Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been accused of “Nazi” rhetoric by his own entourage after he spoke out at the weekend against the creation of “mixed-race people”. One of the prime minister’s longtime advisers, sociologist Zsuzsa Hegedüs, handed in a resignation letter on Tuesday in which she described Orban’s words as “Goebbels-worthy” – a reference to the Nazi politician who served as a propagandist under Adolf Hitler. In the letter seen by Hungarian magazine HVG, Hegedüs – whose parents were Hungarian Holocaust survivors – called the speech “pure Nazi text”. “That you are capable of uttering an openly racist speech would never occur to me in my wildest dreams,” he wrote. Representatives of the Jewish community have also expressed concern. The International Auschwitz Committee on Tuesday called the speech “foolish and dangerous” and called on the European Union to “make it clear to the world that a Mr. Orbán has no future in Europe.” The speech reminded Holocaust survivors of “the dark times of their exclusion and persecution,” the organization’s vice president, Christoph Heubner, said in a statement sent to the AFP news agency. Heubner specifically called on Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer to step in when he hosts Orban on an official visit to Vienna on Thursday. The Federation of Jewish Communities of Hungary said its president, Andras Heisler, had requested a meeting with Orban. “Based on our historical experiences and our family stories that live with us, it is important to raise our voices against expressions in Hungarian public life that are prone to misunderstandings,” the group said.
‘Inadmissible’
More than half a million Hungarian Jews were systematically exterminated during the Nazi Holocaust in World War II. Today, there are approximately 75,000 to 100,000 Jews in Hungary, most of them in the capital, Budapest. Hungary’s chief rabbi Robert Frolich posted on his Facebook page: “On two legs, working, talking and sometimes I think there is only one race on this planet: Homo Sapiens Sapiens.” Bogdan Aurescu, the foreign minister of EU member Romania, said Orban’s “ideas” were “unacceptable”. A spokesman for the European Commission, Eric Mummer, declined to comment specifically on the statement, but said “the EU has a certain number of values enshrined in the treaties and implements policies in line with those values and those treaty articles.” Orban, who delivered the speech on Saturday in Romania, said the international left in Western Europe “is using a pretense, an ideological trick: the claim – their claim – that Europe is by its very nature inhabited by peoples of mixed tribe”. “We don’t want to become a people of mixed race,” he said. He also appeared to allude to the gas chambers of Germany’s Nazi regime when he criticized Brussels’ plan to cut European gas demand by 15%. Orban had made similar remarks in the past but without using the Hungarian term for “race”, according to experts. Government spokesman Zoltan Kovac downplayed Orban’s statement, saying it had been “misinterpreted” by those who “obviously don’t understand the difference between mixing different ethnic groups that all come from the Judeo-Christian cultural sphere and mixing peoples from different cultures.”
