Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s declaration that Hungarians “do not want to become a mixed race” in addition to revolt caused a downturn in the government on Tuesday (26). The country’s Minister of Social Inclusion, Zsuzsa Hegedus, resigned from her post and said that the prime minister’s speech had “Nazi” content.
“I don’t know how you didn’t realize that the statement is pure Nazi rhetoric worthy of Joseph Goebbels. [ministro da propaganda de Adolf Hittler]”, Hegedus wrote in his resignation letter, according to the Hungarian news website hvg.hu. “After such a speech, which contradicts all my basic values, I had no other choice: […] I have to break up with you.”
In addition to being a minister, Hegedus was one of Orbán’s oldest advisers, with whom she had lived for approximately 20 years. But she chose to step down after the prime minister criticized countries for welcoming immigrants and “mixing European and non-European populations”.
“There is a world in which European peoples are mixed with those arriving from outside Europe. This is a world of mixed races,” Orbán said on Saturday (23) during an event in Romania. “And then there’s our world, where people from Europe move, work and move. […] That’s why we always fight: we’re willing to mix, but we don’t want to become mixed-race people.”
The statement continued to reverberate on Tuesday. The Auschwitz International Committee said it was “horrified” by Orbán’s statement and asked the European Union (EU) to “distance itself from its racist connotations”. Christoph Heubner, vice president of the organization, told the AFP news agency that the leader’s speech was “stupid and dangerous” and reminded Holocaust survivors “of the dark times of their own exclusion and persecution”.
Heubner also asked Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer who should receive Orbán during an official visit to Vienna on Thursday (28), to distance himself from the Hungarian prime minister. “[Devemos] make the world understand that Orbán has no future in Europe”.
Although it provoked revulsion in different sectors of society, the spokesman of the Hungarian Executive, Zoltan Kovacs, relativized Orbán’s statement. He said there was a misunderstanding by “people who clearly don’t understand the difference between the mixing of different ethnic groups in Judaism and Christianity and the mixing of people from different civilizations”.
In addition to generating outrage over the statement about “mixed people”, Orbán received criticism for making indirect reference to the Nazi regime’s gas chambers to criticize the European Union’s plan to reduce the use of gas by 15% in an effort to reduce dependence on the product. imported from Russia.
“I don’t see how they can force member states [da UE] to do so, although there is a German knowledge in this field, as the past has shown,” Orbán said, in an ironic tone. Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu said the phrase was unacceptable.
More than half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered during the Nazi Holocaust in World War II. Today, there are around 75,000 to 100,000 Jews in the country, most of whom are in Budapest.
Prime Minister since 2010, the populist was elected to his fifth term, the fourth in a row, in April. In his ten years in power, he has attacked immigrants, human rights groups and the LGBTQIA+ community. The politician also defends in his project of “illiberal democracy” measures that restrict freedom of the press.
Orbán faces his most difficult moment since taking power. The country is under economic pressure from double-digit inflation, as well as EU funding cuts due to violations of rule of law principles. At the beginning of the year, the Hungarian prime minister received the visit and was called a brother by President Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
