Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has delivered his traditional speech during the closing event of the Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp in the resort town of Baile Tusnad (Tusnádfürdő) on Saturday.Continue reading
One of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s advisors resigned on Tuesday, calling his recent Tusványos speech a “Nazi diatribe.” In response, the Prime Minister commented that his government has a zero tolerance policy on anti-Semitism and racism.
Zsuzsa Hegedüs, the Prime Minister’s long-standing advisor on social inclusion, resigned on Tuesday. In her letter to Viktor Orbán – which she shared with HVG.hu – Hegedüs wrote “I don’t know how you didn’t notice that the speech you delivered is a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels,” referring to the speech the PM delivered last Saturday at the Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp – also known as Tusványos – in Baile Tusnad (Tusnádfürdő).
In his speech. Orbán called it an “ideological travesty of the internationalist left” when they try to claim that Europe is inherently mixed-race. “It is a historical and semantic fraud. The peoples living within Europe move, they work, but they are not mixed peoples. We are willing to mix with each other, but we are not willing to become mixed race,” he said.
Viktor Orbán’s press chief, Bertalan Havasi, told HVG.hu on Tuesday that the Prime Minister took note of Zsuzsa Hegedüs’s resignation. In a letter – also published by his political director, Balázs Orbán, on Twitter – the PM stressed that his government “has a zero tolerance policy on anti-semitism and racism. According to my understanding, God created all people in his own image. Therefore, in the case of people like me, racism is excluded ab ovo,” he wrote. „After twenty years of working together you can’t seriously accuse me of racism,” Orbán added.
Zsuzsa Hegedüs wrote another letter to the Prime Minister – also shared with HVG.hu – in which she refers to her parent’s experiences as Holocaust survivors. The former advisor wrote that she made statements regarding the speech itself, not Orbán as a person.
According to a study presented at the annual conference of the European Jewish Association (EJA) in Budapest last month, the best quality of life for Jewish communities in Europe can be found in Hungary and Italy.
Featured photo via MTI/Szigetváry Zsolt
