Hungary

Orban talks... as Jobbik walks

Adam Lebor — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:45:04 +0100

Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, strongly condemned antisemitism and pledged to honour the memory of Holocaust victims at the World Jewish Congress, which met in Budapest last weekend, but failed to criticise the far-right Jobbik party, the third largest in parliament.

Mr Orban told the delegates: “History has taught the Hungarians that antisemitism must be recognised in time… It is especially important that we make it clear: antisemitism is unacceptable and intolerable.”

The government says that it fully supports the renaissance in Jewish life. Between 80,000 and 100,000 Jews live in Hungary, most in Budapest. The city has numerous functioning synagogues, Jewish schools, cafes and restaurants.

Mr Orban emphasised the government’s commitment to commemorating the Holocaust, when more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews were killed. A new government committee will co-ordinate nationwide events next year, the 70th anniversary of the deportations. “It is with a broken heart that we bow our heads in memory of the victims,” said Mr Orban “but thank God that an authentic Jewish community…managed to survive.”

Mr Orban pointedly compared Hungary to France as a country where, despite the murder of a teacher and three schoolchildren in an antisemitic attack in Toulouse, there was “no consensus” on whether a minute’s silence could be held in state schools.

But there was strong disappointment that Mr Orban failed to single out Jobbik for condemnation and failed to mention any antisemitic incidents.

Ferenc Orosz, the chairman of the Raoul Wallenberg memorial committee, was recently beaten up at a football match after he asked spectators to stop chanting “Mussolini” and “Sieg Heil”.

Jobbik’s strong parliamentary presence has emboldened antisemites, said Tamas Vero, a Budapest rabbi who attended the WJC assembly. “The situation became much worse after Jobbik entered parliament in 2010. People hear members of parliament speaking in this way, so it becomes acceptable to speak like this on the streets.”

A spokesman for the WJC said that Mr Orban “did not confront the true nature of the problem: the threat posed by the antisemites in general and by the extreme right-wing Jobbik party in particular.” The WJC accused Mr Orban of failing to draw “a clear line” between the government and the right-wing fringe.

However, WJC president Ronald Lauder, who was re-elected at the assembly, subsequently apologised for failing to acknowledge Mr Orban’s criticism of Jobbik as “a real danger” in an interview with Ynet, published last Saturday.

Hundreds of Jobbik activists gathered on Saturday in downtown Budapest to protest against the WJC gathering. Marton Gyongyosi, a Jobbik MP and vice-president of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, told the rally: “Our country has become subjugated to Zionism, it has become a target of colonisation while we, the indigenous people, can only play the role extras.”

Mr Orban had ordered the far-right gathering to be banned but a court over-ruled his decision.

Board of Deputies President Vivian Wineman, who led a British delegation to the gathering, commented: “The decision to hold the meeting in Budapest was the right one. But Orban missed his opportunity.”

Hungarian PM pledges to stop far-right protests ahead of WJC meeting

Zoe Winograd — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:01:41 +0100

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has banned protests against the World Jewish Congress plenary assembly, due to take place in Budapest next week.

Last month, Lorant Hegedüs Jr, member of the far-right Jobbik party, announced plans for an “anti-bolshevik and anti-Zionist people’s gathering” to take place this weekend. On Monday Mr Orban told police to stop any anti-Zionist demonstration.

The WJC is being held in Budapest this year to show solidarity with the Hungarian Jewish community, which has faced a resurgence of antisemitism in recent months. It will be one of the first times that the WJC plenary assembly is held outside Jerusalem.

World Jewish Congress defends invite for hate-link Orban

Anna Sheinman — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:29:54 +0100

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) has defended its invitation to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to speak at its quadriennial assembly, despite his failure to denounce the hate speech of his close friend and one of his party’s founders, Zsolt Bayer.

Mr Bayer, a journalist, has written an article calling British journalist Nick Cohen “[a] stinking excrement called something like Cohen”. Also in the article, in reference to a massacre of mostly Jewish communists in 1919, Mr Bayer expressed disappointment that “they were not all buried up to their necks in the forest of Orgovány”.

