Jobbik has tried to publicly distance itself from such groups in the past. But the nature of the party's intellectual bedfellows emerged during a Jobbik-organized rally in August in Devecser, a village in western Hungary. A Jobbik MP delivered the first speech, about the need to confront the problem of "gypsy crime." But the subsequent speeches from members of other groups turned increasingly threatening, according to a witness I interviewed, climaxing with a tirade from the leader of a group called Outlaws' Army (elsewhere he's called for the establishment of paramilitary camps to train Hungarian youth for an impending race war in Europe, and for the country's Jews to once again be shipped off in freight cars). "It was really like hearing Hitler," the witness said. Demonstrators eventually began chanting death threats and throwing stones at Roma houses, vowing to return.

When I asked Gyongyosi about Devecser, he talked for approximately six minutes about "gypsy crime." I told him what I meant was that a rally that had degenerated into a tirade of death threats and rock-throwing -- an international incident that made the party synonymous with neo-Nazi thugs -- must surely be bad press for Jobbik. If such actions don't reflect the party's core values, why had they not said as much?

"In a rally, the more people there are, the happier you tend to be," he said. "And then you can see that there is a very thin line -- you cannot draw very straight lines between who is who and who wants what."

I wasn't surprised that he disavowed responsibility for the other groups that turned up. But his acknowledgement that there is no clear line to distinguish Jobbik's platform from that of the extremist groups flocking to their rallies seemed precisely the problem. From a cynical PR standpoint alone, I had expected he would regret holding the rally. But that was not the case.

"If you take democracy seriously, what is productive and what is not... time tells," he said. "It is very difficult to say, 'okay, this was good, that was bad, we could have done without, or we need another two more of these type of rallies.'"

Across Europe, the resurgence of such extremist politics has raised thorny questions about the limits of free speech and political participation in a democracy.

"There is this argument that democracy should be tolerant to anything," said Irene Koutelou, one of the founders of Greece's Anti-Nazi Initiative. "But democracy cannot be tolerant to stabbings. It cannot be tolerant to beatings. It cannot be tolerant to organized groups that promote violence on a racist basis." Koutelou's organization has been lobbying for more than a decade to outlaw the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn. Over the last year, the onetime fringe group has become Greece's third most popular party, and Koutelou fears its leaders wants to ride the prevailing winds of anti-immigrant sentiment to become a pan-European force.