A racist speech made by the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban, Saturday July 23, continues to arouse strong reactions, almost a week later. A “rhetoric of this nature is inexcusable”condemned the spokesman for American diplomacy, Ned Price, on Thursday.
On Saturday, Viktor Orban had expressed his rejection of a society “multi-ethnic” and “non-Europeans” by declaring: “NOTWe don’t want to be a mixed race.” If this rhetoric is not new to the far-right leader, he had never used the term “breed”.
He had also challenged the plan to reduce gas consumption drawn up by the European Union by making what seemed to be an allusion to the gas chambers: “I don’t see how they can force member states to do this, although there is German know-how in this area, as the past has shown”.
Thursday the American Ned Price echoed the words of a statement by Washington’s special representative on anti-Semitism issues, Deborah Lipstadt, who said she was “deeply alarmed” by a discourse using “rhetoric that clearly evokes Nazi racial ideology”.
On Tuesday, the international Auschwitz committee said to itself “horrified” with a speech that reminds Holocaust survivors “the dark times of their own exclusion and persecution”. On the same day, an adviser to the Hungarian leader, sociologist Zsuzsa Hegedus, tendered her resignation, describing her speech as a “pure Nazi text worthy of Goebbels”.
“In Hungary, these expressions and sentences represent a cultural, civilizational point of view”, Viktor Orban defended himself on Thursday while visiting Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer in Vienna. He condemned “firmly any form of racism and anti-Semitism” and assured to have addressed “honestly” these statements with his guest, without contesting them more explicitly.