Maram Stern, deputy secretary general of WJC, which represents Jewish communities in 100 countries around the world, said of the meeting due to take place in May: “We have invited Prime Minister Orbán because we want to hear his reaction to the rise in antisemitic and racist incidents in this country, including those involving Zsolt Bayer. I am sure Prime Minister Orbán will listen to our concerns, and we will listen to what he has to say.”

In January this year, Mr Bayer caused further outrage by calling Roma in Hungary “animals” who are “unfit for co-existence”. Despite this, he and Mr Orbán remain close friends and the Fidesz party refused to comment on the inflammatory statements.

The WJC’s statement came after an estimated 10,000 people marched in Budapest on Sunday protesting against antisemitism as part of the annual March of the Living. The march traditionally commemorates those who died in the Holocaust but, this year, thousands more than normal turned out carrying Israeli and EU flags in protest against the growing climate of antisemitism in Hungary.

Abraham Foxman, Director of the Anti-Defamation League, said: “We encourage Prime Minister Orbán to make the fight against antisemitism, hatred and bigotry a priority for his government and to demonstrate that commitment through action, as he recently did by protecting the March of the Living from an antisemitic protest event.”

Survey: antisemitism rises 30 per cent worldwide

Zoe Winograd — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:11:41 +0100

A survey has shown a 30 per cent increase in global acts of antisemitism.

The survey, carried out by the Kantor Centre at Tel Aviv University, highlighted Hungary as experiencing the most worrying examples of antisemitism in Europe. The report noted Hungary’s “escalation of antisemitic incitement” and a “correlation observed between the political strengthening of extreme-right parties and the high level of antisemitic manifestations including incidents of violence and vandalism.”

European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor said: “In Hungary, barely a week passes without an attack on minorities or outrageous comments from far-right politicians.”

“Unfortunately, red lines keep being crossed and there needs to be an extremely strong reaction, both from the Hungarian government and the European Union, to push back against these phenomena.”

At a press conference today, Dr Kantor expressed his concerns about increasing antisemitism in Greece, Ukraine and France. According to a report by French-Jewish security unit SPCJ earlier this year, there has been a 58 per cent rise in antisemitic incidents in France since 2011.

“It appears that rather than the Toulouse attacks being a shock to the system, they had the opposite effect and perhaps allowed terrorist groups in Europe to become more emboldened,” Dr Kantor said.

Top award for Hungarian ‘hate’ journalist

Sandy Rashty — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:40:47 +0000

Israel’s ambassador to Hungary has called on the government to revoke an award given to an allegedly antisemitic TV presenter last Friday.

Ferenc Szaniszlo, who works for the privately-owned Echo TV, was presented with Hungary’s top journalism prize, the Tancsics Award.

Mr Szaniszlo reportedly once said on his show that Gypsies are monkeys and implied that Jews and Roma have carried out anti-Hungarian activities.

He has also allegedly claimed that Israel was established by the West to undermine Arab-Muslim nations and calls has described himself as an “anti-szemét”, a term which in Hungarian literally means “anti-garbage” but can be understood to be a wordplay on “antiszemita” — antisemitic.

This week, Israeli Ambassador Ilan Mor called on the government to withdraw the award “given to the wrong person for very wrong reasons” and accused Mr Szaniszlo of “spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories against Israel”. Mr Szaniszlo denies allegations of antisemitism and said he would not surrender the award.

Hungary’s self-destructive demons

Thomas Ország-Land — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:15:41 +0000

NUMEROUS statues and plaques have recently been unveiled and prominent squares and avenues are being renamed up and down Hungary in honour of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the country’s wartime regent — the politician most responsible for the murder of close to 600,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel, the survivor and Nobel Laureate, last year returned a prestigious award bestowed on him by the Hungarian government, in protest against its recent rehabilitation of two minor, deceased writers whose only claim to fame was their antisemitism. The latest international religious freedom report issued by the American State Department criticised the rise of antisemitism in Hungary and the failure of the authorities to prosecute the disseminators of aggressive racists statements. Much of the blame for this must surely lie with Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian, populist, ultra-Conservative Hungarian Prime Minister.

But, in a timely and brilliant analysis, Paul Lendvai, the doyen of European foreign correspondents, rightly refrains from calling Orbán an antisemite.

