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December 2, 2020 - 12:15pm
The colourful antics of Fidesz MEP József Szájer, caught shinnying down a drain pipe while fleeing an illegal sex party by Brussels police last week, have been a gift to headline writers and meme generators.
As a party that positions itself as a defender of traditional ‘Family Values’ against the ‘decadence’ of a Western Europe corrupted by ‘LGBT+ ideology’, it is easy to focus on apparent moral duplicity. Szájer, a Fidesz founder, famously authored most of Hungary’s 2011 Basic Law on his iPad commuting between Brussels and Budapest: Clauses L.1-3, embedding a heterosexual definition of marriage and the state’s duty to uphold it, are his personal handiwork.
But it is a mistake to linger on this point. Individual hypocrisy is after all ‘the tribute that vice pays to virtue’. What really matters is how Szájer typifies the ethos of an internally disordered polity, and Hungary’s troubled place within the EU’s legal framework.
For starters Szájer, a law graduate and lawmaker, broke local public health regulations amid a pandemic which has devastated the EU state in which he is a temporary migrant-worker. Further, he invoked European Parliamentary Immunity to shield himself from any adverse judicial consequences.
Szájer’s personal conduct encapsulates the elan with which his government flouts EU Law. This rule breaking is facilitated by a claim for immunity (national sovereignty) to frustrate any holding of Hungary’s leaders to account. On a side note, Szájer’s conduct is especially egregious as Fidesz has concertedly undermined the constitutionally guaranteed privileges and immunities of Hungary’s domestic opposition MPs since 2018.
That Szájer and Fidesz, cheerfully believe they can ‘get away’ with such behaviour is regrettable but not irrational: to date they have.
Fidesz-KDNP has long been shielded by a protection racket arrangement within the European People’s Party, which is the EU’s alliance of — theoretically — moderate conservatives. That’s why the EU’s moved against Warsaw over Rule of Law far more swiftly than it did against Budapest.
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SubscribeHypocrisy is what politicians of all parties and beliefs do. Something similar has just happened with a left wing, male MEP from Sweden who had been living with another man for six months. Nothing wrong with that, except that the man he was living with had just finished a jail sentence for the multiple rape of minors, and the possession of child porn etc. The mainstream Swedish press didn’t talk about it until they were forced to.
They are all at it, politicians and media alike.
A bit like Joe Biden and Clinton corruption ignored by the US media (and the BBC)
I made the following observation and it was removed by Unherd for reasons unknown to me, so I’ll reinstate it:
“A bit like Joe Biden and Clinton corruption ignored by the US media (and the BBC)”
A pot calling a kettle black here. A fraternal tut about ‘colourful antics’, double standards, quote Protagoras and waves will closer over as, indeed they will in the EU.
A bit desperate. Does the Charlie Elphick scandal expose the failings of the Conservative Party, the Keith Vaz scandal expose those of the Labour Party, the Mark Oaten scandal expose those of the Lib Dems?
Aoexander, you are, too, the national traitor!!!! So like the two kakadu girls from the toral negatÃv, cold and abarchust oarty MEPs!
The fool girls – uf the Highest Prisecutor not them accuse, THE MILITANT HUN-ONOGUR NATION SHALL BE REPRESSIONER!