Originally published 2020-12-03.
On the night of Friday 27 November 2020, Belgian police broke up a private party in central Brussels that was breaking the country's Covid-19 lockdown rules. One of the men who tried to get away was József Szájer, a senior Hungarian member of the European Parliament and a co-founder of Viktor Orbán's ruling Fidesz party. Within days he had resigned his seat in Brussels and then left the party he had helped to build.
The story travelled far beyond Belgium because of who Szájer was. He had chaired the committee that drafted Hungary's 2011 constitution, the text that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and his party had spent years campaigning on "traditional family" values. Below is a clear account of what happened, what was and was not established, and why the episode still comes up whenever Hungarian politics and LGBTQ rights are discussed.
What happened in Brussels that night
Neighbours called the police about noise from a flat above a bar in the city centre. When officers arrived they found around two dozen men at a gathering that, under Belgium's second lockdown, should not have taken place at all. Social contact was tightly restricted at the time and private parties were banned.
According to the Brussels prosecutor's account, a passer-by saw a man climbing down from a window and moving along a gutter and drainpipe to escape. Police caught up with him. His hands were bleeding, he carried no identity papers, and officers found what was reported to be a single ecstasy pill in his backpack. He denied that the pill was his.
Because he could not prove who he was, police escorted him to his home, where he showed a diplomatic passport. The prosecutor's statement identified him only by his initials and year of birth, "S. J. (1961)", but Hungarian and Belgian media named him within hours. Every person at the party was reportedly fined €250 for breaching the Covid rules.
Who is József Szájer?
Szájer was born in Sopron, in western Hungary, on 7 September 1961. He studied law at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and taught Roman law there before moving into politics. In 1988 he was one of the young founders of Fidesz, which began as a liberal, anti-communist youth movement before shifting to the national-conservative right.
He sat in the Hungarian parliament from 1990 to 2004 and led the Fidesz group for much of that time. From 2004 he represented Hungary in the European Parliament, where he became a vice-chair and chief whip of the European People's Party group, then the largest bloc in the chamber.
His most lasting role came in 2010, when he was put in charge of drafting Hungary's new constitution, known as the Fundamental Law. It took effect at the start of 2012. Among other things, it limits marriage to a man and a woman and gives no explicit protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Szájer was married to Tünde Handó, a senior judge who joined Hungary's Constitutional Court in 2020.
Resignation and the response from Fidesz
Szájer announced on Sunday 29 November, before the story became public, that he would leave the European Parliament at the end of the year. Once the details emerged on 1 December, he issued a statement admitting the lockdown breach. He wrote that he deeply regret[ted] violating the Covid restrictions, it was irresponsible on my part
, said he would pay any fine, denied using drugs and asked people not to extend the matter to his country or his political community.
On 2 December he quit Fidesz with a brief letter, and on 3 December he gave up his honorary citizenship of Sopron. Viktor Orbán distanced himself firmly. He told the pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet that his old friend's actions were unacceptable and indefensible, and said that what Szájer had done does not fit into the values of our political community
. Orbán added that thirty years of work for the party would not be forgotten, but that the decision to leave was the only possible one.
As far as public records show, Belgian prosecutors did not pursue a separate drug case against him. Szájer has since stayed out of public life.
Why critics spoke of hypocrisy
The reaction centred less on the man than on the gap between his party's rhetoric and the scene in Brussels. In the same year, the Orbán government ended legal gender recognition for transgender people (May 2020) and, on 16 December 2020, parliament passed a constitutional amendment that in effect barred same-sex couples from adopting. In June 2021 came the so-called child protection law, which bans content that "promotes" homosexuality or gender change to anyone under 18. In 2025 that law was used as the basis for trying to ban Budapest Pride, which went ahead anyway.
Opposition politicians in Hungary and MEPs from several groups accused Fidesz of double standards. The liberal Momentum party called the affair a sign of the party's moral bankruptcy. The European Union, for its part, had already been in a long dispute with Budapest over media freedom, academic freedom and the rule of law, so the scandal landed in an already tense relationship.
The episode also became part of pop culture. A street artist painted a mural in Rome portraying Szájer as an unlikely gay icon, and someone attached a mock memorial plaque to the drainpipe he had used.
Private life, public conduct: a fair way to read the story
It is worth separating two questions. The legitimate public issue was conduct: a lawmaker broke emergency health rules that ordinary citizens were being fined for, tried to flee the police and was found without identity papers. Those facts are what ended his career, and he admitted the rule-breaking himself.
What is not a matter for public judgement is anyone's sexuality. The other people at the party were private individuals, and nothing about attending says anything that readers are entitled to speculate on. The hypocrisy argument is about a political party's policies, not about whom a person loves.
Seen that way, the Szájer case is mostly a story about consistency. Politicians who write laws on how others should live their family lives can expect their own conduct to be measured against those laws, and lockdown rules applied to diplomats as much as to anyone else.
Key facts at a glance
- When: the night of 27 November 2020, during Belgium's second Covid-19 lockdown.
- Where: a private flat above a bar in central Brussels.
- Who: József Szájer, Fidesz MEP since 2004 and chief drafter of Hungary's 2011 constitution.
- What police reported: about 25 people at an illegal gathering, an attempted escape down a drainpipe, and one pill in a backpack that Szájer denied was his.
- Outcome: fines for the attendees, Szájer's resignation as an MEP (29 November) and from Fidesz (2 December).
Sources: Wikipedia: József Szájer; Insight Hungary / 444, 3 December 2020; Business Insider, December 2020 (quoting La Dernière Heure and the Brussels prosecutor); Wikipedia: LGBT rights in Hungary.
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