LITHUANIA | ANTISEMITISM & BIAS | ŽEMAITAITIS AFFAIR | OPINION
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—The following is a transcript (in English translation) of an excerpt from the October 15, 2025 interview with Lithuania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Kęstutis Budrys (Social Democratic Party) on one of the most popular Lithuanian news sites, 15min, that appeared under the title “Kęstutis Budrys’ Interview with 15min: on Libel against Tsikhanouskaya and the Stain of Antisemitism.”
The incident under discussion this time comes from yet another antisemitic Facebook post by Remigijus Žemaitaitis, leader of the populist Nemuno Aušra (‘Nemunas’ Dawn’) party, currently one of the three parties in the ruling coalition, together with the Social Democrats (LSDP) and the Union of Peasants and Greens (LVŽS). It is the first time since independence and the rise of Lithuanian democracy in 1990/1991 that an overtly antisemitic party has been accepted into the governing coalition. See Defending History’s monitoring of aspects of the affair. In the most recent outrage, the party leader attacks a major beloved Lithuanian intellectual (a former culture minister and current director of the Lithuanian Museum of Art) by fabricating for him a supposed Jewish heritage.
But Minister of Foreign Affairs Budrys goes far beyond dealing with the issue in isolation. In the opinion of many in the Jewish and Western communities here, the minister, with all the brevity needed in the interview format, goes well beyond previous foreign ministers’ understanding of the Holocaust and what it means for Lithuania, with an outstanding sense of moral clarity and the courage to say things that are so often distorted in this part of the world so as to avoid them being said.
By speaking openly about how hordes of everyday people who had never harmed anyone turned into Nazi collaborators over a period of some two weeks in 1941.
