“I apologize to all ministry officials if they were affected by this and if they believe I said it like that. I swear I didn’t say it like that. I wasn’t talking about the officials, I was talking about those activists who are found on the back roads in the ministries. And there are a lot of them, we even have a detective on it. We draw maps on it, make spiders and cut them off from money. And we will continue to do it.” declared the Turk in the program Za five minut twelve on Nova.
“The absolute majority of people at the Ministry of the Environment are super decent people, I like them and I have a great relationship with them. But I didn’t talk about them. I never said that officials are parasites. I said that there are still many parasites,” he added, saying that he meant people from non-profit organizations or subordinate organizations that draw money from the ministry.
“Taken out of context,” says Turek
“It’s taken out of context, just like with the phone,” he added, referring to his earlier explanation that he left the phone in the pub and people wrote something to him on social networks. In this way, he apologized for posts from Facebook, for which he faced criticism due to racist content and the promotion of symbols of the criminal regime of Nazi Germany.
“I was talking about someone who works against the interests of the ministry. Specifically, I was talking about a person who was paid from the ministry’s money, but despite another assignment, he proceeded against our intention to reduce the acceleration zones. On the contrary, he wanted to prevent it,” he said. He added that, according to him, the given official sought massive development of wind farms in the Czech Republic, which the ministry did not want.
Turk’s statements about parasites intended for extermination caused a wide negative response. On Friday, trade unionists spoke out against him at a national conference, saying that they would take legal action against the representative. They were touched by Turk’s statement made at the celebration of XTV internet television.
“In those of our resorts, which we have four, there are still a lot of, let’s say, progressive, left-wing, sometimes green, sometimes various other parasites, and we decided to exterminate them gradually,” said the government representative.
Babiš wants to solve it with Macinka
Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO) also criticized Turk’s words and told journalists that he would talk about them on Monday with him and with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Deputy Prime Minister and the head of Motorist Petr Macinka. Neither the speaker of the House of Representatives and the head of the third SPD coalition party, Tomio Okamur, nor the finance minister, Alena Schillerová, nor the education minister, Robert Plag from ANO, liked the words.
The opposition also spoke out against Turk, the Mayors called for his dismissal from the position of representative. President of the Senate Miloš Vystrčil (ODS) considers Turk’s words as evidence of how the boundaries of political culture are changing.
Experts pointed out that similar “dehumanizing rhetoric” was a precursor to crimes against humanity and genocide in the past.
