A Hungarian state honour given to a prominent journalist who is close to the prime minister, Viktor Orban, but seen by his critics as racist has prompted several dozen recipients of the same award to return theirs in protest.



Zsolt Bayer was one of several Hungarian citizens handed an Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross by President Janos Ader on Thursday, to mark one of Hungary’s national days.

By late on Monday, according to Hungarian media, some 44 previous recipients of the decoration including scientists, artists and academics, had declared they were returning their own awards in protest.

An occasional columnist for the rightwing Magyar Hirlap daily, Bayer has often been photographed in Orban’s company and co-founded a civil group that has organised massive pro-government street demonstrations.

He has in the past compared the Roma people – Hungary’s largest minority group with 600,000 to 700,000 members – to “animals” and written remarks deemed antisemitic in a country with a Jewish community estimated at more than 100,000.

Andras Heisler, the head of Hungary’s largest Jewish organisation, Mazsihisz, said he too was handing back his award given to him in 2011 as he did not want to belong to the same “group of people” as Bayer.

The journalist “is a racist, an antisemite, who pollutes Hungary with his incandescent Gypsy-hatred and nation-destroying ideas,” Heisler wrote in a Facebook message.

In 2013 the Magyar Hirlap newspaper was fined around 250,000 forints (€800/$1,000) by Hungary’s media regulator for publishing Bayer’s anti-Roma comments.

Bayer’s award was given for his work with a body representing victims of communism, Orban’s office said in a weekend statement, adding that there were no plans to withdraw the honour.

Bayer was also decorated however for his “exemplary journalistic activity”, according to the government’s official legal gazette, Magyar Kozlony.

Bayer himself said he didn’t understand why other recipients were giving up their awards and that his quotes were misinterpreted and taken out of context.

“I don’t really get how people can be so shut off in their own closed, narrow, sad worlds,” he told a television news programme in reaction to the protests.