The EU wants to persuade its member states to give up gas. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban railed against this in a speech to supporters – and chose an outrageous comparison to the Holocaust in relation to the gas dispute. It is not the only verbal blunder of the right-wing politician.

The Association of Jewish Communities in Hungary expressed “serious concerns” after a speech by right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in which he openly used racist language. The organization said the association could not do anything with Orban’s statements about alleged “racial mixing”. “Due to our historical experiences and the family stories living with us, it is important to speak out against misleading statements in public life,” it said. Association President Andras Heisler therefore asked for a meeting with Orban.

Orban had said on Saturday in a speech to supporters in the Romanian resort of Baile Tusnad: “There is a world in which the European peoples mix with those who come from outside Europe. It is a multiracial world.” On the other hand, there is the Carpathian Basin, where European peoples such as Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks and others mixed with each other. “We’re willing to mix, but we don’t want to become multiracial,” he said.

The concept used by the National Socialists, among others, that there are different human races is scientifically untenable and is part of racist worldviews. This ideology wrongly ascribes characteristics to whole groups of people based on physical differences such as skin color.

During World War II, the Nazi regime, together with the allied Hungarian state, deported around half a million Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz death camp. Most of them died there in gas chambers.

Orban therefore also received criticism for another passage of his speech: “For example, there is the latest proposal from the EU Commission, which says 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 this, from the past, I think.”

Liberal Hungarian MEP Katalin Cseh tweeted an English translation of this passage, adding: “Yes, that’s a joke about gas and Nazi Germany.”