These are the 21 who will be representing Hungary in the European Parliament

There were 21 MEP mandates allocated in the 2024 European Parliament elections in Hungary, with the ruling Fidesz-KDNP coalition winning 11 of these. Péter Magyar's party, the Tisza Party, which burst onto the Hungarian political scene a few months ago, won 7 seats in the EP, while DK only got to keep 2 (of its previously 4) seats, and far right Mi Hazánk also gets to delegate one MEP to Brussels.

Based on the lists, the following candidates have made it to the European Parliament, although some may not take up their mandates, which will result in those further down the list going to the European Parliament instead.

Fidesz-KDNP

Tamás Deutsch owes his position as list leader to the clemency scandal, as the position was originally intended for former Justice Minister Judit Varga, who was caught up in the scandal in February. The 57 year-old Deutsch is one of the founders of Fidesz and became an MP in 1990, and stayed there until 2009, when he switched to the European Parliament, and has served as an MEP ever since. In 2014 and in 2019, he was fourth on his party's EP list.

From 2012 to 2016 and again from 2017, he served as Vice-President of the Hungarian Olympic Committee. As an MEP, he became famous for his brief and profane Twitter messages, the most memorable perhaps being "who the f*ck is Thomas Melia" in 2011. His style, and his likening of Manfred Weber's words to the language of the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, got him banned from holding a position in the EPP or from speaking on behalf of the group, foreshadowing Fidesz's departure from the same.

Kinga Gál, a lawyer of Transylvanian origin, has served as deputy president of the Office of Hungarians from Beyond the Borders and as senior advisor to the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She was elected to Fidesz's EP list in 2004 and has been an MEP since then. In October 2015, when Fidesz was still a member of the European People's Party, she was elected as one of the group's vice-presidents. She is also a member of the EP's Foreign Affairs Committee and the Committee for relations with the People's Republic of China.

Historian, political scientist and finance expert András Gyürk has been a member of Fidesz since 1988 and was its campaign manager in several elections. He was elected to the Hungarian Parliament in 1998 and served as deputy leader of Fidesz' parliamentary group from 2002, before moving on to the European Parliament in 2004, where he has been head of the Fidesz delegation since 2010. We last wrote about him in October 2023, when he defended Fidesz's abstention on a vote about the introduction of an instrument to curb carbon emissions and support the introduction of digital and biotechnology industries by arguing that the EU's industrial production had declined, its competitiveness was in ruins and that "Brussels' industrial policy" was "based on sanctions, unrealistic green targets and more red tape". At the same time, Gyürk, along with the Fidesz, backed a fund for joint EU military procurement in September 2023.

Balázs Győrffy is president of the National Chamber of Agriculture, which, in early 2023, criticised the price freezes introduced by the Fidesz government. He was born in Pápa, Hungary, and graduated in economics and law in Pécs. He is an associate professor at the University of Pécs and at Szent István University. After his university years, he ran the family farm near Pápa and was mayor of Nemesgörzsöny for eight years (2006-14), while also being involved in several agricultural interest organizations in Veszprém County.

Since Fidesz left the EPP in 2021, György Hölvényi, 61, has been its only Hungarian member as a KDNP delegate and has worked in the European Parliament since 2003. Hölvényi was born in Budapest and holds a degree in teaching history and Hungarian literature and also has a diploma in tourism economics.

He has been involved in KDNP politics since 1989. In the 1990s, he was a ministerial secretary, and in 1999 he became deputy state secretary at the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Between 2000-03 he was head of the office of the president of Duna Television Ltd'. From 2003 until 2009 he served as the press officer of the EPP's parliamentary group, and between 2009-14 he headed the programme on Intercultural Dialogue programme. His last position prior to becoming an MEP was State Secretary for Church, Minority and Civil Society Relations at the Ministry of Human Resources.

In the spirit of equal opportunities, Ádám Kósa, a deaf MEP, will be replaced by an Olympic bronze medallist and three-time Paralympic champion, Pál Szekeres. He started fencing in 1976, became world champion in foil in 1987 and won a bronze medal with the foil team at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. A car accident forced him into a wheelchair in 1991 after which he competed in the Paralympics in the years following, all the way until 2008.

Szekeres has supported the government's work over several government cycles as a ministerial commissioner and deputy state secretary in the field of sport and social affairs, serving as deputy state secretary for sports for the disabled at the Ministry of Youth and Sports during the first Orbán government and then as deputy state secretary at the Ministry of National Resources after 2010. Since 2016 he's been president of the fencing division of IWAS (International Wheelchair and Amputee Sports Federation).

Since 2014, the Hungarian governing parties have made a habit of striving to ensure that Hungarians living in non-EU countries and thus not directly represented in Brussels also have a voice in the European Parliament. This is how Viktória Ferenc from Transcarpathia, who also enjoys the support of the Transcarpathian Association, came into the picture.

