Gábor Vona

Gábor Vona (born August 20, 1978 as Gábor Zázrivecz in Gyöngyös ) is a nationalist Hungarian politician .

Until the parliamentary elections in Hungary in 2018 on April 8, 2018, he was chairman of the Jobbik party (Movement for a Better Hungary) and chairman of the Jobbik faction in the Hungarian parliament after the 2010 election . In 2016, he handed over leadership of the parliamentary group to János Volner .

Vona studied history and psychology at Loránd Eötvös University and worked as a teacher. He lives in Óbuda .

He was also the chairman of the Hungarian Guard , founded in August 2007 , whose goals are physical, intellectual and spiritual development, participation in rescue operations and actions of civil defense, protection of Hungarian culture and history .

While Ferenc Gyurcsány describes the Hungarian Guard as “a disgrace for Hungary”, Vona claims that the Guard was not founded against someone, but for Hungary or for the Hungarian nation. Vona also says the guard was founded to change the regime and save Hungary.

On December 16, 2008, the Budapest court decided to disband the Hungarian Guard for insulting the national dignity of the Roma during their 2007 march. The judgment was confirmed in the second instance on July 2, 2009.

On December 18, 2009, Gábor Vona was officially named Jobbik's top candidate for the spring 2010 parliamentary election . MEP Krisztina Morvai should be nominated for the post of President. The right-wing extremist party's minimal goal was to outperform the socialists from the MSZP , according to a spokeswoman. In surveys in December 2009, Jobbik was 10 to 15 percent. In fact, after the two rounds of parliamentary elections in April 2010, the party won 47 seats, or 12.2% of the valid votes.

Before the 2010 election, Vona said he would ask Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to send Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Hungary as election observers. He compared the success of his party with the "triumph of Palestinian partisans against Israeli helicopters".

Like his party colleague Márton Gyöngyösi (albeit a little earlier than him), Vona demanded in 2012 that, for security reasons, lists of Jews living in Hungary who have both Hungarian and Israeli citizenship should be drawn up. Vona describes himself as an anti-Zionist , but denies being an anti-Semite . In order to refute the anti-Semitism allegations against himself and his party, he met personally with the anti-Zionist rabbi Moshe Ber Beck from Neturei Karta and in March 2013 wrote an open letter to Ilan Mor , the Israeli ambassador to Hungary, in which he reported on it. When Vona traveled to England in January 2014, his arrival there was demonstratively welcomed by local Neturei Karta members. The BBC then published an article about Vona's visit to England in which the Neturei Karta people were mistakenly portrayed as anti-Jobbik protesters in a photo. In the meantime, however, the article has been changed and the image has been replaced by another.

After the FPÖ and the Front National had spoken out against entering into an alliance with Jobbik in the European Parliament , Vona described them as “ Zionist parties” with whom one did not want to conclude an alliance “for simple financial considerations”.