Despite the wave of criticism, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said on Thursday that his defense of the country not becoming a “mixed race” would be a cultural issue, not a racial one. “We want to keep our civilization as it is now,” he said.
Defender of an anti-migration and anti-democratic agenda, Orbán criticized over the weekend politicians and countries open to welcoming immigrants and “mixing populations”. This stance has historically earned Fidesz, the ruling party, support among sections of the population opposed to welcoming migrants.
The new wording of the speech, however, now with the content against miscegenation, drew criticism from the International Auschwitz Committee for its racist connotation and also led the Minister of Social Inclusion Zsuzsa Hegedus to resign shortly afterwards.
In her resignation letter, she compared the far-rightist’s speech to Adolf Hitler’s propaganda in Nazi Germany. “I don’t know how you [Orbán] did not realize that the statement is pure Nazi rhetoric worthy of Joseph Goebbels,” Hegedus wrote.
Speaking in Vienna, according to reports from the Hungarian newspaper Index, Orbán said: “It happens that I am sometimes ambiguous. This is a civilized position, we are proud of what Hungary has achieved in the fight against racism. It is not about racism, but about cultural differences”.
The prime minister had already tried to distance his speech from the racist content in a letter he released after the resignation of Zsuzsa Hegedus, a longtime ally. In the text shared by the political director of his office on Twitter, he said: “My government has a zero-tolerance policy towards anti-Semitism and racism.”
The now ex-minister Zsuzsa Hegedus responded to arguments by saying that she did not characterize her government as racist, but that the prime minister’s recent speech worried her. “The slightest public mention of racial discrimination incites a movement that history has already shown; once we let the genie out of the bottle, not even the ‘sir’ can shut it up again,” she said, according to the hvg news website. huh.
Orbán was re-elected in April for his fifth term in Hungary, and Fidesz, the party he founded, retained a majority in parliament. His government — he is in his fourth consecutive term — was marked by the erosion of Hungarian democracy and by rifts with the European Union (EU), the country’s bloc.
The prime minister, alongside figures such as Jair Bolsonaro (PL), is part of the group of world leaders who promote an authoritarian turn, with anti-democratic speeches and policies. His government even offered help for the reelection of the Brazilian president, showed an interim report obtained by the Sheet.
“I am the only EU politician who advocates an openly anti-immigration policy,” Orban told a joint news conference with Austrian Prime Minister Karl Nehammer.
On Wednesday night (27), the US embassy in Budapest released a statement in which it does not mention Orbán, but says it condemns “all ideologies, policies and rhetoric that oxygenate doctrines of hatred and division”. Earlier this week, Frans Timmermans, vice president of the European Commission, wrote on Twitter that racism had no place in Europe, whose strength would come from diversity.
According to reports and videos in the local press, Orbán was vain in Vienna, when he arrived for the meeting with the Austrian prime minister, by the group Omas gegen Rechts (grandmas against the right), made up of women, most of them of retirement age, with action in Austria and Germany against neo-Nazism and right-wing extremism in Europe.
