After the Hungarian prime leader spoke out against becoming “people of mixed ethnicity,” a member of Viktor Orban’s inner circle quit.

According to Hungarian media, Zsuzsa Hegedus, who has known nationalist Mr. Orban for 20 years, called the speech a “perfect Nazi text.”

Holocaust survivors from the International Auschwitz Committee referred to the speech as “dumb and dangerous.”

According to Mr. Orban’s spokeswoman, the words were distorted in the media.

The address was delivered on Saturday in a Romanian province with a sizable Hungarian population.

In it, Mr. Orban claimed that while mating with Europeans should be allowed, doing so with non-Europeans led to a “mixed-race world.”

He remarked that we are open to mixing, but we don’t want to become people of mixed racial origins.

Although Ms. Hegedus acknowledged Mr. Orban’s well-known anti-immigration beliefs, she felt his address on Saturday went too far.

The largest Jewish organisation in Hungary denounced the speech and demanded a meeting with Mr. Orban. In the last months of World War Two, more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews were killed, many of them at Auschwitz.

According to the International Auschwitz Committee, his statements served as “grist to the mill for all racist and far-right groups in Europe,” and they served as a reminder of the dark days of the Holocaust survivors’ persecution.

In April, Viktor Orban was elected to an unprecedented fourth term in power, yet he has taken a position on Russia’s war that differs from that of every other EU nation. He has kept up close ties with Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, and is the first EU official to publicly criticise Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine.

Hungary’s foreign minister travelled to Moscow last week to explore increasing its purchase of Russian gas, even as the rest of the EU decided to reduce its reliance on it. Currently, 80 percent of the gas used in Budapest comes from Russia.

The Hungarian government has regularly disagreed with the EU over matters of rule of law, such as press freedom and immigration, despite receiving significant sums of EU funding.