Steven N.According to parliamentary tradition, the National Assembly will not comply if a court requests it to waive the immunity of a Member of Parliament in cases of defamation. The representative body has maintained that parliamentary immunity should not be lifted for crimes involving personal affairs, but Fidesz MPs made an exception on Wednesday for MP Tímea Szabó of Dialogue.
Balázs Bús, the former mayor of Óbuda who lost to Szabó in an individual race in the spring parliamentary elections, charged the opposition politician with defamation and ruining his good name. Bús claims that his rival made demeaning statements about him in a video posted on Facebook on March 23, and he subsequently reported her to Parliament’s Immunity Committee.
In the video, Szabó accused the former Óbuda district mayor of keeping silent about a pedophile case that took place in a kindergarten.
There are pedophile criminals in Fidesz. The Óbuda Fidesz candidate, Balázs Bús, has also kept quiet about a pedophilia crime in a kindergarten.
-stated Tímea Szabó in her video.
Despite Bús’s exhortations to the Immunity Committee, the body declined to waive Szabó’s immunity in its Tuesday session. However, in Parliament on Wednesday, a majority of Fidesz-KDNP deputies, together with MPs from Our Homeland, voted in favor of suspending Tímea Szabó’s parliamentary immunity.
The final vote was 118 in favor, 49 against, and one abstention.
Immediately after this vote, Parliament also voted to suspend the immunity of another Dialogue MP, Bence Tordai, in a similar dispute with his former Fidesz rival in Budapest’s District II. However, this time the vote failed and Tordai’s immunity was not lifted. [444]
