Even though the party performed poorly at the recent parliamentary elections and has been badly shaken by a sex abuse scandal, its current president – Peter Jakab – will remain at the helm.

Even despite the recent spate of scandals, Peter Jakab will remain the Hungarian Jobbik party’s president, according to a decision made at the party’s 24th renewal congress, convened to elect new party officials.

Mr Jakab can remain at the helm even despite the fact that he suffered a heavy defeat at the primaries and that Jobbik was the only political party that managed to secure no individual mandates at the general election on 3 April.

Jobbik has also been involved in a series of scandals. As we underlined in one of our previous articles, the Hungarian press was full of Mr Jakab’s unseemly housing issues even before the election. Then it turned out that Jobbik’s president hardly ever stays in the apartment rented to him by the National Assembly. Instead, he regularly spends his nights in the home of his cabinet chief, Eniko Molnar. We later learned that Mr Jakab, a self-proclaimed family guy and dad, had a marriage breakdown.

A few day ago Jobbik was unnerved again by the eruption of another sex abuse scandal. It turned out that last December, during a pig slaughter feast

organised by Jobbik, a leading party politician wanted to rape the girlfriend of his fellow party member.

The party stayed silent and tried to cover up the incident, which Mr Jakab only learned about later,

because he was reportedly so drunk that night that he was unable to stand.

Peter Jakab became Jobbik’s president in January 2020 and swiftly became a key ally of Hungary’s former leftist PM Ferenc Gyurcsany, something that has cost Jobbik a great number of voters.