In his unbridled lust for personal power, Orbán appears to have foolishly released the long suppressed, xenophobic hatreds festering in Hungary’s collective consciousness. Those demons are likely to destroy him and capture his people. Lendvai and many others well disposed toward Hungary fear that, in the absence of a credible, coherent, democratically minded parliamentary opposition, the rising discontent of the electorate may one day force Orbán’s Fidesz administration to share power with the relentlessly growing, far-right Jobbik party, a creature of his own making.

Lendvai has been based in neighbouring Vienna since the failed anti-Soviet Hungarian revolution of 1956, in which he participated as a freedom fighter. He is a Jew who lost family in the Shoah and witnessed as a young adolescent in Budapest the gratuitous murder of tens of thousands of civilian captives by the Nazi rabble of the Hungarian Arrow-Cross — the role models of the Jobbik party today. His sympathetic coverage of Hungary’s now floundering efforts to build a liberal democracy after the painful decades of Soviet tyranny that ended nearly 25 years ago won the country many friends abroad.

I worked with Lendvai for years when he was Central Europe correspondent for the Financial Times, where I often prepared his copy for publication — and I learned to respect the insightful, sober accuracy of his reporting. Now 81 and editor-in-chief of the Viennese journal Europäische Rundschau, Lendvai is often quoted and consulted by the English and German press and academia.

But his name is constantly being smeared by the rightist Hungarian media, which links him, without verifiable evidence, to the bygone Communist secret police. His book launches in the German-speaking world are occasionally marred by threats of violence from the vociferous expatriate Hungarian far-right. His latest book — Hungary between Democracy and Authoritarianism — is essential reading for diplomats, politicians and investors as well as the informed public concerned about the disturbing rise of antisemitism in the region.

The book has been impressively endorsed by the Hungarian political and intellectual elite in their own way. After the first prospective publisher of an earlier, Hungarian version backed out under government pressure, the book was published elsewhere and became a best-seller. In it, Lendvai describes Orbán as a “master tactician,” “a gifted populist,” a “radical and consummate opportunist,” a “ruthless power politician who believes not in ideas but in maximizing his power without any compunction,” an irresponsible manipulator “giving vent to Hungarian nationalism” and “tapping into fear and prejudice at a moment of crisis”.

Orbán’s second period of rule was secured by a landslide election victory in April 2010.

It followed a sustained campaign of violent street demonstrations, fuelled by frustration with the global recession that badly hit a post-Communist country unprepared for the boom/bust cycles of Western capitalism. Hungary’s neo-Nazis seized the opportunity to emerge as arguably the nastiest and best-organised of their ilk within the EU.
Xenophobia here feeds on fertile soil. Some seven decades after the Holocaust, Hungary still doggedly declines to properly confront its murderous past. As the generations march on, their inherited sense of suppressed guilt periodically surfaces in aggressive denial.

For example, the Hungarian history atlas prescribed for secondary school use in 2009 did not even mention the wartime anti-Jewish racial laws, the deportations to Auschwitz, or indeed the Holocaust. And the wartime propaganda trash promoting popular racial hatred against the Jews is still in circulation.

Lendvai quotes a long list of depressing educational and social data.

According to research, only four per cent of the present generation of Hungarians aged 18-30 know the meaning of the word “Holocaust”. Only 13 per cent can give a figure for the number of its victims. Two thirds of the adult population believe that the Jews of Hungary are too powerful. Half squarely blame the Jews for the world economic crisis.

Jobbik won 47 of the 386 seats in the single-chamber Hungarian parliament in the last elections, capturing 23 per cent of the vote. Its supporters are mostly young men, and their numbers are dramatically swelling at the expense of Orbán’s Fidesz party. This lures Orbán further into the mire of radical rightist politics as he courts young racists in the hope of reversing the trend.

Consequently, the police stand idly by as Jobbik’s uniformed paramilitary wing, outlawed by the courts under a previous administration, marches again displaying the regalia of the defunct Arrow Cross, spreading fear in the targeted Jewish and Roma communities. There have been numerous recent attacks in the old ghetto district of Budapest on unaccompanied elderly Jews, including a widely loved and respected, former chief rabbi aged 90.

