(Bloomberg) -- Geza Csemer will never forget how a group of men clad in black uniforms charged at his family outside his home in eastern Hungary.

Hundreds of far-right vigilantes occupied the tiny town of Gyongyospata, tucked away amid rolling hills and vineyards an hour’s drive from Budapest. They marched through the neighborhood dominated by the Roma minority, vowing to paint their houses red with their blood.

“My three children were clutching my hands tightly,” Csemer, 45, who now leads the town’s Roma community, recalled during a recent visit. “Then I saw they had all wet their pants, that’s how scared they were.”

The chilling events of 2011 were the start of what would turn Gyongyospata into a symbol of the ethnic tension that’s rarely far from the surface in so many parts of eastern Europe. With growing evidence that the coronavirus pandemic is disproportionately hitting marginalized communities across the continent, Roma groups are fearful that wounds are being opened up again.

A decade ago, anti-Roma extremism was flourishing in the wake of the global financial crisis. A spate of murders targeting the minority had shaken the nation. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, had returned to power and vowed to crush vigilantism and improve the prospects of regions hit hardest by the economic meltdown.

By that time, Gyongyospata’s primary school was already segregated—in practice—along ethnic lines, like an estimated hundreds of others across Hungary. Roma students were largely bunched in remedial classes, often with several grades lumped together. Most non-Roma were on the upper floor, off-limits to those below. It lasted until 2014.

A court case over compensation for Roma pupils in the town was only settled this month, awarding about $5,000 to each of 60 students. Yet instead of some sort of catharsis, the ruling brought the ethnic tension that boiled over in 2011 back to the surface—only this time the town’s Roma residents blame Orban for fanning the flames rather than cooling emotions.

Already before the coronavirus arrived in Hungary, Orban focused attention on Gyongyospata as he looked for a bump in the polls after a rare political setback in local elections.

In a televised press conference in January, Orban said the town’s Roma stood to gain “free money while the rest of us toil.” This month, as tens of thousands of people lost their jobs in the first wave of the pandemic, Orban reacted to a supreme court verdict that rejected a challenge to scrap cash compensation for segregated students.

“We can’t have a situation where in order for the minority to feel at home, those from the majority should have to feel like foreigners in their own cities, villages and homeland,” Orban told state radio on May 15. “This can’t happen and won’t happen as long as I am the prime minister. This country, after all, belong to the natives.”

Read More: Orban’s Pandemic Power Grab Reveals the EU’s Wider Frailties

It was all too familiar for the Roma, a group whose roots often trace back more than 1,000 years to northern India. They have traditionally borne the brunt of prejudice in modern day eastern Europe as far-right groups regained a foothold following the collapse of communism 30 years ago. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Slovakia and Bulgaria sought to quarantine Roma areas.

Orban had pledged to tame those forces, establishing law and order and accelerating an economic recovery. The popularity of far-right parties in Hungary indeed receded, paramilitary groups were disbanded and Orban—before the coronavirus pandemic hit—was on his way to meeting a pledge to create a million new jobs by this year, benefiting Roma who lost out when industries collapsed with the demise of the communist regime.

But in their place came a powerful government that harnessed militant nationalism as Orban built what he calls his “illiberal democracy” within the European Union. Dissenters, whether political parties, civil society groups or even universities, were soon investigated, sidelined or ousted.

Orban turbo-charged his influence by starting to rule by decree for an indefinite period in late March, ostensibly to fight the virus, triggering alarm in Brussels that the country was descending into a de-facto dictatorship. Orban this week said he would end emergency rule in June, though his parliamentary super-majority means his agenda is unlikely to be affected.

Hungary this year became the first EU nation to be downgraded from a democracy to a “hybrid” regime, somewhere between a democracy and an autocracy, in an annual report by Washington-based group Freedom House.

Gyongyospata’s Roma community is worried they have become a political punchbag again. Csemer compared their situation to refugees, whom Orban shunned as a centerpiece of his political agenda over the past five years. The policy turned him into Europe’s ringleader for nativist forces across Europe. 

“We feel like we’re the new targets, the new ‘immigrants,’” Csemer said.

Barnabas Maka, the owner of the pub next to the post office, echoed Orban’s rhetoric. He blamed “the liberal world and its values that dominate in the west” for magnifying the conflict. When it comes to the school, he said Roma children “can’t behave in a classroom.”

Beatrix Csemer, a relative of Geza, was one of the students who said she suffered discrimination in the town’s primarily school. She said it came in many forms, from Roma being deprived of IT classes to being barred from using the school’s indoor swimming pool.

“They took my childhood away and no one can return that to me,” said Beatrix, 28. She said the feeling of being unwanted in school led her to terminate her studies after finishing primary school in 2006.

Her predicament is all too common among Hungary’s estimated 900,000 Roma, whose pre-virus jobless rate was already almost five times that of the rest of the population in the country of just under 10 million people.

Many work in the informal labor market, with little hope of receiving government assistance as the economy heads toward a recession this year. Four-fifths of employed Roma only had a primary-school education, compared with one-fifth for non-Roma, according to the statistics office in Budapest, making them among the most vulnerable in an economic downturn.

In Gyongyospata, many of the Roma live in ramshackle homes along a potholed street in the lower section of the sloping village. Orban’s successive administrations did manage to improve livelihoods largely through the trickle-down effects of one the continent’s highest economic growth rates.

An EU report on May 20, though, said policies favoring the more well-off magnified disparities. Any gains may be quickly reversed during the pandemic, it said.

Education remains a particular concern. As schools switched to distance-learning during the pandemic, many Roma households found themselves facing the choice of paying bills or putting food on the table, according to Vivien Brassoi, a researcher at the European Roma Rights Center in Brussels. Buying a laptop or upgrading an Internet connection, if there was one to begin with, wasn’t the priority, she said.

“The danger is that authorities will now say that the Roma just couldn’t keep up with schoolwork and recommend that they repeat grades or be taught separately in remedial classes, reinforcing segregation that’s already prevalent at many schools,” Brassoi said.

As rights activists hailed the supreme court ruling as a model for seeking reparations and eliminating segregation at other schools, Orban simultaneously pledged to craft legislation making it impossible for other victims of alleged school discrimination to receive monetary compensation.

Meanwhile in Gyongyospata, the fight for equal rights has come full circle.

Despite an official end to segregation six years ago, many non-Roma parents decided to take their children out of the local school, which was recently renovated with the help of EU funds. The new academic year may be the first to have a first-grade class of only Roma, according to Geza Csemer.

“The ethnic divide is only getting deeper,” he said. “I’m afraid things are only going to get worse.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.