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Opposition Calls on Hungary's Orban to Sack Museum Head for Likening Soros to
Hitler

Reuters

   BUDAPEST - A leading Hungarian opposition party joined calls on Sunday
   for Prime Minister Viktor Orban to sack the head of a state-funded
   museum for making extreme anti-Semitic comments likening U.S. financier
   George Soros to Adolf Hitler.

   Nationalist Orban has long vilified Soros, a Hungarian Jew who
   emigrated after World War II, as part of a general campaign against
   immigration. Orban accuses Brussels of trying to force Hungary to
   accept migrants under the influence of Soros. In an op-ed published on
   Saturday, Szilard Demeter, who heads the Petofi Literary Museum and
   serves as a government cultural commissioner, called Soros "the liberal
   Fuhrer" and wrote that Europe was Soros' "gas chamber" with "poisonous
   gas" flowing from the capsule of multicultural open society.

   Demeter issued a statement on Sunday that he would withdraw the
   article, saying his critics were right that "the Nazi parallel could
   unintentionally hurt the memory of the victims."

   Earlier Hungarian Jewish groups including the Federation of Hungarian
   Jewish Communities called his op-ed "unforgivable" and "an ugly
   provocation".

   The main leftist opposition party the Democratic Coalition called for
   Demeter's immediate dismissal.

   "The Democratic Coalition expects from the government that Szilard
   Demeter should be unemployed by the end of today. A man like him has no
   place in public life, not just in a European country but anywhere in
   the world," it said.

   The government has not replied to emailed Reuters questions on whether
   they shared Demeter's views.

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