Antigypsyism – Trace

Uccu Roma Informal Educational Foundation creates dialogue between Roma and non-Roma communities in Hungary through informal education, Roma-led city walks, and personal encounters. Its work connects Roma identity, culture, local memory, and lived experience with the need to challenge antigypsyism and stereotypes today.

Economic transition after 1989 intensified exclusion. De-industrialisation and mass unemployment hit Roma communities hardest, eroding the limited social mobility they had gained under communism. Although successive governments adopted Roma inclusion strategies, weak enforcement and politicisation undermined progress. The rise of far-right parties in the 2000s mainstreamed antigypsy rhetoric: paramilitary marches in villages such as Gyöngyöspata and Devecser in the early 2010s terrorised Roma residents under the pretext of “restoring order.” Such marches have since been prevented by the police and open expression of antigypsyism has decreased. Despite significant investment in inclusion programmes, particularly housing desegregation, and increased employment among the Roma community since the late 2010s, political forces continue to exploit and fuel anti-Gypsy sentiments. Segregation and discrimination still prevail.

Historical Roots of Exclusion

Roma presence in Hungary dates back to the 15th century, yet their history has been marked by alternating cycles of control, marginalisation, and persecution. The Habsburg era (1526–1867) was characterised mainly by assimilation that sought to eradicate Roma culture and itinerant life. The regime’s policies often reflected a combination of repression and assimilation, influenced by racial hygienic and biological assimilation discourse and societal definitions of Gypsies as “work-shy”. During the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918), settled Roma were partially integrated. Yet, those living a nomadic lifestyle still faced significant prejudice and exclusion, often harassed by the authorities and treated as criminals. Although the 1893 national Roma census mapped their situation, no meaningful inclusion measures were taken. Most Roma children did not receive a regular education, which further widened societal gaps.

In the interwar period during the era of Miklós Horthy, there was no central Roma policy. The Roma were primarily treated as a public order and social issue, with law enforcement handling traveling Roma. Laws institutionalised segregation and forced labour. The Nazi occupation in 1944 and the collaboration of Hungarian authorities , led to the Porajmos, during which thousands of Roma were executed, deported, or died in forced labour battalions and concentration camps. Post-war communist rule replaced overt persecution with paternalistic control: Roma survivors received neither reparations nor recognitionand were excluded from land reforms, leaving them impoverished. State-led “modernisation” policies enforced settlement in segregated and often substandard housing on urban margins, while portraying them as a “social problem.” Education . While education and employment programmes formally aimed at integration, they frequently reinforced dependency and cultural erasure. Despite official rhetoric of solidarity, Roma citizens remained disproportionately poor and stigmatised.

Between Assimilation and Resistance

Since 1989, Hungary’s transition to democracy has exposed the continuity of antigypsyism. Discrimination in schools and workplaces, racial profiling by police, and the persistence of segregated settlements illustrate how prejudice transcends ideology. Since the 1990s, Roma communities in Hungary have faced repeated violent attacks, – from skinhead raids to coordinated neo-Nazi firebomb and gun attacks on Roma homes – particularly during the serial killings of 2008-2009. Far-right marches, including the 2012 march organised by Jobbik in Devecser, shocked domestic and international audiences in the first half of the 2010s. These were later prevented by the authorities. However, widespread discrimination, including racial profiling, has continued, exposing persistent antigypsyism and systemic impunity.

Confronting antigypsyism in Hungary requires more than desegregation and integration policy—it demands a broader approach to social inclusion and recognition of the historical continuity of exclusion and its moral cost. In recent years, local Roma-led initiatives and NGOs have begun to challenge exclusion, building networks of advocacy and cultural empowerment. Yet the broader social climate remains tense, with online hate speech and political scapegoating perpetuating hostility.

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF Antigypsyism IN Hungary

2004 – 2024

EU ACCESSION & MEMBERSHIP

From 2004 to 2024, Hungary saw the entrenchment and mainstreaming of antigypsyism across political, institutional, and social spheres. EU accession brought new legal frameworks and funding for Roma inclusion, yet these were undermined by weak implementation, segregation in schools and housing, corruption, and an increasingly hostile political climate. Far-right parties and movements – first Jobbik and its affiliated vigilante groups, such as the Hungarian Guard; then, from 2018, Mi Hazánk normalised antigypsy rhetoric, popularised the notion of “Gypsy crime,” and staged intimidating marches in Roma settlements. Their narratives spread rapidly through online platforms like Kuruc.info and were amplified by local governance models and policing practices that singled out Roma as threats to public order. The 2008–2009 serial killings exposed extreme vulnerabilities and systemic failures in law enforcement, whose initial misclassification of attacks reflected deeper institutional prejudice.