Lendvai notes that “the genies Orbán has conjured up in his thirst for power have spun out of control… [Yet] I still believe that the real danger comes not from the neo-Nazis or those who seek solutions in violence but rather from the… silence of the political right around Orbán and, with a very few exceptions, the Catholic and Protestant churches”.

Orbán’s popularity is significantly waning. His administration could face defeat in the 2014 elections if the fractured democratic opposition manages to form a single platform. Paradoxically, the substantial decline of Orbán’s approval rates stems from his astonishing personal success. He has built a political establishment totally subject to his control and reduced the legislature to a rubber-stamp.

Fidesz won 53 per cent of the vote in the last elections, cast in a 64 per cent turnout. By means of a quirk of the electoral law, this gave the party a two-thirds parliamentary majority. All the deputies of his party, and even the state president and the chairman of the legislature, have been chosen personally by Orbán. They owe their loyalty to him rather than to the electorate.

In little over two years, this parliament has managed, in a frenzy of legislation, to disable the essential checks and balances of democratic control. No aspect of Orbán’s radical reform programme had been disclosed, let alone debated, before the elections. The centre-piece of the reform is a new constitution passed without cross-party consensus and already modified six times.

It shirks the question of Hungary’s culpability for the Shoah and trivialises its significance by equating that crime against all humanity with the subsequent Soviet occupation. The constitution also drops the word “Republic” from the official name of the country, leaving the door open for Orbán to crown himself king. Seriously.

A long series of new laws and decrees exposes the press to prohibitive fines potentially issued at will at the hands of a committee of political appointees, emasculates the judiciary by replacing independent-minded judges with party hacks, and redraws constituency boundaries to favour Fidesz. The administration has also challenged or undermined the independence and effectiveness of such essential institutions as the central bank and the office of the parliamentary ombudsman.

The FT summed up the reforms thus: “Together they bestow inordinate power on the ruling party. The prime minister can claim to have won the last election fairly. Now he is deploying a two-thirds majority in parliament to deny opponents the same possibility.”

There is more. An effective change of administration under the new rules would be virtually impossible to establish because, even if another party were to win the elections, the existing Fidesz office holders in charge of the key national institutions would continue to run the country. The reason: these executives have been appointed for terms ranging from six to nine years by a law stipulating that they could be removed from office only by subsequent legislation requiring another two-thirds parliamentary majority.

Outside these institutions, Orbán’s extra-parliamentary power extends through client networks embracing the mass media, business, industry, agriculture, diaspora organisations, art and education funding, regional administration and, of course, the civil service.

Many of the key relationships in this informal maze of dependence were originally forged in the dying days of Soviet power. Its dominant participants then were among the brightest communist cadres who learned how to secure for themselves and each other the choicest pieces from the disintegrating state structure. Today, they are the Hungarian oligarchs.

To survive, an autocratic, populist regime must focus the hostility of its outraged electorate on real or imagined enemies abroad. Orbán has thus declared a national freedom struggle, in the idealised spirit of the 1956 revolution, against such safe targets as the EU, the International Monetary Fund — and foreign correspondents, especially Lendvai.

All this has frightened away foreign investors. Global credit rating agencies have responded by downgrading Hungary’s public debt to junk status. Cheaper money may or may not be forthcoming from the IMF, which does not want to see Hungary go bankrupt for fear of fresh riots possibly fanned and exploited by the volatile neo-Nazis.

Charles Gati, a distinguished, Hungarian-born academic, is quoted by Lendvai as saying: “This country is no longer a Western-style democracy. It is an illiberal, or managed, democracy in the sense that all the important decisions are made by Orbán”.

To George Kondád, sociologist, best-selling novelist and Lendvai’s lifelong comrade in the struggle to build a liberal democracy, Hungary — despite all the efforts since the collapse of communism — remains “a junk country with a junk administration and a junk prime minister”.

Lendvai himself grimly states: “In my view, there is nothing to suggest that the Orbán regime could be seriously threatened (at the polls) by the left in the foreseeable future”.

Though Lendvai despairs, I do not. For the tyrants of the modern world tend to survive for any significant length of time only when protected by mighty domestic industrial infrastructures or by foreign interests — and Orbán enjoys no such support. He is in charge of a weak European economy surrounded by neighbours committed to integration with the mature Western democracies.

