Péter Jakab (born 16 August 1980) is a Hungarian politician and member of the National Assembly. He served as president of the right-wing Jobbik between January 2020 and June 2022. He had been the parliamentary group leader of Jobbik from July 2019 to July 2022. He was the deputy leader of the parliamentary group from February to June in 2019. He was elected Member of Parliament in the 2018 parliamentary election. He was a Member of the House Committee on Legislation from 2018 to 2019 and he was the Vice Chairman of the Committee on Justice in 2019 in the National Assembly.
Early life
Péter Dénes Jakab was born in Miskolc on 16 August 1980. He has always openly talked about his Jewish origin. His great-grandfather was murdered 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. Due to his political activity and party affiliation, Jakab was fired from his teaching post. Jakab filed a labor lawsuit, but lost it, the court ruled that "mentioning the name of Jobbik to the Gypsies is frightening" in July 2011.
Political career
He had 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 County Vice 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 (42.37%) and former city Police Chief Albert Pásztor (33.26%). 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 leader of the parliamentary group 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 interest to run 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.
Leader of Jobbik
On 25 January 2020, Péter Jakab was elected for president in Jobbik. He received more than 87 percent of the votes. On 30 June 2020, Jakab and Koloman Brenner, a representative of the party's strategic council, defined the party's direction and ideology, that is, Jobbik's Declaration of Principles. The party defined itself as a national, Christian, conservative, center-right, socially sensitive people's party in the document, which mentions the creation of a welfare Hungary and a civil society as one of its goals. Jakab said that his election ended Jobbik's process to become a people's party from a far-right organization. The document defines Jobbik as the only people's party in Hungary. According to Jakab's statement, the party has arrived at the political centre, offering the opportunity for freedom and prosperity to all decent Hungarians, especially those who have not received it in the last three decades.
After his election, Jakab rapidly ousted far-right elements from the party and centralized the party leadership, pushing party rivals to the periphery. Several prominent members left Jobbik in the subsequent months, including János Bencsik, István Szávay, Tibor Bana, former leader Tamás Sneider, Gergely Farkas and Ádám Mirkóczki, while Andrea Varga-Damm was expelled from the party. Under the leadership of Jakab, Jobbik joined the electoral alliance of six opposition parties on 15 November 2020 in order to jointly contest the 2022 parliamentary election against the ruling party Fidesz.