(JTA) — A lawmaker from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling party posted a photo of a dead pig on Facebook with what critics said was a veiled reference to billionaire George Soros — who said the government was using Nazi-era propaganda tools to incite hate against him.
The photo, which Fidesz lawmaker Janos Pocs said was sent to him by someone from his electoral district, shows people standing over a slain and charred pig, with “O VOLT A SOROS!!!” inscribed on the animal. The phrase could translate either as “It was his turn” or as “This was Soros,” Bloomberg noted in its reporting on the affair.
“One pig less over there,” Pocs commented on Facebook Friday. “Bon appetit!” He later told Budapest-based news website 444.hu that the inscription has nothing to do with the Jewish billionaire, saying that he’s offended by the suggestion as the text merely refers to the pig being selected for slaughter.
Fidesz is a center-right party with a nationalist agenda. Soros is a liberal who last year said of his “plan” for increasing immigration by Middle East immigrants into Europe that it “treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”
Fidesz has launched a billboard campaign against Soros, which features a picture of him laughing and the words: “Don’t let him have the last laugh.” Some Hungarian Jews, including some leaders of the Mazsihisz federation of Jewish communities, believe the campaign incites anti-Semitic hate, but others, including the leaders of the Chabad-affiliated EMIH Jewish organization, disagree.
Peter Feldmajer, a former president of Mazsihisz and currently a local leader of Mazsihisz, has said he regards the import of Middle East immigrants into Europe “as far more dangerous than the campaign against Soros, which I admit is not pretty.”
The Open Society Foundation, Soros’s main conduit for aid to Hungarian non-government organizations, said that the post was a “shocking attack” against the financier. The photo fits into “a long and dark tradition of anti-Semitic imagery dating back to the Middle Ages,” it said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg.
In an article published in the Nepszava newspaper on Friday, Soros said the government’s billboards, depicting him as a sneering puppet master, were similar to propaganda from the Nazi era.
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