Worthy Christian News > World News > Adviser To Hungary’s Premier Quits Over ‘Pure Nazi Speech’

Adviser To Hungary’s Premier Quits Over ‘Pure Nazi Speech’

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – The longtime top adviser of Hungary’s hardline nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has resigned over a “pure Nazi speech” in which he spoke out against becoming a “mixed race.”

Zsuzsa Hegedüs said Orbán’s anti-migration views were well known but that Saturday’s comments in Romania crossed a line. “I don’t know how you didn’t notice that the speech you delivered is a purely Nazi tirade worthy of Joseph Goebbels,” she wrote in her resignation letter.

Goebbels was the head of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s propaganda ministry during World War Two, when six million Jews, including 600,000 Hungarian Jews and others, were killed because of their background.

Hegedüs, one of Orbán’s longest-serving advisers, has known the prime minister since 2002.

However, in her resignation letter, leaked to the media, she said she had become increasingly uncomfortable with Orbán’s “illiberal turn” in recent years.

‘MIXED RACE’

In the speech, Orbán, 59, said mixing between Europeans was acceptable, but Europeans mixing with non-Europeans created “mixed race” people.

“We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed race,” Orbán stressed. He added that countries where this was seen as acceptable are “no longer nations.”

Hegedüs said she had long defended the prime minister against accusations of antisemitism but believed his latest speech to be indefensible. “I sincerely regret that such a disgraceful stance has forced me to sever our relationship,” she wrote.

Orbán wrote in a reply that he wasn’t a racist. “You can’t be serious about accusing me of racism after 20 years of working together. You know better than anyone that in Hungary, my government follows a zero-tolerance policy on antisemitism and racism,” he wrote.

Yet the International Auschwitz Committee of Holocaust survivors called the speech “stupid and dangerous.”

Orbán gave his remarks at the Summer University event in the town of Băile Tuşnad in Romania’s Transylvania region, where many ethnic Hungarians live.

CONTROVERSIAL SPEECH

His controversial speech came before he was to travel to the United States next week to open CPAC Texas, a gathering of American conservatives.

Orbán counts former U.S. President Donald J. Trump among his many admirers on the American right, though it was not immediately clear whether his speech on race mixing would lead to tensions with CPAC.

Representatives of Hungary’s Jewish community also condemned Orbán’s remarks. “Only one race inhabits this earth, Homo Sapiens. And it is unique and undivided,” chief rabbi Robert Fröhlich commented.

Hungarian opposition politicians, who Orbán’s Fidesz party defeated in April elections, described his remarks as “beyond the pale… unworthy of a European statesman”.

And the latest resignation showed that even within his own rightwing Fidesz, there are concerns about Orbán’s rhetoric.

He already faces a standoff with the European Union which refuses to release billions of dollars in aid over the rule of law concerns and corruption.