Across the period, antigypsyism intersected with governance reforms, uneven anti-discrimination policies, political, economic and social crises, and an increasingly polarised public debate. While national strategies invoked inclusion, high-profile political statements, selective law enforcement, and permissive responses to far-right mobilisation frequently reinforced stigma and collective blame. Compounding poverty, residential exclusion, and the persistence of paramilitary intimidation left many Roma communities facing enduring insecurity and mistrust toward state institutions. These dynamics, combined with repeated failures to sanction hate speech and violence, embedded antigypsyism as a structural feature of public life well into the 2020s, despite growing employment opportunities resulting from economic development in the second half of the 2010s.

1989 – 2004

DEMOCRATISATION & TRANSITION

Between 1989 and 2004, Roma in Hungary faced deepening antigypsyism as the collapse of state socialism produced mass unemployment, loss of housing security, and widening poverty. Roma were disproportionately affected by deindustrialisation and the withdrawal of welfare protections, while discrimination in employment, housing, and public services intensified. School segregation expanded through local decisions, the foundation of private schools, and informal barriers, entrenching long-term educational disadvantage. Police profiling and everyday discrimination remained widespread, and despite new democratic institutions, law enforcement often minimised or ignored racial motives in violent attacks. Public opinion surveys consistently showed high levels of antigypsy prejudice, reinforcing social exclusion.

At the same time, far-right groups and skinhead networks grew more active, carrying out attacks on Roma families and neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, the law enforcement and justice systems failed to provide the Roma with security and justice. Political actors also increasingly used coded or explicit antigypsy rhetoric, culminating in the emergence of Jobbik, which popularised narratives of “Gypsy crime” and normalised ethnic scapegoating. Although the 1993 Minority Rights Act and the 2003 Equal Treatment Act introduced legal protections, implementation was weak and enforcement inconsistent. EU accession brought new expectations for Roma inclusion, but entrenched segregation, discriminatory local governance, corruption relating to funds intended for Roma inclusion, and rising extremist narratives meant that structural antigypsyism continued to shape Roma life during the entire period.

1945 – 1989

AUTHORITARIANISM & SURVEILLANCE

Between 1945 and 1989, Roma in Hungary lived under a system that simultaneously proclaimed equality and reproduced deep structural antigypsyism. Although framed as beneficiaries of socialist modernisation, Roma were treated as a population to be managed, corrected, and dispersed. Public-health campaigns, forced bathing, and quarantines portrayed them as carriers of disease; “black ID cards,” resettlement schemes, and police registries cast them as rootless or delinquent. Under the pretext of social integration and development, the Roma were forced to abandon their culture, traditional professions, and way of life. Authorities systematically prohibited traditional Roma crafts such as horse trading, carpet selling and itinerant trades, classifying former livelihoods as criminal acts or begging to force the Roma into industrial labour, thereby dismantling their economic independence. These practices reinforced long-standing stereotypes and allowed the state to justify intrusive control rather than expand rights or address deprivation.

Assimilation — not inclusion — became the cornerstone of official policy. The 1961 resolution by the ruling party of the one-party state, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP), denied the Roma national minority status. This enabled the dismantling of cultural institutions and legitimised efforts to break up settlements and scatter families. Labour and education policies placed Roma in the lowest-paid industrial jobs and funnelled children into segregated or remedial classes, entrenching social immobility. The state increasingly took Roma children into state care to force their integration into “socialist society.” The police developed parallel surveillance systems, treating “Gypsy crime” as an ethnic category, while broader society absorbed and reproduced these narratives. By the end of the socialist era, Roma remained among the most marginalised communities in Hungary—an inequality underscored by rising extremist violence in the transition years, revealing how deeply antigypsyism had been woven into state and social structures, as well as public life.

1939 – 1945

WAR & GENOCIDE

Between 1939 and 1945, antigypsyism in Hungary hardened into a system of racial persecution shaped first by Horthy-era policies such as “Gypsy raids” by the police to control and settle down nomadic Gypsies, and later by the German occupation and the Arrow Cross regime. Roma were increasingly framed as a population to be monitored, controlled, and punished. Fingerprint registries, racialised policing, and expanding forced-labour obligations treated Roma as inherently suspect, while territorial annexations placed tens of thousands more Roma under a state apparatus that viewed them as socially undesirable. Propaganda portraying Roma as criminals or wartime liabilities normalised discriminatory surveillance and laid the groundwork for mass arrests, dispossession, and violence.

After the Nazi occupation in March 1944, persecution escalated into organised destruction. Roma communities were rounded up for forced labour, driven on foot to assembly points, or confined in overcrowded internment sites such as the Csillagerőd fortress in Komárom, where starvation, disease, and killings were common. Many were deported to concentration camps including Dachau and Ravensbrück, where women and girls were subjected to medical experiments. Others were executed in local massacres in Doboz, Jászkarajenő, and across the countryside during the Arrow Cross terror. Though less bureaucratically systematised than the genocide against Jews, the Pharrajimos in Hungary claimed thousands of Roma lives, leaving communities shattered and marking one of the most violent expressions of racial persecution in the country’s wartime history.