeland. In one case, Hungarian youth wore HVIM insignia and investigators later found HVIM literature in a young man’s home. The young Hungarian men claimed that Serb police had abused them in custody. An older generation of far-right Hungarian politicians in Vojvodina – leaders who rose to prominence during this period – continue to mobilise their political base by keeping memories of such inter-ethnic conflicts fresh. Yet while Our Homeland is present in Vojvodina, BIRN could not find any evidence that its HVIM youth wing is currently organising any public activities. No one interviewed by BIRN in Vojvodina would confirm that HVIM was active in their city or town. They also rejected the idea that HVIM might be doing outreach under another pretence, even though anti-extremism researchers frequently warn that far-right groups recruit at festivals celebrating Hungarian culture and other events that have no explicit political purpose. Still, efforts are being made by Our Homeland’s regional representatives to make common cause with Serbian far-right groups as well as other like-minded parties from all around Europe. In a 2024 interview for Our Homeland’s website Magyar Jelen, Szabo boasted that “the Oathkeepers Party Committee [a Serbian far-right group] invited our president and a delegation, along with the AfD [Alliance for Germany, a far-right group] and our Bulgarian sibling party, to appear at an event.” “I see it as a huge step forward for white, European nationalism,” he added. Extremism researchers regularly raise the alarm about efforts to build extremist coalitions across ethnicity. But the evidence suggests that far-right groups are finding it easier to share ideas than to attract voters, as memories of past disputes between groups linger in the minds of many. Take a recent election in Romania. Many political observers expressed surprise when ethnic Hungarians in Romania’s Transylvania region turned out to vote for the far-right candidate Calin Georgescu in the 2024 presidential election. “Value choices are increasingly important,” anthropologist Laszlo Foszto told BIRN, “even to the point of overriding ethnic loyalty.” But, as it turned out, this “far-right values coalition” could only form around Georgescu because of his own distinctive lack of political baggage. Georgescu was new to Romania’s far-right movement. Members of Romania’s Hungarian minority could support him because he had never participated in any anti-Hungarian riots, which were a common feature of far-right mobilising as recently as 2020. In the end, this electoral coalition fell apart when the first round of the election was annulled in December 2024 after declassified intelligence documents showed that Russia had run a coordinated online campaign to promote Georgescu. With Georgescu barred from running again, the veteran far-right figure George Simion, who had participated in a recent anti-Hungarian mobilisation, ran in the 2025 presidential runoff, but he failed to gain even minimal support among the Hungarian minority community. In the Vojvodina town Senta, which has a majority ethnic Hungarian population, BIRN interviewed veteran politician Laszlo Szabo Racz who, despite expressing support for Our Homeland, declared his opposition to Roland Szabo’s coalition-building efforts with the Serbian Oathkeepers Party. Racz first broke with the Vojvodina Hungarian mainstream party, the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (Vajdasagi Magyar Szovetseg, or VMSZ), in 2000. He founded his own right-wing party, but has consistently collaborated with Hungary-based far-right groups. “We support Our Homeland,” Racz told BIRN. “It’s our hope that Our Homeland will gain a stronger position in the next government,” he said, referring to the April 12 general election in Hungary. But Racz also has a long history of anti-Serb rhetoric. As leader of Senta for the Sentaites (Zenta a Zentaiake, Senta Sencanima), which opposes an increased Serb presence in the town, Racz has refused to collaborate with Serb elected officials on the town council. He told BIRN that he opposes working with Serbian far-right parties: “I don’t believe this is a very good idea because these extremist Serb parties are, in practice, chauvinistic parties.” Racz also called Serb extremists “hostile” and “untrustworthy” during our discussion. Racz predicted violence if Our Homeland and its sympathisers in Vojvodina achieve one of their foremost political goals – the long-term revanchist aspiration to return control of Vojvodina to Hungary. “They’ll for sure attack us, and violently,” he said. Veteran Vojvodina extremist figures like Racz, who rose to prominence during periods of intermittent inter-ethnic violence, present a significant obstacle to the formation of new far-right coalitions between ethnicities. Vojvodina’s Hungarian community has a strongly personalistic and clientelistic political culture. This helps an older generation of public figures retain a significant amount of influence, even in far-right movements. Racz uses the memory of past violence to mobilise his supporters, particularly