Foreign

Hungary PM Adviser Resigns Over ‘Pure Nazi’ Speech

By Web News 440

A member of Viktor Orban’s inner circle has resigned after the Hungarian prime minister spoke out against becoming “peoples of mixed race”.

Zsuzsa Hegedus, who has known the nationalist Mr Orban for 20 years, described the speech as a “pure Nazi text”, according to Hungarian media.

The International Auschwitz Committee of Holocaust survivors called the speech “stupid and dangerous”.

Mr Orban’s spokesman said the media had misrepresented the comments.

The speech took place on Saturday in a region of Romania which has a large Hungarian community.

In it, Mr Orban said European peoples should be free to mix with one another, but that mixing with non-Europeans created a “mixed-race world”.

“We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed race,” he said.

Mr Orban’s anti-migration views are well known, but for Ms Hegedus, Saturday’s speech crossed a line.

“I don’t know how you didn’t notice that the speech you delivered is a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels,” she wrote in her resignation letter, according to the Hungarian hvg.hu news website.

Goebbels was the head of Adolf Hitler’s propaganda ministry.

Mr Orban’s remarks on race have been bitterly criticised by some in Hungary and equally vehemently defended by others.

“Only one race inhabits this earth, Homo Sapiens. And it is unique and undivided,” chief rabbi Robert Fröhlich commented.

Opposition politicians, decisively defeated by Mr Orban’s Fidesz party in the April elections, said his remarks were “beyond the pale… unworthy of a European statesman”.

Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs tried to dampen the growing chorus of condemnation, arguing that the prime minister had been outspoken on the topics of immigration and assimilation for years.

In the government flagship daily, Magyar Nemzet, an article praised Mr Orban for defending the idea of nationhood against a drive to mix all nations “into a grey, indistinguishable mass”.

At best, Mr Orban appears confused, sometimes speaking of the Hungarians as “the most mixed society”, at other times, appearing to suggest he believes in ethnic purity.

Zsuzsa Hegedus’s resignation is unlikely to have further repercussions in Hungary. Party discipline is tight and resignations are almost unheard of.

During his speech, the Hungarian leader also appeared to make light of the Nazi gas chambers in World War Two when he criticised the EU’s plan to cut gas demand by 15% by pointing out that “the past shows us German know-how on that”.

Hungary’s largest Jewish group condemned the speech and called for a meeting with Mr Orban. More than half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered in the final months of World War Two, many of them at Auschwitz.

The International Auschwitz Committee said his words were “grist to the mill to all racist and far-right forces in Europe” and they reminded Holocaust survivors of the dark times of their persecution.

Romania’s foreign minister said the remarks were unacceptable and it was regrettable they were spoken on Romanian territory.

Responding by letter to his long-standing adviser, Mr Orban defended his words.

“You know better than anyone that in Hungary, my government follows a zero-tolerance policy on both anti-Semitism and racism,” he wrote.

His spokesman, Zoltan Kovacs, said the mainstream media was “hyperventilating about a couple of tough lines about immigration and assimilation”, but had stayed silent on the main points of the speech.

Addressing the war in Ukraine in his speech, Mr Orban argued that the West’s support of the country had failed, sanctions against Russia were not working and a negotiated peace deal should be the priority.

Viktor Orban won a historic fourth term in office in April, but his stance on Russia’s war has been out of step with every other EU country. He has maintained good relations with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and is the only EU leader to openly criticise Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

While the rest of the EU was agreeing to cut its reliance on Russian gas, Hungary’s foreign minister visited Moscow last week to discuss buying more of it. Budapest currently imports 80% of its gas from Russia.

Despite receiving large amounts of EU funds, the Hungarian government has frequently clashed with the EU over rule-of-law issues such as press freedom and migration.

BBC/Taiwo Akinola

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Lifestyle

A City Where You Express Love By Using Padlock

By Web News 858

The tradition of love locks started not in Paris but in Hungary.

The legend goes that a woman who had lost her lover during World War I started fixing padlocks on bridges where they used to meet. It was her way of expressing that her love was unbreakable.

Soon, the trend caught on and became a tradition not only in Hungary but also in other parts of the world.

Perhaps, since Paris is known to be the City of Love, the tradition became most popular there.

Paris adopted the culture from young Italian couples. The love locks caught people’s fancy instantly and it became a roaring tradition here. Although the ritual started only in the year 2008, the railings of bridges over the Seine are crowded with padlocks.

Lock bridges are now an important part of the scenery on the Seine.

Since late 2008, tourists have taken to attaching padlocks (love locks) with their first names written or engraved on them to the railing or the grate on the side of the bridge, then throwing the key into the Seine river below, as a romantic gesture. This gesture is said to represent a couple’s committed love.

In February 2014, Le Monde estimated that there were over 700,000 locks; with the 2014 summer tourist season, many thousands more have since been added, creating a serious safety concern for city authorities and an aesthetic issue for Parisians.

By 2014, concern was being expressed about the possible damage the weight of the locks was doing to the structure of the bridge.

In May, the newly elected mayor, Anne Hidalgo, announced that she was tasking her First Deputy Mayor, Bruno Julliard, with finding alternatives to love locks in Paris.

In June, part of the parapet on the bridge collapsed under the weight of all of the padlocks that had been attached to it.

In August 2014, the Paris Mayor’s Office began to say publicly that they wanted to encourage tourists to take “selfies” instead of leaving love locks, when they launched the “Love Without Locks” campaign and social media hashtag.

The web site states: “Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love. Set them free by declaring your love with #lovewithoutlocks.”With the high tourist season in full swing, more than 50% of the panels on the Pont des Arts had to be boarded over with plywood because the weight of the locks (estimated by the city to be 700 kg per panel) was creating the risk of more panels collapsing.

On 18 September 2014, the City Hall of Paris replaced three panels of this bridge with a special glass as an experiment as they search for alternative materials for the bridge where locks cannot be attached.

From 1 June 2015, city council workmen from Paris started to cut down all the locks after years of complaints from locals. Health and Safety officials said “the romantic gestures cause long term Heritage degradation and danger to visitors” As of 2015, over a million locks were placed, weighing approximately 45 tons.

Street artists like Jace, El Seed, Brusk or Pantonio have been chosen to paint the new panels that replaces the old railings with locks.

Titilayo Kupoliyi