Prague, Feb 18 (CTK) – Tomio Okamura, leader of the anti-EU Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), should never have become a deputy chairman of the Chamber of Deputies, chairman of the Constitutional Court Pavel Rychetsky told Czech Television on Sunday.
Rychetsky said Okamura’s public rhetoric was neo-Nazi.
Justice Minister Robert Pelikan (ANO) said it was a pity that other parties had not joined their forces against the SPD after the October election.
However, Pelikan said he, too, had elected Okamura to the senior post in the lower house.
Rychetsky said the post of deputy chairman of the Chamber of Deputies was associated with the Czech Republic’s representation.
“I consider it a quite serious situation when the parliament elected democratically, in a secret vote, to the post a man whose publicly presented views are really racist, xenophobic and neo-Nazi, let alone his populism and demagoguery,” Okamura said.
The rhetoric of Okamura and other SPD members has provoked a discussion in Europe of what is actually going on in the Czech Republic, Rychetsky said.
Okamura said in January that the World War Two Lety concentration camp for the Roma had not been fenced. Later he admitted that there was a fence, but insisted that no one guarded it and the inmates could freely move around.
This is why Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) demand that Okamura be dismissed from his current post in the parliament. In this, they have been supported by the Pirates, Social Democrats, TOP 09, the Mayors and Independents and some deputies for the Civic Democratic Party (ODS).
The Prague Jewish Community, the Museum of Roma Culture and the Lidice Memorial called his words Holocaust denial.
From August 1942 to May 1943, a total of 1308 Roma people gradually stayed in the Lety camp, where 327 of them died and over 500 ended up in Auschwitz.
Nazis exterminated 90 percent of Bohemian and Moravian Roma people.
