A scandal surrounding Orbán turns into a War of the Roses
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IIn Hungary, a political affair is mixed up with a war of the roses involving a former model couple of the national-conservative ruling party Fidesz. It’s about former Justice Minister Judit Varga and her former husband Péter Magyar, who used to run a state student loan agency.
On the one hand, it concerns allegations of abuse of power and manipulation of the public prosecutor’s office by the government, which Magyar claims to have substantiated by presenting a secret audio recording with his then wife. On the other hand, she accuses him of blackmail and domestic violence and expresses her solidarity with the government of Prime Minister and Fidesz leader Viktor Orbán. Magyar is being harshly attacked in pro-government media. Government opponents, in turn, responded to a Magyar call for demonstrations in Budapest by several thousand on Tuesday evening.
Magyar was once a Fidesz loyalist
In recent weeks, Magyar has emerged claiming to lead a new, bourgeois opposition force. He combines this with serious allegations against Orbán’s team. He says it is a “mafia government.” This week Magyar released audio recordings he made of a domestic conversation with Varga in January 2023. She was still Minister of Justice at the time and married to him.
She has since divorced him privately and also left politics. She had actually resigned from her ministerial office in order to lead the Fidesz list for the European elections in June. But a pardon scandal involving former President Katalin Novák, who had to resign as a result in February, also swept Varga away. Because she signed the controversial pardon while she was still Minister of Justice.
This affair was the reason for Magyar’s step out of the scenes. He initially criticized Orbán for sacrificing the two women for mistakes for which the head of government was allegedly responsible. But now it’s about a much more sensitive affair that came to light in December 2021. Former Justice State Secretary Pál Völner is said to have accepted bribes from the President of the Hungarian Chamber of Bailiffs, György Schadl. Völner is already in court, Schadl is also charged.
Varga complains of verbal and physical violence
It now appears from Magyar’s audio recordings that public prosecutor’s office files were manipulated by Orbán’s head of cabinet and minister Antal Rogán. Rogán made suggestions to prosecutors about what should be deleted from the court files. The government’s compliant instrument is said to have been Attorney General Péter Polt, but the head of the Chancellery, Gergely Gulyás, is also accused. The fact that the affair could not be kept under wraps was due to the fact that Polt did not have complete control over the public prosecutors under his command.
In the two-minute recording, Varga appears to have made or affirmed these statements to her husband at the time. After Magyar published it on Tuesday, Varga responded with several statements on social media. In it, she accuses her former husband, with whom she has three children, of verbal and physical violence during their marriage. She made the statements on the tape because he intimidated her. After the divorce, he threatened her with publication several times and tried to blackmail her.
Magyar also says that before he started recording, he recommended that Varga resign as justice minister. She then explained to him that it was a “mafia” from which one could not leave. That’s why he decided to record the rest of the conversation. Now it is intended to serve as ammunition for Magyar in the political struggle.
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