PM Orban Proves Right: Convicted MEPs Do Make Up a Football Team

Workplace harassment, fraud and corruption are the usuals.

Banners encouraging people to vote in the European Parliament elections outside the EP building in Brussels on April 27, 2024. EU member states will hold the elections June 6 to 9. (Photo: MTI/EPA/Frederic Sierakowski)

An analysis published by the Irish The Journal portal in 2024 reveals that during the current term, 23 MEPs have been convicted by a court - not by an internal ethics body - with outcomes ranging from fines to prison sentences. This batch would make up two football teams.

Whether the right wing is strengthening or not, there are already signs indicating that other lawmakers sitting in the European Parliament may yet turn into protagonists in scandals. The far left in Italy is working to get an Italian activist serving a prison sentence in Budapest into the EP. The ultra-left political movement Power to the People has issued a statement calling on its followers to vote for Ilaria Salis in the June EP elections - thus opening the cell door of the activist imprisoned in Budapest. 

What perhaps reveals more than anything else is the scandal engulfing the president of the European Commission.

"Serious corruption scandal surrounds Ursula von der Leyen" was the title of an article published a year ago by the Hungarian Origo news portal about the European Commission's vaccine procurement scandal. In March 2021, Ursula von der Leyen held preliminary talks with the head of Pfizer on the purchase of coronavirus vaccines and practically negotiated the details in text messages exchanged with the pharmaceutical giant's CEO, Albert Bourla. An investigation into the 35-billion-euro deal was launched in January 2022, but the European Commission president's staff failed to find the text messages in question. On January 11, 2023, the EP's Covid-19 Committee decided to call on the Commission president to appear before the European Parliament over the suspicious purchase of vaccines. Later, however, the European Parliament, battered by the corruption scandals in the previous months, decided to question Ursula von der Leyen on the dubious vaccine purchase behind closed doors "at some point in the future".

What makes the story even more engrossing is the fact that Ursula von der Leyen's husband, Heiko von der Leyen, was appointed as the medical director of the US pharmaceutical company Orgenesis in December 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic. As previously reported by Magyar Nemzet, the company works closely with Pfizer, which is implicated in the European Commission's vaccine procurement scandal.

 Cover photo: Banners encouraging people to vote in the European Parliament elections outside the EP building in Brussels on April 27, 2024. EU member states will hold the elections June  6 to 9. (Photo: MTI/EPA/Frederic Sierakowski)