Zsolt Bayer is a Hungarian far-right politician and Journalist known for his pro-Russian narrative. His views have been widely characterised as racist, homophobic transphobic and antisemitic. He was a co-founder of the ruling Fidesz group and a close associate of pro-Kremlin Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He is the proprietor of party membership card No. 5. Bayer has operated for media outlets such as Magyar Nemzet and Magyar Hírlap. In 2016, he was given the Knight’s Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit.
In 2022, he promoted pro-Russian ideas during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was one of the speakers at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary. He is considered one of the main propagandists of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Zsolt Bayer, who inflicts the idea that
“Ukraine is an analogue of Nazi Germany”
in the Hungarian media. Zsolt Bayer referred to the calls within Ukraine to rethink the role of Russian literature in Ukrainian educational and cultural areas and said the actions of Ukrainians were similar to the Nazis’ ones against the Jewish nation.
According to him, “It was already in Nazi Germany. Goebbels had already talked about that… Big bonfires were burning in the streets of Nazi Germany, people were throwing in literary works harmful to German thinking and the German people, especially, naturally, works of Jewish authors. And Heinrich Heine warned that those who start burning books end up burning people.”
Bayer challenged the existence of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian nation as such, having presented his words with images with Russian captions saying that Ukraine’s territory is not originally Ukrainian, but allegedly was robbed from russia and Poland. Zsolt Bayer a popular political commentator and enthusiastic supporter of the Viktor administration, went further by declaring that “today, Ukraine is a puppet state created and managed by the CIA.”