Ferenc was born in Pallo, Ukraine, and studied as a linguist in Hungary, worked at the Estonian Embassy in Hungary, and even traveled to Argentina to research the Hungarian community there. Since 2013, she has worked full time as a researcher at the Institute for National Policy Research, and still regularly visits Ukraine, among others, to give lectures at the Ferenc Rákóczi II Hungarian College of Transcarpathia. She has said that if elected, her goal will be to fight for Hungarian-language education and for the language to be made official in the region.

The other candidate representing Hungarians living outside the country's borders is Annamária Vicsek, who was born in Subotica, Serbia, and studied at the medical university in Novi Sad. She also received a degree from Budapest's ELTE university in speech and language therapy, then in special pedagogy, and worked as a speech and language therapist in Budapest until 2007. After returning home, she joined the Fidesz-aligned Association of Hungarians in Vojvodina (VMSZ) in 2008 and began turning more and more towards politics in 2014, when she became a member of the Serbian parliament and in 2016 was even appointed State Secretary in the Ministry of Education. She worked with countless organizations and working groups in the field of minorities, education and disability. At the same time she rose through the ranks of VMSZ, becoming a member of the board and even vice-president in 2023.

Enikő Győri will begin her second term in the EP. She graduated in International Relations from the Budapest University of Economics in 1992 and received her PhD from the same university in 2000. By 1999 she was already Ambassador to Rome. Between 2003-09, she served as head of the Fidesz parliamentary group's work group on EU matters at the Office of the National Assembly, while also teaching at ELTE. From 2010-14, she served as State Secretary for EU Affairs, and was recalled from the EP ahead of Hungary’s 2011 EU Presidency, and played a key role in organizing it. She is probably the first and so far only Hungarian MEP to speak in the EP in fluent Italian. Győri is one of Fidesz's most professional candidates from a diplomatic point of view, having worked as a trainee in Spanish, Mexican, French, Italian and EU institutions and organisations. She is rumored to be the next Hungarian candidate for EU Commissioner (Viktor Orbán is said to be aiming for the post of Commissioner for Competition).

Not surprisingly, when we googled the name of András László, who is not yet known nationwide, we mostly came across content he had produced for various social media sites. There’s nothing strange about this, however as last September Lakmusz reported that László had been trained by Megafon and was believed to be Megafon's influencer intended for the international market. László has been cabinet chief at the Ministry of Human Resources since 2010, and has (among others) worked as a foreign policy adviser at Fidesz's Foreign Affairs Secretariat.

László has been posting explanatory videos – mostly in English – that reinforce the government's narrative since 2022.

Ernő Schaller-Barosshas just completed his first (not full) term in the European Parliament, as he was the one who replaced József Szájer who quit suddenly after climbing down the gutter when trying to avoid being caught by the authorities at a curfew-breaking sex party in Brussels in 2021. He joined Fidelitas in 2002 and Fidesz in 2010, and has served in various positions, among others as Deputy State Secretary for International Affairs at the PM's Office from 2018, and Ministerial Commissioner for the Development and Supervision of Visitor Programmes, Scholarship Programmes and Exchange Programmes from 2020. According to 444, it was at his mansion near lake Balaton that a party was held during the Covid pandemic, after which the participants, including Minister Gergely Gulyás, had to be quarantined.

Tisza Party

Péter Magyar, a lawyer by training, burst into Hungarian public life with his reaction to his former wife Judit Varga's resignation from all her public posts over the clemency scandal. Magyar attacked the governing parties in a thunderous Facebook post and was able to turn his sudden popularity into a political force with a 200-stop country-wide tour, several organised demonstrations and similarly dynamic – and often divisive – interviews.

He and his team took over the already registered, but completely insignificant Tisza Party, of which he became vice-president. Magyar is seen as a divisive figure both by the opposition and the governing parties.

The former are calling him Fidesz's man due to his past, the latter an enemy, but for many he is the third choice that's neither Viktor Orbán nor Ferenc Gyurcsány. His EP election pledge was to bring home the thousands of billions of forints from the EU that have not been paid out to Hungary because of the current system’s corruption.

Dóra Dávid works as a legal consultant in Meta's London office, and that's pretty much all that could be known about her for a long time. In her video uploaded to Péter Magyar's YouTube channel a month ago, when introducing herself, she said that she was born in Pécs, but got her law degrees in England. She has worked in a law firm, in the legal service of the European Commission but also at Jamie Oliver's group. She speaks four languages and gave her first interview two weeks ago – also to Péter Magyar's YouTube channel.

Zoltán Tarr, a former Reformed pastor and synod councilor, became nationally known after giving a speech at Péter Magyar's April 6 protest on Kossuth Square. In it he said that he found the actions of Reformed Bishop Zoltán Balog and his behaviour since the clemency scandal broke unacceptable.

