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Hungarian deputy quits over gay sex party

Conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s strongest voice in the European Parliament has resigned as details emerge of his flight from a gay sex party in Brussels by clambering down a gutter.

The affair is an embarrassment to Mr Orban, a right-wing nationalist whose Fidesz party espouses traditional Christian and family values and has campaigned against the country’s LGBT community.

Mr Orban told the Magyar Nemzet newspaper on Wednesday (local time) Jozsef Szajer’s actions were “indefensible”.

“He took the only appropriate decision when he apologised and resigned from his position as a member of the European Parliament and left Fidesz,” Mr Orban said.

Police in Belgium, where gay sex and marriage as well as sex parties between consenting adults are legal, broke up the party last Friday because it breached coronavirus lockdown rules.

“We don’t sit around drinking tea. People are here for sex,” party organiser David Manzheley said.

Mr Szajer has not yet been contacted for comment.

He was a founding member of Fidesz and an ally of Mr Orban for more than 30 years.

In Brussels as a European deputy, he was the party’s leading force in the European Parliament and he had an instrumental role in rewriting Hungary’s constitution after Mr Orban won elections in 2010.

Mr Szajer resigned as European deputy on Sunday, citing unspecified moral reasons. He said he regretted having broken Belgian lockdown rules.

Police detained about 20 people at the house party.

Belgian prosecutors did not name anyone, including the 59-year-old Mr Szajer, but said police had detained a man with initials SJ and born in 1961 who had tried to flee the venue along the gutter and was found with narcotics in his backpack.

Mr Szajer denied taking drugs and said he had offered to take a drugs test at the scene but police did not carry one out.

“The police said they had found ecstasy pills. They were not mine, I know nothing of who put them there and how. I told that to police,” he said in a statement.

Party organiser Mr Manzheley said 30 people came to the event on Friday evening, many fewer than the regular 100 or so. He did not know everyone there but recognised Mr Szajer subsequently, he said.

Guests at his parties would undress on arrival, some of them donning fetish gear, he said.

“We have Christmas coming. People are thirsty for meetings … It is absolutely normal that guys in the gay community are going to be searching for solutions to meet.

“Yes, (Szajer) was present, like many other politicians from different countries,” he said.

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