Hungary’s Jobbik was one of the farthest right parties in Europe. One of its MPs suggested drawing up a list of Hungary’s Jews, others had a history of racial hate speech, and the party was affiliated with the Hungarian Guard, a uniformed movement that on occasion terrorised Hungary’s Roma communities.

Recently, though, the party has a new message to voters: we’re not far right any more.

“This Jobbik is not the same Jobbik it was five years ago,” said Péter Jakab, recently elected leader of the party, in an interview at his parliamentary offices by the Danube in central Budapest.

Jobbik’s claim to have changed has been met by scepticism by many, but the party’s top brass says the election of the 39-year-old Jakab, who is partly of Jewish origin, proves the point.

Jakab’s first move in charge was to kick out Gergely Kulcsár, a former MP and still a Jobbik member of a local parliament. Kulcsár had a long history of scandalous statements and actions, including spitting on a Holocaust memorial in central Budapest. Jakab called the incident “a despicable act” and spoke freely about his own Jewish heritage.

“I was 13 or 14 when I found out that my great-grandfather had died at Auschwitz, along with a lot of other relatives from my mother’s side of the family,” said Jakab. “My grandmother was baptised and that’s how she was saved. She later married a Christian.”

Jobbik party supporters at an anti-EU protest in Budapest in 2012. Photograph: László Balogh/Reuters

It is a far cry from 2013, when Jobbik’s Csanád Szegedi resigned his party membership following revelations that his mother’s family was Jewish. “If somebody found out I had Jewish ancestry, I would immediately resign,” Jobbik’s chairman, Gábor Vona, said at the time.

It was Vona, however, who began Jobbik’s purported move towards the centre, around the time that Hungary’s governing Fidesz party, led by prime minister Viktor Orbán, veered from the centre right to the far right after the 2015 migration crisis. Orbán has based his popularity on shutting off Hungary to refugees and migrants, and has begun a campaign against the Hungarian-American philanthropist and financier George Soros which has at times used antisemitic tropes.

Jobbik was, however, divided. The party got 20% of the vote in 2018 parliamentary elections, running a confused campaign in which some of the party’s politicians insisted that it was no longer far right while others continued with the old rhetoric. After those elections, some of the more extremist elements split off to form a new, openly racist party.

Jakab said the change to the rest of Jobbik was now irrevocable. But Jakab himself has made antisemitic statements in the past. In a 2014 interview about antisemitism, he appeared to blame Jews for antisemitism and for abusing the memory of the Holocaust for financial gain, saying: “It is Jewish leaders who generate the prejudices that they can use to collect millions for more programmes fighting antisemitism.”

He claimed that he was merely referencing commonly held views rather than expressing his own when confronted with and other statements. But on other subjects, he voiced views that would have been unthinkable for the party a few years ago. He criticised Orbán for “inciting hatred” against Soros, saying the philanthropist “has every right” to spend money how he pleases in the country. “If you don’t like something about what Soros does, the solution is not to ban him or forbid him to do things, just offer better alternatives,” he said.

Jakab also praised the newly elected liberal, green mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, saying that on the evidence of his first months in office “nobody could have done a better job”. The liberal opposition to Orbán agreed to cooperate with Jobbik to help to defeat Orbán’s candidates in October municipal elections, after much debate about the ethics of doing so.

Analysts suggested that Jobbik’s shift was genuine, but should not be exaggerated, as the party still has nationalist and populist policy platforms. “The main difference from a few years ago is that they are now positioned in genuine opposition to Orbán rather than phoney opposition,” said Péter Krekó, of the Political Capital thinktank in Budapest. Increased cooperation between Jobbik and the liberal opposition could be key to giving the opposition a shot at denying Orbán a fourth successive term in 2022.

Jobbik politicians insist that they have changed in both style and substance, however. Márton Gyöngyösi, a Jobbik MEP, caused outrage in 2012 when as an MP he called for a list of Jews in Hungary to be drawn up. He later said he had meant Hungarian-Israeli dual citizens, and has in the years since apologised repeatedly for the remarks. In an interview, he claimed that both he and the party had undergone a transformation after seeing the Orbán government put parts of Jobbik’s far-right programme into practice.

“Viktor Orbán has adopted the style that we used to have years ago, and seeing what it looks like has made us realise that things are not as black and white as we thought,” Gyöngyösi said.