Márton Gyöngyösi


Márton Gyöngyösi is a Hungarian politician, the Executive Vice-President of the Hungarian far-right political party Jobbik. He was elected MP in the 2010 parliamentary election. Between 2010 and 2018 he served as the vice-chair of the Foreign Committee of the Hungarian National Assembly. He was the leader of the Jobbik's parliamentary group from 2018 to 2019. He was elected a Member of the European Parliament in the 2019 European Parliament election, as a result he resigned from his seat in the national parliament.

Early life

As a child of Hungarian foreign trade experts, Márton Gyöngyösi spent the most of his childhood in Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan and India. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 2000, where he studied economy and political science. He studied for one year at Friedrich Alexander-University in Nuremberg as an exchange student. In Ireland he participated in the professional chartered accountancy examinations.
In December 2004 he moved back to Hungary and started working as a tax consultant in the Budapest office of KPMG. Between 2007 and 2010 he worked as an expert at Ernst&Young.
He speaks English, German and Russian.

Political career

Gyöngyösi has been participating in the activity of Jobbik since the autumn of 2006. Within a short time, he has become an advisor to the president of the party, Gábor Vona. On the 2010 elections, he was nominated as a candidate for foreign minister of a future Jobbik government.
From 2003 through 2010, he regularly published articles of political and public interest in Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet as well as business and economy related publications in business daily Napi Gazdaság.
In 2019, he was nominated as the lead candidate of Jobbik's European Parliament list. Jobbik received 6.34% of the vote in the European parliament election, a serious throwback from the 14.67% they received at the last European election in 2014. Despite the setback, the party was able to secure 1 mandate, so that Gyöngyösi was elected to the European Parliament.
Gyöngyösi is member of Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Delegation to the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly and he is the substitute of Committee on International Trade, Subcommittee on Human Rights and Delegation for relations with the United States.

International politics

Gyöngyösi has been a key figure in the transformation of Jobbik to a mainstream party. As the politician of Jobbik in charge of foreign affairs he was the initiator of the Wage Union European Citizens’ Initiative. According to Gyöngyösi the European Union should give more powers to its member states but close cooperation is necessary.

Inter-parliamentary relations

On March 26, 2007 the Hungarian Parliament established the Hungary-Azerbaijan interparliamentary friendship group. Márton Gyöngyösi is the chairman of this Group.

Personal

Gyöngyösi is married. His wife is Ágnes Gyöngyösiné Cserhalmi, jurist and economist. They have a son.

Controversies

In 2012 as a junior MP in the Parliament, while evaluating an Israeli military action in the Gaza strip, Gyöngyösi suggested that there should be a list of Jews in Hungary. Later he told his statement was “a bad sentence, it was a not-well-thought-through sentence, it was a disastrous sentence.”