Romanian politician and MEP Diana Șoșoacă launched an anti-Semitic rant hours after the country’s highest court banned her from running for president in autumn elections.
She praised the Legionnaires, a viciously anti-Semitic interwar movement, using a pejorative words about ‘Jews’ to speculate that they had maneuvered her ouster from the ticket.
“Long live the Legion and (its leader) the Captain, who were killed by the same Jewish power that acted now,” she said during live Facebook broadcast.
In the same broadcast she also suggested Romania’s political parties and intelligence services had cooperated to get her out of the race. She was considered one of the weakest candidates in the race, with little chance of getting many votes.
Mrs. Sosoaca, 48, is best known for her pro-Russian stance and populist outbursts in the Romanian and European Parliament.
On Saturday, the Constitutional Court voted 5-2 to not validate her bid for the presidential ballot on Nov. 24. The court did not give any reason, but Digi24 reported it was because her public statements had contravened the constitution.
Responding to her anti-Semitic comments, the director of the ‘Elie Wiesel’ National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania Alexandru Florian, told G4Media that her remarks were: “merely the tip of the ideological iceberg she promotes.”
He also blamed anti-discrimination board and the government anti-Semitism department for failing to reacting to anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
The director of the Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism Organization (MCA Romania), Maximilian Marco Katz, said.
“A few months ago, when (she) went public with nationalist-extremist opinions, I thought she was doing it for political purposes, now I am more and more convinced that Ms. Șoșoacă really believes in the lies she has been incessantly spewing since May 2024.”
In May 2024, Mrs. Sosoaca denied the Romanian Holocaust where hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in the Romanian Parliament.
MCA Romania filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General and the speakers the two parliamentary chambers, but said it received no response.
“Mrs. Șoșoacă continues to mock the memory of the victims of the Romanian Holocaust… and continues, undisturbed, to attack the Jewish community in Romania in the same disgraceful way that she defends the criminal legionnaires.. The distortion and denial of the Romanian Holocaust, the public display of anti-Semitism, the use of anti-Semitic expressions such as “Jewish”, “Jewish” and all derivatives, are classified as crimes. Why is Mrs. Șoșoacă allowed to mock Romanian Jews and the things that are sacred to them? Why is she allowed to lie shamelessly, trying to turn public opinion against the Jews?
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