The Hungarian Prime Minister is a lonely, frail figure driven by a fatal attraction to power and plagued by its attendant paranoia. His command structure is based on the unquestioning obedience of professional managers prepared to serve any cause or master. When Orbán inevitably succumbs to the intolerable pressure exerted by the democratic opposition and the paranoia generated by his own style of administration, his painfully constructed edifice of control must collapse with him.

Hungary court orders denier to visit Auschwitz

Nissan Tzur — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:00:00 +0000

A court in Hungary has handed a Holocaust-denier an unconventional punishment.

Gyorgy Nagy, 42, was ordered to visit either Hungary’s Holocaust memorial centre, Auschwitz or Yad Vashem in Israel.

Nagy, an unemployed computer technician, is the first Hungarian convicted under the country’s new Holocaust denial law which came into effect in February 2010. The Budapest court also gave him an 18-month suspended jail sentence.

If Nagy chooses to visit the local Holocaust memorial centre, he will have to make three trips and write down his thoughts and observations after the visits.

Nagy was arrested at a political rally in Budapest in 2011 when police noticed he was holding a banner with the words: “The Shoah didn’t happen.”

In the 2010 law, the Hungarian government made denial of the genocide committed by the Nazi regime a crime punishable by a maximum of three years in prison.

The bill to ban denial or questioning of the Holocaust was submitted by Attila Mesterhazy, chairman of the Hungarian Socialist Party.

Despite the new law, Hungary’s current prime minister, Viktor Orban, has been recently sharply criticised by many Jewish organisations for pandering to nationalists and tolerating antisemitism.

In one of the most notable cases, Mr Orban’s government was accused of having approved the naming of a park in Gyomro — a small town on the outskirts of Budapest — after Miklos Horthy, the country’s wartime leader and a close ally of Adolf Hitler.

Mr Orban has also been accused of failing to condemn antisemitic statements made in recent months by some members of far-right party Jobbik.

John Mann takes on Hungarians

Jennifer Lipman — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:20:11 +0000

The chair of the Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism is planning to take a cross-party delegation of MPs to Hungary later this year to challenge the rise of an extremist party in the country.

John Mann MP, who was in Budapest this week to meet government officials and opposition parliamentarians, said the intention was to “challenge the statements and acts of various members of Jobbik targeting Jews and Roma.” He spoke in the Hungarian parliament about the need to fight the threat to the freedom of minority communities.

Jobbik, which has 47 parliamentary seats, is known for its nationalistic stance. Its foreign affairs spokesman has openly questioned the Holocaust and the party has sought to build links with the Iranians.

Mr Mann was joined this week in Hungary by parliamentarians from Belgium, Italy, Austria, France and Israel to raise concerns over Jobbik and show solidarity with the Jewish community.

He said he did not meet Jobbik representatives this time because it was not “appropriate to give them a platform to excuse their behaviour around Holocaust Memorial Day”.

But he urged other British MPs to support him in “going to directly challenge them face to face” in the near future.

Members of the European Parliament are discussing whether to block EU funding to ultra-nationalist parties, such as Jobbik, the British National Party and France’s National Front. Last year, all the hard-right parties combined received 333,000 euros (£283,488) of EU funding.

The campaign to block the funds, initiated by the British movement Hope Not Hate, will need 189 MEPs’ votes to enforce the rule.

There are 22 Hungarian MEPs, three of whom come from the Jobbik party.

MPs warn of far-right rise in Europe during Holocaust Memorial day debate

Jennifer Lipman — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:16:43 +0000

MPs spoke movingly of meeting Holocaust survivors and visiting the sites of Nazi atrocities in a parliamentary debate convened to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

In what has become a tradition since 2008, politicians of all parties acknowledged the annual memorial day, which officially takes place this year on Sunday.

They used the debate to raise the question of the rise of extremism in Europe, including in Hungary with the far-right party Jobbik and in Greece with Golden Dawn, and warn of history repeating itself.