against an image of hostile and threatening Serb extremists. Thus, Szabo’s effort to gain support among Vojvodina Hungarians by proposing an informal coalition with the Serbian far right would need to overcome Racz’s habit of sowing distrust to reinforce his own political support among Vojvodina Hungarians’ far right. A bilingual service held at the Evangelical Church of Christ (Hristova Jevandeoska Crkva, Krisztus Evangelikus Egyhaza) on the edge of Subotica’s old city centre. Photo: BIRN Flexible linguistic code-switching For Subotica’s 70,000 Serb inhabitants, Serbian is the lingua franca of most everyday business transactions and public social life. It is common sense, a matter that is taken for granted, to speak Serbian while they move about the pedestrian shopping area in Subotica’s historic city centre. Many ethnic Hungarians also shop here and it’s typical to overhear snippets of their Hungarian-language conversations on the sidewalk or in front of shops and cafes. Likewise, walking to a table in a busy downtown cafe, it’s possible to overhear Hungarian spoken at one or two tables. These small groups of Hungarians eat, drink and relax alongside tables of Serbs. But this is not necessarily a sign of strict ethnic segregation, since Hungarians often speak Serbian in mixed groups, according to BIRN interviews. Any Subotica social group conversing in Serbian, whether in public on the street or in a cafe, may include one or more Hungarians. Some downtown workplaces are ethnically “mixed”, often with Hungarians working alongside a larger group of Serbs. Workers will often be aware of others’ ethnic identities. In several cafes and restaurants, BIRN heard wait staff speaking Serbian to each other. A moment later, two of the waiters – knowing that they were both Hungarian – switched to Hungarian for a one-on-one conversation. This everyday practice of shifting between Serbian and Hungarian is known by linguists as “code switching”. But Hungarians in Subotica may switch codes for a variety of reasons, not just because they’re communicating an ethnically charged message – an ethnic slur or insult is the archetypal example – that they don’t want Serbs to understand. During the hectic evening rush at Subotica’s downtown Beer&Caffé, for example, one waiter became impatient while fixing a malfunctioning beer tap. He locked eyes with another waiter across the bar. In Hungarian, he mouthed, “Help me,” after which she took over at the tap. Although the two waiters switched into Hungarian for this exchange, they did so not necessarily as Hungarians or because they wanted to exchange a message with an explicit ethnic significance that they did not want their Serb colleagues to understand. Likewise, that the waiter whispered his request was not necessarily to prevent being overheard by Serbs but rather because the bar was loud. “I didn’t want to hurt my throat,” the waiter Zoltan explained to BIRN in a subsequent interview. Subotica’s religious institutions may also appear, at first glance, to be ethnically segregated. In an interview with BIRN, one Subotica Protestant pastor was able to rattle off different churches’ ethnic identifies, including Eastern Orthodox (Serb), Catholic (Hungarian), Baptist (Serb), Faith Community (Hungarian), and so on. These communities advertise services of worship in either Serbian or Hungarian. But services sometimes take place in multiple languages at the margins of Subotica’s religious world, in emerging evangelical or Pentecostal congregations. In these congregations, there is a kind of flexible linguistic code-switching characteristic of everyday life on Subotica’s downtown streets. BIRN visited a Pentecostal Charismatic group, the Evangelical Church of Christ (Hristova Jevandeoska Crkva, Krisztus Evangelikus Egyhaza), at its small “house church” on the edge of Subotica’s old city centre. The service began with a Hungarian song followed by a Serbian song. The lyrics in each language appeared on a screen behind the stage. The sermon was delivered by a pastor in Hungarian and beside him the song leader, a woman, did a line-by-line translation into Serbian. Both worship leaders were bilingual. Afterwards, BIRN interviewed the pastor, who explained that the Evangelical Church of Christ has been in Subotica for more than 50 years. The congregation has been bilingual for most of that time, even though most current members are Hungarian. The church also broadcasts its services over the internet and the online audience is mostly Serb, he added. Ethnic identity in everyday interactions in mixed cities like Subotica, sociologist Rogers Brubaker writes, “is often a matter of seeing as”. Brubaker means that everyday interactions for the people involved are often open to interpretation. An exchange among waiters at a bar, for example, is one such ambiguous situation. Whether or not ethnic identity is a relevant factor in a situation – whether or not two individuals are seen to be communicating as Hungarians – depends on whether a person involved adopts an ethnic perspective. This way of “seeing” or interpreting