A senior adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has resigned, saying comments the nationalist leader made at a recent rally were "openly racist."
The controversial prime minister touched off a wave of criticism after a July 23 speech, delivered in neighboring Romania, in which he defended his vision of an "unmixed Hungarian race" as he criticized mixing with "non-Europeans."
Zsuzsa Hegedus, a sociologist and longtime friend of Orban, said in a letter she could no longer tolerate being associated with someone who had taken "such a shameful position."
"However, after such a speech, which was against all my basic values, I had no other choice" than to resign, she said in a letter published by the hvg.hu news website.
"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, referring to the head of Adolf Hitler's propaganda ministry in Nazi Germany.
A nationalist who has repeatedly clashed with the EU over his increasing authoritarian rule at home, Orban's speech at the Baile Tusnad Summer University in Romania's Transylvania region, home to a large Hungarian community, started with an analysis of the situation surrounding Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
But it quickly devolved into a polemic that the International Auschwitz Committee of Holocaust survivors called "stupid and dangerous."
"We move, we work elsewhere, we mix within Europe," he said. "But we don't want to be peoples of mixed race."
The Hungarian premier and his nationalist government have targeted migrants from Africa and the Middle East, as well as NGOs that support them, restricting the right to seek asylum and putting up barriers at borders.
Those policies have resulted in several rebukes by the European Court of Justice and sparked outrage among several European Union nations.
Hegedus had worked alongside Orban since 2002. In May, she began work as a representative for the prime minister tasked with "consulting on issues related to the development of current and future strategies for social integration, the management and the resolution of social conflicts."