"When we stop remembering our collective history, because we no longer have first-hand accounts from people who were there, or simply because it shows the unpalatable truth about how we can turn on a minority, we risk making the same mistakes," said Conservative MP Graham Evans. "It is inevitable that they will be repeated. Evil men know that. Adolf Hitler knew it. He frequently referred to the Armenian genocide… the memory of it had all but disappeared by the 1930s.

"The world had moved on, and the vigilance against similar events had all but disappeared. History, it appeared, could simply wash the blood away.

"We cannot let people believe that, with the ending of the war, all these attitudes suddenly went away," reiterated Labour's Mark Tami. "There were pogroms in eastern Europe after the second world war. Education is clearly the key to ensuring that future generations never forget what happened."

Ilford South MP Mike Gapes also referred to the reported comments of Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, deriding the Holocaust as a myth. "It is important for us in this country not to have double standards or pull our punches, but to criticise vehemently and strongly all those who foster holocaust denial internationally-in whatever position in whatever country, whether it be Hungary or in other parts of the world."

Throughout the debate, MPs repeatedly underlined the fact that "we must not be complacent".

"Just because society knows what happened before is no reason to believe that it is not capable of repeating those wrongs in the future," said Labour MP Chris Williamson. "We need look no further than the atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia for proof of that."

Many praised the work of organisations including the Holocaust Educational trust.

"I went knowing what Auschwitz was, but I left understanding what it meant , " said Mr Evans, who visited the concentration camps in Poland with HET and pupils from his constituency in 2011. He referred to how the understanding of the Shoah had changed over the generations, recalling how as a child he met a soldier who had been at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

"I had always thought that we had been the plucky Brits who fought the war and beat the Germans," he said. "The idea of the Holocaust had never occurred to me."

One of the points raised was the challenge of Holocaust memorial as numbers of survivors remaining falls.

"As time passes… it is important to record testimony," said Labour MP Pat McFadden. "As each year passes, there are fewer and fewer living survivors, and if we are to learn the lessons from the Holocaust before they fade into the distance, it will be important to record as much testimony as possible so that we can remain as vigilant as possible.

"As much as we might believe that those atrocities should never happen again, the danger of them happening again has not gone away."

Meanwhile, after signing the Holocaust Educational Trust's Book of Commitment, Liberal Democrat MP David Ward compared modern Israel to the Nazi regime. In remarks to Asian Image magazine, reported by The Commentator, he said: "Having visited Auschwitz twice... I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza."

Mr Ward, whose Bradford constituency neighbours that of Respect leader George Galloway, is a frequent critic of Israel in the Commons. During the height of the fighting in Gaza last year, he stated that "the blockade of Gaza amounts to an act of aggression perpetrated by the state of Israel". Last year he urged the government to support a protest "at events involving Israeli Olympians to highlight the plight of the Palestinians and to bring to public awareness the apartheid regime in Israel".

Hungarian hate writer calls for Gypsy 'solution'

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:26:50 +0000

A prominent Hungarian commentator who has been widely accused of writing antisemitic articles has said that Gypsies are “animals” that “shouldn’t be allowed to exist”.

Zsolt Bayer is a close friend of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and a co-founder and former chief spokesman of the Fidesz party. While Bayer does not hold an official position within the party, he is known as someone who often accurately captures the mood of its followers.

His latest diatribe was prompted by a New Year’s Eve stabbing in Szigethalom, a town near Budapest, in which one Roma man was arrested. Writing in ultra-right-wing newspaper Magyar Hirlap, Bayer said:

“A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals, and they behave like animals. When they meet with resistance, they commit murder. They are incapable of human communication. Inarticulate sounds pour out of their bestial skulls. At the same time, these Gypsies understand how to exploit the 'achievements' of the idiotic Western world. But one must retaliate rather than tolerate. These animals shouldn't be allowed to exist. In no way. That needs to be solved - immediately and regardless of the method.”

Bayer’s article prompted condemnation by some Fidesz politicians. Tibor Navracsics, who is both justice minister and deputy prime minister, joined with Roma and Jewish groups to call for Bayer’s removal from Fidesz. MEP Tamás Deutsch, also a Fidesz co-founder and friend of Bayer, called the writing “shameful”.

Bayer has allegedly referred to Jews as “stinking excrement” in one of his articles.