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An anti-LGBTQ politician from Hungary resigned from the European Parliament on Sunday after he was caught fleeing from what was described as a 25-man orgy in Brussels busted by police for breaching Belgium’s coronavirus pandemic lockdown.
Jozsef Szajer, a 59-year-old MEP who represented Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's ruling Fidesz party, apologized in a statement Tuesday for breaching restrictions meant to combat the spread of COVID-19 but did not comment on the nature of the “private party” and asked people to treat the matter as “strictly personal” to him.
Belgian newspaper HLN and other media reported on Tuesday that police discovered about 25 men, most of whom were naked, attending a sex party above a café not far from the Grand Place in the Belgian capital’s historical center last Friday.
The public prosecutor’s office in Brussels confirmed that a man identified as S.J. was in attendance and allegedly tried to escape by climbing through a first-story window of an apartment below before he was apprehended.
Sarah Durant, a spokeswoman for the Brussels region’s deputy public prosecutor, said a passerby had spotted a man “fleeing along the gutter” before police reached him. She said the man’s hands were bloodied and he was likely injured while trying to escape, according to The Guardian. Police found narcotics in the man’s backpack.
Szajer denied using drugs at the party and said police found a single ecstasy pill that wasn't his and that he offered to take an on-the-spot drug test, which police declined.
Szajer said he did not have identification on him at the time and, therefore, claimed diplomatic immunity and police issued an official verbal warning before escorting him back to his residence.
“I deeply regret violating the COVID restrictions – it was irresponsible on my part. I am ready to pay the fine that occurs. With my resignation on Sunday I drew the political and personal consequences,” Szajer wrote in his statement. “I apologize to my family, to my colleagues, to my voters. I ask them to evaluate my misstep against a background of 30 years of devoted and hard work. The misstep is strictly personal. I am the one who owns responsibility for it.”
In this file photo dated Saturday, May 2, 1998, Jozsef Szajer, vice-president of the Fidesz Hungarian Civic Party, talks to the media. Hungarian member of the European Parliament Jozsef Szajer on Tuesday Dec. 1, 2020, admitted to being among those present at an illegal party broken up by Belgian police in central Brussels last week, amid press reports he took part in a COVID-19 lockdown sex orgy. (AP photo/Tibor Rozsahegyi, FILE)
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At least two other diplomats, a 43-year-old and a 33-year-old, also reportedly attended the party Friday and claimed immunity, but those men were not immediately publicly identified. Belgium limits indoor gatherings to four people, and Brussels is under a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, with all bars and restaurants required to remain closed until mid-January.
Szajer’s wife is Tünde Handó, a prominent Hungarian attorney and judge with whom he shares a daughter, according to The Guardian. A founding member of the national-conservative, right-wing Fidesz party, Szajer personally drafted an amendment to the Hungarian constitution in 2011 to “protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.”
After his resignation, the Fidesz-KDNP delegation to the European Parliament issued a statement thanking Szajer “for playing a crucial role in enabling Hungarian civic conservatism and Christian democracy to take their rightful place on the European political scene,” according to Euractiv. The party added that Szajer's resignation was the "only right decision."
It was the latest in a series of scandals involving members of Fidesz, which has vocally heralded Hungary’s role in defending Christian family values. Orban, who was elected prime minister in 2010, is a prominent critic of the liberal political culture of Western Europe and has laid his political power on a foundation of what he calls “illiberal” Christian democracy.
In July, a Budapest court sentenced Fidesz member and former Hungarian ambassador to Peru Gabor Kaleta to a one-year suspended prison sentence and fined him for possessing more than 19,000 sexually explicit images of minors.
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In 2019, a video was leaked of Fidesz politician Zsolt Borkai participating in an orgy on a yacht in the Adriatic Sea. Borkai, the mayor of a medium-sized city 70 miles from the capital of Budapest, was reelected that month despite the scandal, and Fidesz said it considered the issue “a private matter.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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