...and of course, there have been attempts from the extreme right to co-opt folk music for their own propaganda. Folk music still hasn't recovered from what Hitler did to it in Germany.

What is happening at the moment in Hungary is pretty depressing. The present urban trad music scene in Hungary would not exist without the work of Bartok and Kodaly, both of whom were on the far left (they were in the culture administration of Bela Kun's socialist republic of 1919) - and Bartok particularly was a consistent internationalist with absolutely no time for nationalist appropriations of folk culture. And the reason so many Hungarian folkies are so good at it is because they've been through the music education system created by Kodaly under the Communists, which is the most effective the world has ever seen.

I suspect most Hungarian folkies still are somewhere on the left, but there is now a significant fraction of them who support FIDESZ, which is roughly like Cameron's Tories (and similarly tolerant of and symbiotic with the racist far right - Jobbik in Hungary roughly corresponding to UKIP/BNP/EDL in the UK).

I haven't figured out what the FIDESZ folkies' attitude to Gypsies is. For a while, the folk scene was a dependable ally of the Gypsies in Hungary and Romania and helped nurture a revival of the autonomous Gypsy culture (like the relationship between the UK folk revival and the Travellers, but less amateurish). How many of them still relate positively to the Gypsies I don't know (or whether many of them still share Bartok's interest in the Muslim culture underlying much of the former Ottoman Empire). I will attempt to find out when I go back there this summer.