Will PM Orbán’s challenger lose immunity because of a cellphone?

Public Prosecutor Péter Polt has turned to the President of the European Parliament, requesting lifting the immunity of MEP Péter Magyar, the leader of the opposition Tisza party, based on evidence that has surfaced against him in an investigation on suspicion of theft, the Public Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement on Thursday.

According to the details uncovered, Magyar accosted the alleged victim of the crime on June 21, when he noticed the victim was filming him with his mobile phone at a club. Magyar took the phone, refused to hand it back and denied having it, then dropped it in the Danube before multiple witnesses, including the phone’s owner, the prosecutor’s office said.

The phone was later recovered by the police and given back to the owner in good working condition, the office said. According to the statement, Magyar’s conduct had been in line with the legal definition of theft. Further clarification of the case and criminal proceedings would only be possible once the EP has lifted Magyar’s immunity, the statement said.

Photo: FB/Magyar Péter

Péter Magyar, the leader of the opposition Tisza party, told public media on Thursday that he will not take up his seat in the Budapest Assembly. Magyar told public broadcaster Kossuth Rádió that he could not fulfil the mandate next to his other positions, as he is already working as an MEP, party leader and the organiser of the party’s “Tisza islands” movements.

In an interview with news channel M1, Magyar said he had invited every top candidate in the local elections for talks because “I feel the responsibility of the fact that Budapest citizens have elected ten party members into the assembly”. Apart from former Fidesz mayoral candidate Alexandra Szentkirályi, “who rejected the talks with a ridiculous, puerile excuse,” Magyar said he had talked to all of them.

Ursula von der Leyen, Péter Magyar and Zoltán Tarr. Different levels of negotiations. Photo: FB/Péter Magyar

Regarding his talks with Gergely Karácsony, Magyar said he had warned the Budapest mayor of “a cozying up, a mating dance” with the government, insisting that “there is a coming closer, despite all propaganda to the contrary” between Budapest and the ruling parties. “Karácsony sometimes calls for Olympic Games [to be held in Budapest] louder than the prime minister and they were openly praising each other during the flood,” Magyar said.

People fed up with back door deals

Asked about statements that Tisza party members would stay away from nominating a deputy mayor and from sitting on the board of city-owned companies, Magyar said the party wanted to keep out of the “the corruption in the capital, conducted so far between the old left and Fidesz.”

Budapest’s current internal rules bestow all powers on the mayor, Magyar said, adding that it was not just Tisza that wanted to change this. He said they wanted councillors to also be able to submit amendment proposals and nominate or comment on the appointment of the heads of city-owned companies.

“People have had enough of the twenty-year-old back door deals between Orbán and [Democratic Coalition leader Ferenc] Gyurcsány,” Magyar said.

Magyar said people also wanted to know “why the capital is on the brink of bankruptcy, why the government is stealing or taking away 75 billion forints from it, and why the state budget has collapsed”.

“How is it possible that when Viktor Orbán took over the government in 2010, Hungary’s state debt was 19,000 billion forints, and that has grown to 55,000 billion forints? Meanwhile, Hungary received 40,000 billion forints from the EU, but even so, public services are falling apart and our hospitals are mouldy…” Magyar said.

Asked whether he would attend a debate with a government official on October 3, Magyar said he had “an axe to grind” with the prime minister, not a government official. He said he wanted to ask him “how he managed to turn Hungary into the poorest and officially most corrupt country in Europe in 14 years”.

Government-close think-tank slamming Magyar

Leader of the opposition Tisza Party Peter Magyar has made misleading claims about at least six key statistics concerning Hungary’s economy and level of development, the Nézőpont Institute said on Thursday.

Magyar claims the Hungarian public debt hit a record high this year, yet, whereas in 2010 it exceeded 80 percent of GDP, it was 73.5 percent at the end of 2023, and it had been heading towards 65.3 percent before the Covid epidemic, but related spending pushed it up again, the think-tank said in a statement.

He also claimed that one million Hungarians live permanently abroad, yet the latest UN figures show the figure is 714,000, and already half a million were living abroad in 2010, while many emigrated after the second world war, the 1956 revolution and the post-1990 change in the political system, the statement added.

As against his assertion that real wages have fallen by 20 percent, in fact real wages grew by 2.5 percent in 2022, even with high inflation, followed by a 2.9 percent fall in 2023. But this year, the data so far indicate that the annual increase may be around 9 percent.

Food inflation, meanwhile, is 66 percent, according to the Tisza Party leader. The reality is that in August 2024 food prices were 2.4 percent higher than in the same period the previous year, and taking the full years 2022 and 2023, food prices went up by 27.8 percent and 23.8 percent, respectively.

Magyar also claimed the economy was stagnating. “Based on forecasts calculated according to current data, the economy is set to grow by 1.0-1.8 percent in 2024,” Nézőpont said.

As to the contention that Hungary “is the poorest” EU member state, the EU statistical office shows that the proportion of people living at risk of poverty in Hungarian society is 19.7 percent, “which is lower than the EU average (21.4 percent), and so we belong to the top performing half of the Union,” Nézőpont said.

PM Orbán highlighted before that they had to win policy debates with numbers against the opposition but he did not say the name Tisza or Péter Magyar.

Read also:

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