the world makes an ambiguous exchange among coworkers trying to get through a noisy shift with their voices intact into a meaningfully “ethnic” interaction among two ethnic Hungarians. Even the infamous inter-ethnic brawls in Temerin over the past 25 years, according to Hungarian journalist Gyorgy Szerbhorvath, did not have to be perceived as inter-ethnic – at least not in the moment. According to Szerbhorvath, who grew up in Subotica, such altercations had happened in the past, not only in Temerin but elsewhere in Vojvodina. Young men sometimes get into fights outside of football grounds, for example. In this context, however, they weren’t signs of ethnic “radicalisation”, but rather “pub brawls” that reflected the participants’ educational level and youth. These fights came to be perceived as ethnic through subsequent events, including a protest march by a Serbian extreme-right group in Temerin where leaders gave speeches interpreting the brawl in ethnic terms. Likewise, a Hungary-based extremist group organised a lecture tour where the young Hungarian men claimed they were mistreated by Serbian authorities. Right-wing activists often do this to persuade their target audiences to habitually interpret every interaction in ethnic terms. Our Homeland activists try to convince Vojvodina Hungarians, to paraphrase Brubaker, to see everything as Hungarians. To this habit of perception, far-right activists add an affective sense of grievance – that Hungarians are being victimised and that they are being victimised because they are Hungarians. A woman draped in a Russian flag walks past members of the Serbian Army honor guard during the ‘Immortal Regiment’ memorial event in Belgrade, Serbia, 09 May 2024. EPA/ANDREJ CUKIC Whither Vojvodina’s Russian immigrants? Even opposition to immigration, an issue that unites far-right parties across the world, is not so straightforward in Vojvodina. Like many extremist movements, Our Homeland tries to recruit new supporters – both in Hungary and Vojvodina – by saying that it will not allow migrants and refugees into Europe. They try to use immigration as a “wedge issue”. It has staked out a position to the right of the ruling Fidesz party of Viktor Orban by saying that Hungary’s government is hypocritical for denouncing EU immigration policy but allowing immigrants to enter Hungary from Vietnam and the Philippines. However, the specific dynamics of immigration to Serbia mean Our Homeland activists face a challenge using immigration as a wedge issue to attract supporters in Vojvodina, because Our Homeland activists and politicians in Serbia are divided over a new wave of Russian immigrants to Vojvodina. Speaking to BIRN, Our Homeland’s regional organiser in Vojvodina, Roland Szabo, claimed that he first became interested in Hungary’s far right in 2015 after observing Syrian refugees cross the Serbian-Hungarian border. The number of Middle Eastern immigrants and refugees entering Europe through Serbia has dropped significantly since 2015, but Szabo and others still try to keep this incident fresh in Vojvodina Hungarians’ minds. In Subotica, Hungarians and Serbs live alongside a large group of Russians who have recently settled in Subotica. Nearly 110,000 Russians moved to Serbia in 2022; most were fleeing the country after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A smaller number, 2,000 by some estimates, now live in Subotica. While both Vojvodina Serbs and Hungarians describe the Russians as “closed off” and “standoffish”, locals can point out several new Russian-owned downtown bars and restaurants. Our Homeland’s activists have not sought to turn this perception of Russian newcomers into a tool of grievance-driven political mobilisation. Szabo, for example, sees it both ways. “Fundamentally, we aren’t against someone from Europe’s constituent nationalities resettling somewhere else, but it’s not necessarily a positive trend for Russians to leave their homeland in droves,” he explained, preferring to hold off on a negative judgement depending on whether Russians planned to remain in Subotica after the war in Ukraine ends. “They should respect our Hungarian culture,” Szabo insisted. Yet Racz, the veteran far-right activist and Our Homeland supporter, has a decidedly more negative view. “I don’t see this leading to anything good at all,” Racz declared. He compared Serbia to neighbouring Montenegro where Russians were, in his words, “taking over” and “buying up everything”. “Sooner or later, it’s going to cause a big problem here,” he predicted. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (R) and Hungarian PM Viktor Orban (L) enjoying burek (cheese or meat pie) at a bakery on a visit to Subotica, Serbia, 27 November 2025. EPA/DIMITRIJE GOLL/SERBIAN PRESIDENCY HANDOUT Nostalgia drives potential recruits away In Senta, BIRN interviewed Ildiko Szocs, a retired archivist and member of the local intellectual elite, who described herself as politically knowledgeable, familiar with Our Homeland and had even been approached by Our Homeland’s Senta town council member to join the party. She turned him down, however. “I am anti-political,” she explained to BIRN. Szocs said her ardent nationalistic views had likely made her a recruiting target. “I am strongly Hungarian,” she declared while showing off a historical publication about anti-Hungarian violence during World War II. She also flashed her Serbian government identification card, which used a different spelling and pronunciation for her Hungarian surname. Like Our Homeland’s Roland Szabo, she complained about public services being delivered in Serbian in Vojvodina. Besides Szocs’s apolitical attitude, like many older Vojvodina residents she is also nostalgic for the Communist period and disdains today’s corrupt politicians who “take for themselves” out the public purse. “Back in the day,” Szocs recalled fondly, “they said, ‘You can be a politician, but sell your land and your house.’ The Communists said that we’re equals and we don’t have private property. Today, you can’t name a single politician who gives instead of taking.” The Vojvodina Hungarian mainstream party, the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (VMSZ), extends its reach by linking party membership to access to public grants – a major source of employment in a region with a weak private sector. The Prosperitati Foundation is officially a Hungarian state-funded regional and community development foundation. But since Viktor Orban took power in Hungary in 2010, it has become the main conduit for distributing public funds to Vojvodina Hungarians, who are overwhelmingly VMSZ members. While it’s only unofficial policy to limit these grants to VMSZ members, many Vojvodina Hungarians acknowledge that it is strictly applied. As evidence, they simply point to signs advertising Prosperitati Foundation support on VMSZ members’ newly built or renovated hotels, restaurants and other businesses. The strict application of this unwritten rule has produced a small population of alienated former VMSZ leaders, but it seems an unlikely recruitment pool for Our Homeland. Politically homeless and cut off from both VMSZ and the party’s Fidesz allies in Hungary, based on interviews with BIRN, these individuals expressed a readiness for political alternatives. However, they rejected Our Homeland as a possibility, citing ideological barriers to such a move. These individuals – intellectuals, teachers and researchers – said their left-wing views were incompatible with Our Homeland’s far-right positions. Over the last year, the large nationwide protests over a corruption scandal when a portion of a train station canopy collapsed in the city of Novi Sad have given Vojvodina Hungarian intellectuals and students an opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with VMSZ. Since 2023, VMSZ has been a junior partner in Serbia’s national government with the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of President Aleksandar Vucic. Hungarian Prime Minister Orban has travelled to Serbia multiple times and cultivated extensive business ties between the two countries over the last decade. Alongside this, VMSZ, Fidesz and SNS have been moving ever more tightly in lockstep. VMSZ has remained loyal to its coalition partner even as Serbia was rocked by these student-led protests. But four Subotica-based Hungarians interviewed by BIRN, who had joined these street demonstrations, denounced VMSZ’s involvement in Serbian government corruption as well as Orban’s support for Vucic. Our Homeland’s Szabo demurred when asked whether he saw these protestors as potential recruits for the party. He did admit to attending some of the protests and recalled seeing Hungarian acquaintances in the crowd. But he had gone as a private citizen and not a participant, he clarified, because Our Homeland does not comment on domestic issues of other countries. Asked why he stopped being a volunteer for VMSZ and chose instead to organise for Our Homeland, Szabo said: “Although no one can go against the VMSZ’s local political structure, I did not feel at home in that community: I couldn’t identify with it either ideologically or politically.” Indeed, community is the indispensable element of far-right organising, discovered the anthropologist Agnieszka Pasieka during her research on European extremist groups. Community is a condition of recruiting new members and a means for keeping the group engaged with each other. “A promise of, or hope for, transformation via community is crucial when considering pull-factors [to joining far-right movements],” she said. BIRN asked Szabo if he ever doubted his decision to abandon VMSZ, because, in effect, he had cut himself off from the only realistic means of making a successful political career as a Hungarian in Vojvodina. He dismissed such practical considerations. Even if Our Homeland fails to get into parliament in the upcoming April 12 Hungarian national election, he said, “I’m not the despairing type.” “If I don’t get a political position, then I’ll just keep on teaching,” he mused. “I’m an amateur astronomer. I like to bike. I’ll be fine. I’m not hungry for a position just for the money.”