Forward Spin

The line forms early each morning outside Budapest's House of Terror. Built in the former communist regime's notorious political police headquarters at 60 Andrássy Avenue, the Hungarian capital's newest museum has attracted more than 30,000 people since it opened five weeks ago. Inside, visitors get a personal taste of the torture and humiliation meted out by Hungary's communist and Nazi regimes. The Gulag Hall simulates the cattle cars that transported 600,000 Hungarians to the Soviet Union in the 1940s and '50s. A caged cell used for political detainees offers Chinese water torture. And then there is the elevator: in the museum's culminating special effect, visitors take an excruciating ride down to the interrogation rooms in a box designed to replicate an execution by hanging. "It's fantastic," said Majori Csaba, 20, a student from the western town of Györ. "I'd read about all of this. But now I can feel it."

Which is the point. Conceived and funded, from government coffers, by the ruling right-wing Fidesz party, the museum opened just before this month's general elections in which Fidesz's main rival, the Hungarian Socialist Party, is being painted as the successor to the cold war communist regime. After months of running neck-and-neck, a Fidesz-led alliance has gained a narrow lead in opinion polls, though results could swing either way. The campaign, in fact, has been the most hotly contested in Hungary since the communist era ended. For the socialists, it represents a last chance for the current generation to resume power. For Fidesz and its combative young Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, 38, the vote holds an even more tantalizing promise: his would be the first government to be re-elected in Eastern Europe since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The spoils include bragging rights for leading Hungary into the European Union by 2004. "This is a clash," Orbán told a rally in eastern Hungary, "between the forces of the past and those of the future." The future has something to be said for it. Under Orbán, the economy, has outperformed its neighbors'. gdp grew 3.8% last year, more than double the E.U. average, while official unemployment is 5%. Even the Hungarians' chronically pessimistic outlook — suicide rates were once the highest in the world — is changing. In a Gallup poll released last week, 46% of respondents said they expected life to improve over the next five years. "It's the kind of situation," noted a Western diplomat, "where you would expect an incumbent to win easily."

As with many economic recoveries, however, the benefits have not been evenly spread. The socialists, for their part, are appealing to a core constituency of pensioners, former state workers and some professionals who recall the old days of comfortable government subsidies, and to anyone who has fared less well in the post-communist period. The party is also strong in the capital Budapest, home to 18% of Hungary's 10 million people, where long-serving Mayor Gábor Demszky claims Orbán's government has deliberately withheld funding from development projects in order to punish the city for voting against him in 1998. "They treat us like enemies," he says.

The rival parties have surprisingly similar domestic and foreign policies, but there the likenesses end. Fidesz is rabidly anticommunist, stronger in rural areas and made up largely of men and women under age 40. The socialists represent an older generation and claim greater sensitivity for the disadvantaged. They stress their European credentials, while Orbán has wrapped himself in Hungary's red, white and green flag. In the past few months, he has defended a regulation that bars foreigners from public contracts, and introduced a controversial law that extends benefits and what officials call "a sense of belonging" to 3.5 million ethnic Hungarians living abroad. The move angered some of Hungary's neighbors, who called it divisive, but proved popular at home. "To be Hungarian was forbidden here for 40 years," says Kata Puski, 21, an economics student from the eastern city of Debrecen. "Now we can tell the world that we are Hungarian and that we love our home."

The other wedge issue is Orbán himself. His brash, confrontational style may irk rivals and neighboring leaders, but it plays well at home, especially among the young. "He's the most gifted Hungarian politician in 100 years," says Mária Schmidt, director of the House of Terror and a former aide. Concludes a Western diplomat: "This is an election about Viktor Orbán. It's his to win or lose."

The same cannot be said for the socialist candidate, Peter Medgyessy, 60. A former Finance Minister and investment banker with a taste for silk ties and French suits, Medgyessy is, by his own admission, a mediocre campaigner. At rallies, his staff switches on a 20-minute video rather than risk a lengthy live performance. He is not even a member of the Socialist Party, but was recruited to mute criticism of the old guard's return to power, a contention Medgyessy rejects. "It is a modern social democratic party, and its leaders are highly respected politicians in Europe," he insisted to Time. Fidesz, on the other hand, has "dictatorial" tendencies, he says. "It goes far beyond political rivalry. It is reaching political hatred."

While some diplomats now cautiously predict a Fidesz victory, the nightmare scenario, they say, is that the alliance falls short of a majority. It might then be forced into a coalition with the far-right Justice and Life Party, which has openly courted the anti-Semitic, anti-Roma and antiglobalization vote. Fidesz has yet to rule out such a deal. Whatever happens, the campaign underscores an irony of East European politics. Countries may be on the verge of entering an enlarged E.U., but at home they remain hostage to their own turbulent past. When the House of Terror opened in February, far-right demonstrators massed to shout that the socialists are direct heirs to the "victimizers" depicted in the museum. The accusation is specious — Hungary's worst crimes ended in the late 1960s — but it's hard to shake. As a visitor to 60 Andrássy Avenue will appreciate, terror has a peculiar grip on the imagination.