Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban yesterday arrived in neighboring Austria for a one-day visit after sparking a storm of criticism with comments against creating “peoples of mixed race.”
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer vowed to discuss the row with Orban, saying the Hungarian leader’s comments on Saturday were “of course to be criticized.”
“Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t shy away from direct dialogue,” Nehammer said on Wednesday.
Photo: AFP
The International Auschwitz Committee has urged the EU — and Nehammer specifically — to distance themselves from “Orban’s racist undertones.”
Austria is the first EU country to host Orban for talks since he won a fourth straight mandate in an April landslide.
“Hungary is an important neighbor and partner for us, both countries are severely affected by irregular migration, which we want to fight together,” the conservative Nehammer wrote on Twitter last week before Orban’s latest controversy.
Vienna sees itself “as an honest broker” and is anxious not to sideline Hungary, an Austrian official said on condition of anonymity.
Jewish community representatives voiced alarm after Orban criticized mixing with “non-Europeans” in a speech in Romania’s Transylvania region, home to a Hungarian community.
Orban said in his speech that countries with large-scale migration from outside of Europe “are no longer nations.”
“There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe,” he said. “Now, that is a mixed-race world.”
In what he described as “our world,” Orban said “people from within Europe mix with one another.”
“We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed race,” he said, adding: “Migration has split Europe in two — or I could say that it has split the West in two.”
“One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations: They are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples,” he said.
Orban also seemed to allude to the Nazi German gas chambers when criticizing a Brussels plan to reduce European gas demand by 15 percent following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Hungary was the only EU member to oppose the plan, which passed on a majority vote this week.
On Tuesday, an adviser to Orban, Zsuzsa Hegedus, resigned, slamming his speech as “a pure Nazi text.”
“I am sincerely sorry that I have to end a relationship due to such a shameful position,” Hegedus, who worked with Orban for 20 years, said in her resignation letter published by Hungarian media. “I was left with no other choice.”
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
RSS