Tusk compares Orbán to former Nazi theorist
April 21st, 2020Left-liberal outlets describe Mr Tusk’s statement as a mild gesture, while pro-government sites hit back with the alleged collaborator past of the People’s Party President’s grandfather.
In its headline reporting Tusk’s statement about the Hungarian Prime Minister, Index calls it ‘A measured accusation of Nazism’. It quotes the President of the European People’s Party as telling the German weekly Der Spiegel that Carl Schmitt, the political thinker and jurist who was an early Nazi sympathiser ’would be very proud of Viktor Orbán’.
HVG.hu runs a similar report entitled ’The President of the People’s Party Delicately Called Orbán a Nazi’. In the main text the liberal weekly describes Tusk’s sentence as a direct accusation of Nazism as Mr Tusk compared the Hungarian law empowering the government to rule by decree over issues connected to the coronavirus epidemic, to the full legislative powers given to Hitler in 1933 in Germany.
Reacting to Tusk’s remark, Pesti Srácok writes that the accusation ’comes from someone whose grandfather was a Nazi collaborator’. They publish a portrait of Jozef Tusk in Wehrmacht uniform, and another featuring four SS soldiers, allegedly with Tusk’s grandfather behind the steering wheel.
On Mandiner, Ádám Petri, the son of the late liberal poet György Petri rejects Tusk’s allegation as utterly groundless, since ’Orbán has never said or done anything corroborating such allegations’. He also suggests that Tusk’s statement ’offends the memory of the victims of the Holocaust’.
On Városi Kurír, left-liberal political scientist Zoltán Lakner describes Tusk’s accusation as ill-advised and criticises him for diverting attention from genuine controversial issues. He explains, on the other hand, that Tusk’s grandfather was a forcibly conscripted Wehrmacht private who deserted after a few days of service and joined the anti-Nazi clandestine Home Army in Poland.