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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ws-concerned-about-toxic-referendum-discourse

Hungarian Jews concerned about toxic referendum discourse

Public debate around migrants during campaign veered towards hate speech, campaigners say

Members of the Hungarian Jewish community have voiced concern about the divisive public discourse that accompanied Hungary’s referendum on the admission of refugees, with some comparing it to the hate speech directed at Jews in the 1930s.

The rightwing prime minister, Viktor Orbán, waged the biggest advertising campaign in Hungarian history in an attempt to convince people to vote against welcoming 1,294 refugees allocated to Hungary under a Europe-wide responsibility sharing system.

Throughout the campaign, Orbán and his allies associated refugees with terrorists. “No one can say how many terrorists have arrived so far among the immigrants,” said a state-sponsored pamphlet sent to every Hungarian household that claimed refugees had turned entire cities in western Europe, including London and Berlin, into no-go zones.

Diana Groo, a Hungarian director who makes films about Jewish history, said: “The campaign of hatred reminds me very much of the Nazi propaganda, and the film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). It does remind us of the 1930s.”

During the referendum campaign the government placed nearly 6,000 anti-refugee adverts in public spaces – five times more than the next-biggest advertising campaign in Hungarian history.

In Hungary, the low turnout was criticised by the leader of the largest opposition party, Jobbik, a far-right group with even more extreme views than Orbán.

“It’s very dangerous,” said Zsuzsanna Vajna, a Holocaust survivor who nearly starved to death in the Budapest ghetto in 1945. “Hitler was saying the same things in the 30s, inciting hatred against one part of the population. Now [the victims] are the migrants, the Muslims. It’s a very violent campaign that’s been going on for more than a year, and has torn apart a country.”

During the winter of 1944, Vajna was forced to walk at gunpoint with other Jews up and down the banks of the Danube, while Hungarian Nazis shot some of them into the river at random. A few hundred metres from this spot on Saturday, several hundred far-right protesters held an anti-refugee rally in one of Budapest’s most famous squares. Their speeches drowned out a nearby counter-rally organised by a liberal opposition group.