The lead-up to the match has been marred by a series of incidents at soccer games. Three Hungarian league teams were fined a total of 1.2 million forints ($5,200) for anti-Romanian and anti-Slovakian chants by their fans, and in a warm-up match against the Czech Republic in August, Hungarian fans chanted “Transylvania is Hungarian!” and promised to mount an “invasion” of Romania before Friday’s game. The fans also flew the Szekely flag, the flag of a historically Hungarian-dominated area in Romania that many Hungarians would like to see gain autonomy from Bucharest.

“Such words should be condemned; they do not belong on a football pitch,” Romania’s foreign minister, Titus Corlatean, told the news channel Antena 3, trying to take the sting out of the match. “Let’s not hide behind the finger here; extremist attitudes exist everywhere; they happen in Romania as well.

“The best answer will be to beat the Hungarians at football.”

The teams have met once before during this qualification campaign. That game, a 2-2 tie in March, was played in a nearly empty stadium after FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, imposed a one-match ban on spectators as punishment for anti-Semitic chanting and banners when Israel played an exhibition in Budapest last summer.

“The right wing is so strong now, there are ultra-right-wing parties like Jobbik and they get into the stadiums,” said Szabo Szilard, 38, a sports journalist for Hungary’s Kossuth Radio. “Because of 100 or 200 stupid people, Hungarian sport can be damaged. That is what politicians, sportsmen, everyone wants — we want to get them out of the stadium.”

The rise of nationalist groups like Jobbik is seen by many as a source of rising tension. Jobbik is Hungary’s third-largest political party, having won close to a million votes in the last parliamentary election. It has been accused of following a radical agenda that includes anti-Semitic policies, which the party denies.

“I’d love to live in a world, I dream about a world where Hungary regains the territory we have lost, and I think every Hungarian should think that way,” Marton Gyongyosi, a member of parliament and a foreign affairs spokesman for Jobbik, said in an interview in his parliamentary offices overlooking the Danube. On one chair sat a book about the workings of Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency.

“Reality is a different question,” he added. “We always have to cook with what we have.”

He denied that the rise of his party had been responsible for the recent deterioration of relations between Romania and Hungary, or for the intolerance seen in his country’s soccer stadiums.