The country road to Heviz is fairly quiet. Cars pass occasionally. Crops wave in the fields. The sun shines down on an early autumn day, pleasant weather for the few late holidaymakers on the way to this spa town in western Hungary.
A pretty girl with long tanned legs well displayed in brief blue plaid shorts waits at what appears to be a bus stop. Down the road a bit, an older woman with bouffant black hair, a la Lewinsky, and this time, black leather shorts, seems to be lurking aimlessly by a field.
There are a lot of women "waiting for buses" in rural Hungary. Once famous as the brothel of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the sex industry is still an important part of the black economy. One shudders to think what sort of customers the working girls on the road to Heviz collect. But it's a living, and in a country still somewhat shell-shocked by the change from the communist system to the free market, where even an average person in work earns the equivalent of only £2,000 per annum, prostitution is still common.
Unemployment recently has shrunk from over 10 per cent to 7.5 per cent (around 300,000 people) but this is still high for a former communist economy, where everyone expected a job more or less for life.
Prostitution is one of the lesser problems for those charged with dealing with the new explosion of crime and corruption which has followed the break-up of the Soviet monolith and the advent of democracy in this charming, landlocked country of 10 million. The Minister for Justice, Dr Ibolya David, has recruited FBI consultants from the US to advise on combating the new mafiaesque crime bosses who have infiltrated from Russia and Ukraine. But, as Dr David said in an interview with The Irish Times, methods of policing in one society are not always transferable to others.
Zero tolerance, one gets the impression, would not be a concept that people would embrace easily in Hungary. Although locals accept with a shrug that theft is endemic - I heard of one man who had his car stolen from outside his house when he jumped out of it momentarily, to close his garage door - and the sex industry causes little consternation, crimes against the person and random violence have been rare. But this is changing, and Dr David, the only woman in the Hungarian cabinet, is drafting and reviewing legislation intended to tighten up against newer, more vicious crimes.
The majority of her work is revising and introducing laws which will pave the way for Hungarian accession to the EU, which the Budapest establishment hopes will happen early in the new century.
Earlier this year five people were killed when a car exploded in a side street just off the main boulevard that is the Budapest equivalent of Grafton Street. The bomb had been placed in the vehicle to tell its owner that he was treading on irritable toes by infringing on the rackets run by a certain foreign gangster. Several innocent bystanders were also killed, and the capital was deeply shocked.
Organised crime, imported by opportunistic gangsters in the republics of the former Soviet Union, has hit Hungary hard. This is the sort of unaccustomed problem that Dr David is facing. There might have been over 14,000 reported car thefts in 1997, but crime figures generally are nowhere near as high as the European average, she says. Now, however, trafficking in drugs and weapons (due to the volatile nature of many of Hungary's neighbouring countries) is growing.
Dr David is something of a rarity in Hungary - a woman in a senior position in public life. In parliament and in public life the average is about 10 per cent representation by women. Under the communist system, about 20 years ago the figure was 30 per cent, but this was an official policy and the women were puppets, says Dr David, deliberately chosen from a lower part of society with less education.
Now women like Dr David, a lawyer in her early forties, are taking a meaningful part in political life. From her nine years' experience in parliament, she says that women's ability to reach final decisions amicably is important, and is starting to be appreciated in what can still be a very macho society.
Many Hungarians see the "development" of their society as an increasingly westernised capitalist country as at best a mixed blessing. The popular singer, Stepanovic, has turned around previous sentiments about the vileness of repressed, impoverished, eastern European countries, Vile East, with a catchy ballad bemoaning the new Vile West.
The rise of extreme right-wing politicians in the Le Pen tradition, if neither as extreme nor as popular, is also seen as partly a result of the beloved "westernisation" that considers membership of both the NATO (due next year) and the EU is not merely desirable but essential.
In its typical small-country enthusiasm for joining the big club, Hungary resembles Ireland. Other similarities are often remarked upon - where we had the British Empire, with Dublin a prominent capital, they had the Austro-Hungarian, and Budapest was its second city. Who else speaks Irish? Who else speaks Hungarian? In both places people love to talk, to enjoy the company of others, to philosophise, but this also leads to a darker streak (Hungarians, have, fortunately, just relinquished their title as the most suicide-prone nationality in Europe). And both countries are dealing with the harsh realities of crime in the new millennium.