The right-wing parties and the ethnicisation trap

Throughout Eastern Europe populist and far-right parties paint a hostile picture of "Gypsies". The same is true of Hungary, where the right-wing populist parties are set to win the first round of the parliamentary elections on Sunday. But adopting such a stigmatising attitude means falling into the ethnicisation trap, writes the daily Die Presse: "Casting the Roma as 'welfare cases' is also dangerous because it strengthens prevailing prejudices. If you assume that all Roma are practically illiterate and ignore that many Roma do very well at school and university, you soon give the impression that Roma are by definition dumber than the rest of the population. From there it's not a big step to putting Roma children in schools for the handicapped, even those who are highly gifted but don't have the chance to show it. Many Roma in Eastern Europe try to conceal their origins because they're afraid they'll never get a job. They fear that regardless of how well they did at school employers could regard them as uneducated and 'afraid of hard work' because 'that's how the Roma are'."

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