Kinship between Hungarian and Finnish has been widely seen as questionable in Hungary since communism collapsed. Nationalist movement and right-wing parties have explained the old theory as Moscow´s attempt to humiliate the Hungarians. They prefer to look for relatives among great warrior nations like the Huns or the Scythians. The Northern relatives simply seem too backward to be accepted as a sister nation. László Fejes, a linguist and a Fenno-Ugrist, says he receives angry feedback from nationalists all the time.

The kinship of Hungarian and Finnish was found in the end of the 17th century by a German doctor Martin Fogel. The basis of Fenno-Ugristics as a linguistic discipline was established a hundred years later. No serious scholar supports the Hun-Scythian theories but they are popular among politicians and artists and even university students.