The International Auschwitz Committee has said it was “alarmed and shocked” by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s racist outbursts. Vice-chairman of the commission, Christoph Heubner, also has expectations of Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP), who will receive Orbán in Vienna on Thursday. Nehammer should tell him “how his racist forays into the past and into the future of Europe are assessed within the European Union”.
Heubner pointed out that Nehammer was “the first of his European colleagues” to have the opportunity to speak with Orbán about his speech. “The European Union would do well to continue to distance itself as much as possible from Orban’s racist undertones and make it clear to the world that Mr Orban has no future in Europe,” the Holocaust survivors’ representative stressed.
Already registered “serious concerns”.
Orbán’s sentences would remind Holocaust survivors of “the dark times of their own marginalization and persecution,” Heubner said. The Association of Jewish Communities in Hungary had previously expressed “serious concerns” about Orbán’s speech.
Speaking to supporters in the Romanian seaside town of Baile Tusnad on Saturday, Orban said: “There is a world where the European peoples mingle with those who come from outside Europe. It is a mixed race world.” On the other hand, there is the Carpathian Basin, where European peoples such as Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks and others mixed in. “We are willing to mix, but we don’t want to become multiracial,” he said.
Statement scientifically untenable
The idea that the National Socialists, among others, maintain that there are different races of people is scientifically untenable and is part of racist world views. This ideology erroneously attributes characteristics to entire groups of people based on physical differences such as skin color.
In his speech to representatives of the Hungarian ethnic group in Romania, Orbán launched a sweeping attack on EU partners, criticizing, for example, the alleged laziness of southern European states.
Allusion to gas chambers of the Nazi regime
He also made a disturbing gas joke. “For example, there is the latest proposal from the European Commission, which states that everyone should be obliged to reduce their gas consumption by 15 percent. I don’t see how that should be enforced, although there is German know-how for it, I think from the past,” he said, in an obvious allusion to the gas chambers of the Nazi regime.
Orbán’s statements about the war in Ukraine also caused outrage. He compared the EU sanctions regime against Russia to a car with four flat tires and said Ukraine could never win the war. Observers pointed out that Orbán did not criticize the aggressor Vladimir Putin in his speech.
Rather, he seemed to blame the war on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and US President Joe Biden. If Donald Trump had been the US president and Angela Merkel the German chancellor, “this war would never have broken out,” Orban said, according to the Hungarian government’s official translation. “But we weren’t lucky and that’s why we’re in this war now.”
Nehammer is looking forward to Orban .’s visit
Nehammer has not yet responded to Orbán’s speech on Saturday. Announcing the visit on Thursday, the chancellor emphasized alignment with Orbán in the fight against illegal migration and described Hungary as an “important neighbor and partner”. “I look forward to welcoming Viktor Orban to Vienna,” the ÖVP leader said on Twitter.
Source: Krone
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