Orban ally resigns over Hungarian PM’s Nazi speech
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s speech regarding the ‘mixing’ of European and non-Europeans drew international criticism, and now one of his long-time advisers has resigned over the speech.
Zsuzsa Hegedüs said in a letter to a Hungarian news outlet hvg.hu that she didn’t believe Orbán is a racist person but the comments he made on Saturday “turned into an openly racist speech.”
“I don’t know how you didn’t notice that you were turning your previous anti-migrant [rhetoric] and anti-Europeanism into a pure Nazi text worthy of [Joseph] Goebbels,” she said. “But I cannot, because of the severity of the fact, even with our friendship of nearly 20 years, overlook that this time.”
Orbán has denied the allegations of racism and blames the media for misrepresenting his comments. In a letter responding to the resignation, he said the government takes a “zero tolerance” approach to antisemitism and racism.
“You can’t seriously accuse me of racism after 20 years of working together,” Orbán said.
He had made the speech at the Tusvanyos Summer University in Romania. In it he claimed “the west is split in two” saying that countries where Europeans and non-European people intermingle “are no longer nations.”
“We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race,” he added.
The EU was called on to distance itself from “such racist overturns” says the International Auschwitz Committee, who were “horrified” by the comments.
Hegedüs responded to the prime minister’s reaction to her resignation. She told him that his comments are unacceptable because he made them in his official capacity as prime minister of Hungary. She said that even the slightest hint of racial discrimination could eventually spiral into tragedies like the Holocaust.
“This horror could only have happened because too many people were silent when the kind of hatred the Nazis were building on was being born,” she said.
Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban speech
“The most thorny problem continued to be the demographic problem. There are more funerals than births. (…) The second challenge is the migration phenomenon, which has divided Europe in two. The migration phenomenon divided Europe in two. Quite simply, the West fell apart, it split in two. On the one hand we have countries, nations, where we have Europeans and non-Europeans, living together.
Those states are no longer nations, there are conglomerates of peoples. We can no longer speak, I say, of the West, it is about a post-Western structure and, according to the rules of mathematics, that great demographic change will happen. In that part of our continent (…), the percentage of the non-European population will increase to over 50%.
And we have the other side of Europe, of the West, Central and Eastern Europe, that is, it is about us. I don’t want to create confusion, but, nevertheless, I say it, in the spiritual sense: the West has moved to our region. Here we have the West, there we have a post-Western structure and there is a battle between the two parts of Europe. So, we made an offer to the post-Westerners, we told them, leave us alone to decide who we want to be neighbours with and who we want to live with“, he stated.
Orban ally resigns over Hungarian PM’s Nazi speech
On Tuesday morning – as reported by hvg.hu – sociologist Zsuzsa Hegedüs sent a letter to Viktor Orbán, in which he wrote that he would resign from his position as prime minister’s representative, because the Prime Minister’s speech in Tusványos – sharply criticized by others – on the “mixing of races” Hegedüs “pure Nazi he considers it “speech”, which would have been liked even by the “hardest-blooded race-haters”, so despite their 20-year friendship, he has to break off their relationship.
Bertalan Havasi, the prime minister’s press chief, responded to hvg.hu first , stating that “the prime minister received and acknowledged” the letter of resignation, and later the letter that Orbán wrote in response to Hegedüs was published on Mandiner. He wrote: “You can’t even be serious about accusing me of racism after twenty years of working together. You know best that my government follows a zero-tolerance policy regarding anti-Semitism and racism in Hungary”.
However, the smallest public sentence regarding racial discrimination incites something that history has already proven not only in Europe, but also in Africa and Armenia, that once we let the genie out of the bottle, not even the “Lord” can shut it back up again. .”
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