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Hungary’s Prime Minister Orban said in Romania that ethnically mixed European countries “are no longer countries.”
An aide close to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has resigned, protesting his racist comments about the idea of ”mixing races”.
Zsuzsa Hegedos, who has had a relationship with nationalist Prime Minister Orban for 20 years, called the speech a “pure Nazi text”, according to Hungarian media.
The International Auschwitz Committee of Holocaust Survivors described Orban’s speech as “stupid and dangerous”.
In an attempt to absorb anger, Urban’s spokesman said the media had misinterpreted the comments.
The prime minister delivered the speech on Saturday in Romania, which has a large Hungarian community.
He said in his statements that European peoples should be free to mix with each other, but this mixing with non-Europeans created a “mixed-ethnic world”.
“We are ready to mingle with each other, but we don’t want to become mixed-race people,” he added.
Despite his well-known stance on immigration issues and his refusal to receive immigrants, Orbán’s recent speech “overstepped the bounds” for Heguidos, and she decided to resign.
“I don’t know how you didn’t notice that my speech was a purely Nazi speech worthy of Joseph Goebbels,” Hegedus wrote in her wave of resignation letter to the prime minister, according to Hungarian media.
Goebbels was the architect of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi propaganda campaign.
Hungary’s largest Jewish group also condemned the speech and called for a meeting with Orbán.
Orban responded to the resignation of his longtime close aide, and defended his words on Saturday.
“You know better than anyone else that my government in Hungary has a zero-tolerance policy for anti-Semitism and racism,” he wrote in his response.
His spokesman, Zoltan Kovacs, said the mainstream media were “over-enthusiastic about a few tough lines (Orban said) about immigration and the integration of immigrants”, but that they were silent on the main points of the prime minister’s speech.
Orban had also spoken in his speech about the war in Ukraine, saying that Western support for the country had failed, sanctions against Russia had not worked, and that a negotiated peace agreement should take priority.
Despite receiving large sums of EU money, the Hungarian government led by Orbán is often at odds with the EU on rule of law issues such as press freedom and immigration.
Hungary’s prime minister has in the past been on good terms with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and is the only EU leader to openly criticize Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.