The international Auschwitz committee said on Tuesday it was “appalled” after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s comments against “mixed races”, and called on the European Union to “distance itself from such racist connotations”.
The nationalist leader’s speech, “stupid and dangerous”, reminds Holocaust survivors “of the dark times of their own exclusion and persecution”, reacted Christoph Heubner, vice president of the organization, in statements sent to AFP.
Rejection of a multi-ethnic society
He called on Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who will receive Viktor Orban on an official visit to Vienna on Thursday, to stand out on behalf of the EU. We must “make the world understand that Mr Orban has no future in Europe”, whose values he “knowingly denies”.
In a speech this Saturday in Romanian Transylvania, where a large Hungarian community resides, the 59-year-old prime minister, known for his anti-immigrant policy, had virulently reaffirmed his rejection of a “multiethnic” society.
“We don’t want to be a mixed race,” mixing with “non-Europeans,” he said.
The countries “where European and non-European peoples coexist are no longer nations. These countries are nothing more than conglomerates of peoples”, also launched Viktor Orban, who had made similar comments in the past but without using the term “race”, according to experts
The Government defended itself this Tuesday, through its spokesman Zoltan Kovacs, from “a misinterpretation” of the statements by “people who clearly do not understand the difference between the mixture of different ethnic groups in Judeo-Christianity and the mixture of peoples of different civilizations.
Allusion to the Nazi gas chambers
But Zsuzsa Hegedus, a sociologist who has been advising Viktor Orban for several years, has resigned, according to the Hungarian media HVG. In a letter, she denounces “a shameful position” and “a pure Nazi text worthy of (Joseph) Goebbels,” referring to Nazi Germany’s former head of propaganda.
Viktor Orban apparently alluded to the gas chambers when he criticized Brussels’ plan to cut European gas demand by 15%. “I don’t see how they can force member states to do it, although there is German expertise in this area, as the past has shown,” he joked.
The Hungarian Jewish community also rose up against this speech. “Many different species populate our planet. On two legs, working, talking and sometimes thinking, but only one species lives on this earth: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. This race is one and indivisible,” the Chief Rabbi wrote on Facebook. Robert Frolich.
In the political class, Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu considered such “ideas” “unacceptable”.
Source: BFM TV
