He has always openly talked about his Jewish origin. His great-grandfather died in Auschwitz. His grandmother converted to Christianity in 1925 and raised 11 children in Mezőtúr. Jakab graduated in 1998 at the Faculty of Biology of Diósgyőri High School. He graduated from the University of Miskolc in 2004. He was a history teacher in Buda Secondary School from 2004 to 2007. He worked as a boarding school teacher from 2008 to 2009 at the secondary and vocational boarding school in Miskolc. From 2009 to 2010, he was history teacher in Kalyi Jag Roma Minority Secondary and Vocational School in Miskolc.
Political career
He has been the President of Jobbik's Miskolc group since 2009. In 2010, he was the councilman in Miskolc City Council and a member of the City Council's Legal and Public Security Committee. He has worked as Jobbik's Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén CountyVice President since 2012. In 2014 he was the mayoral candidate for Miskolc in the 2014 municipal elections. He got 20.53% of the votes, finishing third behind incumbent mayor Ákos Kriza and former city Police Chief Albert Pásztor. In September 2016, Jakab was appointed Jobbik's spokesman. He was Jobbik's MP candidate in Constituency I of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County at the 2018 Hungarian national elections. He got 20597 votes, which was 127 less than Fidesz' Katalin Csöbör's, making it the closest single-member constituency race in these elections. After he was elected Member of Parliament he became the party's Deputy Group Leader in January 2019, then Group Leader after Márton Gyöngyösi was elected as MEP. Since Jobbik's board collectively resigned due to the poor results achieved at the 2019 European Parliament election, he expressed his interested in running for the presidential seat. Interviewed by ATV's Straight Talk show on 29 August 2019, Péter Jakab announced his candidacy for Jobbik's presidential seat at the party's National Congress in September. Jakab later withdrew because the party did not support his idea in the Electoral Board meeting to extend the board's mandate in such a way that it would only expire after the 2022 national elections. He did not run in the 2019 municipal election, he endorsed the joint opposition candidate, Pál Veres. On 25 January 2020, Péter Jakab was elected for president in Jobbik. He received more than 87 percent of the votes.