A few days after the demonstration, Tarr was fired from his job at Neumann János Nonprofit Kft., a company belonging to the Ministry of Economy. He said his dismissal was clearly politically motivated, which Fidesz communication director Tamás Menczer did not deny.

Tarr admits that he was not interested in politics around the time of the regime change. He says he voted for MDF at the time, but was bothered by the fact that the old generation wanted to continue what they had started decades ago. "Those who are running the country and the church today all grew up under socialism, and have retained the reflexes they learned then," he said in an interview with Hvg360. Speaking about the Tisza Party's tour across the country, he said that "the mood feels almost like a second regime change"

András Kulja worked as a surgical candidate in two hospitals in Budapest until April, and has hundreds of thousands of followers on his health education TikTok channel. He joined Péter Magyar's association after attending the April 6 protest on Kossuth Square. When Telex interviewed him,we asked him about Hungarian healthcare, European TikTok legislation and the situation of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine.

Eszter Lakos was born in Győr, studied in Italy, worked as a legal adviser in Brussels and moved home with her family last year. As she put it in the video where she introduced herself, she is familiar with the "Brussels bubble", so she would not need to look for her desk when arriving at the European Parliament, but could jump into action right away.

Gabriella Gerzsenyi, a new MEP with Transcarpathian roots has a legal background. Speaking at Tisza's event in Debrecen, she said that when she moved home from Brussels, she felt she had to "do something". She lives with her family in a small settlement on Szentendrei island where they are setting up a self-sustaining farm. Gerzsenyi is also active as a writer, with two published novels (Brüsszel után szabadon – Történetek a közelmúltból and Három lábbal a földön, the latter of which received a favourable review in Magyar Nemzet last year) and several short stories in literary journals such as Prae, Látó and Új forrás.

A lawyer and economist by training, Kinga Kollár currently lives in Luxembourg, where she works for the European Commission, but she has also worked as a civil servant in Hungary, as well as a spokesperson and advisor for the Hungarian Competition Authority. In May this year, the pro-Fidesz press tried to corner her because of an old, public Facebook comment in which she called Hungarians "brainwashed" ("Unfortunately, until the education system changes, we will remain just as brainwashed as the Russians" was the criticized sentence). In her introductory video, she spoke about hearing Viktor Orbán speak at her university twenty-five years ago about how good it would be for us to join the EU, "but today [thanks to a small political elite] I find myself ashamed of being Hungarian", she said.

DK-MSZP-Párbeszéd

Klára Dobrev is a 52-year-old Hungarian lawyer and economist with Bulgarian ancestry on her father's side. She is the wife of Ferenc Gyurcsány, a founding member of the Democratic Coalition (DK). She has served as an MEP for the Democratic Coalition since May 2019 and was Vice-President of the European Parliament between January 2019 and January 2022. In 2023, she was the fourth most influential woman in Hungarian public life according to Forbes. Speaking as the EP list leader of DK, she told Telex: "We are willing to cooperate with anyone who wants to oust Orbán's regime and who would never consider a coalition with Fidesz".

Csaba Molnár is a 49-year-old Hungarian lawyer, politician, member of the European Parliament, vice-president and campaign manager of DK. He joined the Hungarian Socialist Party at a young age and later served as Minister of Transport, Communications and Energy in the second Gyurcsány government and as Deputy Prime Minister in the Bajnai government. He joined Gyurcsány's DK in October 2010 and led the party's parliamentary group from 2011 until the 2014 EP elections, when he was elected to the European Parliament. "For us, the elections are about dealing with Fidesz, not Péter Magyar," he said in a recent interview.

Mi Hazánk

László Toroczkai was born as László Tóth in Szeged and started his studies at the József Attila University of Szeged. He got involved in politics at the age of 19 when he joined the far right MIÉP, and was already a candidate for the Parliament at such a young age. Then, when he was only 20, the party's leader István Csurka asked him to become a parliamentary correspondent for MIÉP's newspaper, Magyar Fórum. He claims that he took the name Toroczkai at the time because Tóth is very common and because of his ancestors.

In 2001, he founded the revisionist Hatvannégy Vármegye Youth Movement, for which he was later banned from several neighboring countries. In 2006 he participated in the assault on the public television's headquarters and afterwards continued his political activity in Jobbik. In 2013, he became mayor of Ásotthalom, located right next to Hungary's border with Serbia where he organized a local militia against migrants. He became vice president of Jobbik in 2016. After his relationship with the party's leader Gábor Vona deteriorated, he ran against him for the position of party president, but lost. That same year, he founded the Mi Hazánk Mozgalom (Our Homeland Movement), which made it into Parliament in 2022.