Péter Márki-Zay, the opposition’s candidate for PM in the April elections, made some odd and unfortunate remarks the other day.
Some have accused the candidate of harboring deep-seated anti-Semitic sentiments.
In his most recent Sunday evening Facebook Live session, Péter Márki-Zay, the joint prime minister candidate of Hungary’s leftist-far-right coalition, said this:
“There are, by the way, Jews in Fidesz. Not many, but…”
Wait, what? Is he keeping a list or something? What a bizarre thing to say.
Speaking of terribly unfortunate remarks and keeping lists. Remember that time in the fall of 2012, when now Jobbik MP Márton Gyöngyösi (now MEP) – don’t forget that the far-right Jobbik is part of that six-party coalition – said that it was “high time […] to take stock of how many people of Jewish origin living here, especially in the Hungarian parliament and the Hungarian government, pose a national security risk to Hungary”?
I wonder if drawing up lists of Jewish members of the Hungarian parliament, and now apparently in the ranks of PM Orbán’s governing Fidesz party, was on the agenda when the two, Márki-Zay and Gyöngyösi, met for a photo op in Brussels a few weeks back.
Had MZP only committed the grave mistake of posing with notoriously anti-Semitic political leaders once, I might have even forgiven him. But, sadly, this is not the case.
As the historian and founding member of the Hungarian-Israeli Media Center Organization, László Bernát Veszprémy, rightly pointed out in a piece that originally appeared in the Times of Israel blog section but was removed later on, in September 2018, MZP posted a picture with Tamás Sneider who was the president of Jobbik at the time. If you don’t remember Sneider by name, don’t worry, you probably know him as the guy whose wife raised a Nazi salute in their wedding photos.
What’s more, as my regular readers will certainly recall, in a by-election in October 2020, Márki-Zay personally stood behind László Bíró from the anti-Semitic, far-right Jobbik. In Hungary, Biró is known as the man who refers to Budapest as “Judapest.” Even worse: “My dog goes crazy when those with the lice-infested 'sideburns' pass by the house,” László Bíró wrote on social media, referring to Hasidic Jewish tourists, those who practice a custom of growing sideburns into payot.
I won’t even go into detail about MZP’s unfortunate decision to back a certain Lajos Rig, a Jobbik politician who once called Roma people the “biological weapons” of Jews…
Has the unwieldy leftist-far-right coalition selected the PM candidate they’ve long deserved -- aggressive, disrespectful and flagrantly anti-Semitic?