The government has not replied to emailed Reuters questions on whether they shared Demeter’s views.
Referring to a budget row between Poland and Hungary and the European Union, Demeter said Poles and Hungarians were the “new Jews” who were targeted by liberals who tried to expel them from the bloc.
Poland and Hungary have said they would block a new European Union budget and coronavirus recovery fund if rule-of-law conditions are attached.
Israel’s embassy tweeted that it utterly rejected “the use and abuse of the memory of the Holocaust for any purpose… There is no place for connecting the worst crime in human history, or its perpetrators, to any contemporary debate, no matter how essential.”
Soros has been at odds with Orban’s government for years for pouring funds into liberal organizations and institutions in Hungary. In 2019 the Central European University he founded said it was being forced out of the country by the nationalist government and moved most of its operations to Vienna. (Reporting by Krisztina Than Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
