Peter Magyar, vice-president of the TISA party, gave a speech to Farkert Bazaar on Thursday, in which he claimed, among other things, that Tamás Deutsch, a Fidesz-KNP MEP and current European Parliament list leader, had not done so. He participates with 30 percent of the votes, and the 705 parliament representative must be on the penultimate list that records the number of votes. He is only called “Mr. Nobody” in Brussels because he shares so few votes, Magyar said of another Fidesz MEP, András Gjork.
To verify Hungarian claims We used minutes of plenary sessions of the European ParliamentWe extracted data for all 22 representatives of the Hungarian European Parliament. (It was not the 21st, however, because Joseph Szajer did not complete his term after his memorable rock bottom campaign, and was replaced by Kinga Gal.) Those who were represented in the entire five-year cycle could participate in 19,610 votes. In a plenary session, it may happen that one hundred to one hundred and fifty amendments are voted on, for example for one of the elements of the asylum package, so the absence of these amendments can reduce the percentages even more strongly.
The European Parliament holds four-day plenary sessions once a month (sometimes twice) in Strasbourg, France, and there are usually two half-day sessions in Brussels.
Andor Djeli (Fidesz-KDP) can be considered the most committed Hungarian MP, as he participated with 95.34% of the votes. Along with him, six others exceeded the 90 percent mark: Sandor Ronai (91.47) and Attila Ara Kovacs (91.85) of the Democratic Coalition, Katalin Czeh of Momentum (91.70), Edina Toth of Fidesz (94.99) and Eneko Gyuri (92.89). And Marton Giorgiosi from Jobbik (91.50).
At the bottom of the list of Hungarians, we find people from the Fidesz party. László Trócsányi performed the weakest with 76.98 percent, followed by András Gjork (78.86), Livia Jarocka (79.78) and Tamás Deutsch (80.10). Thus, Deutsch lost only twenty percent of the votes, but he could have attended more than that. There were several cases where Fidesz representatives were present at the plenary session, but simply did not vote. These were mostly topics that required decisions on human rights or Russia issues. But as Istvan Ojeli (MSZP) pointed out, there are times when someone cannot participate in a plenary session because they represent the European Parliament at another event.
Incidentally, Klara Dobrev (Denmark) leads Deutsch by only 1.5%, while the important Anna Donath received 83.46%, despite the fall on maternity leave while she was acting.
The number of times you vote sometimes has financial implications. The daily fee for European Parliament representatives is €350, and is only paid on the day of plenary sessions if the representative participates in more than half of the roll call votes. We wrote more about this in this article.
