Gábor Vona (born Gábor Zázrivecz; 20 August 1978) is a Hungarian historian, teacher, and former nationalist politician who led the political party Jobbik from 2006 until 2018. He was the party's candidate for the position of prime minister in the 2010, 2014, and 2018 parliamentary elections. He served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 2010 to 2018 and led the Jobbik parliamentary group until 2016.
Under his leadership, the Jobbik founded its controversial and short-lived paramilitary wing Magyar Gárda, while the then minor extra-parliamentary party gained great popularity among voters since the 2006 nationwide protests and elevated into the National Assembly during the 2010 parliamentary election. Vona initiated to re-define Jobbik from a nationalist radical movement to a conservative people's party after 2014 when the party became the strongest opposition party to Viktor Orbán's Fidesz. Vona tendered his resignation after disappointing election results in the 2018 parliamentary election.[1]
According to Vona's biography,[2] the family's name was originally Vona but Gábor's grandfather, also called Gábor, died in World War II in Transylvania during the Battle of Torda and his grandmother married a Zázrivecz who adopted Gábor's father. So he took back his original family name. The name change occurred when he was in college. According to Gábor Vona, the Vona surname came from his Italian paternal ancestors, while he also has Slovak maternal ancestors.[3] He had worked as a history teacher for a short period of time, after which he had various jobs for a few years (educational organiser for a language school, and sales, first for a security company and then for an IT company). He lives in Óbuda with his wife and his first son Benedek. His parents are pensioners.
During his university years Gábor Vona actively participated in the student organization of the Alliance of Christian Intellectuals and was a member of the students' council of his university. Besides founding JOBBIK (an acronym for Association of Right-Wing Youth; a youth movement that became the predecessor of the Jobbik party) he became a member of Fidesz and the civic circle of Viktor Orbán. With his expectations about Fidesz frustrated and supplanted by disappointment, in 2003 Gábor Vona re-established Jobbik as a political party and became its deputy chairman; he was then elected as party leader in 2006.[4]
In 2007, Vona had founded the paramilitary group Hungarian Guard, which was outlawed in 2009.[5]
In 2009 Vona repeatedly called for a change of government and for Hungary's ruling politicians to be "held to account",[6] referring to among others, Ferenc Gyurcsány and Gordon Bajnai. He considers himself an "EU realist" arguing that the EU should take a new direction in which the role of the nations should have more weight.[7] Vona argues that the national police should be greatly strengthened and supports introducing an American style "three strikes law".[8]
In 2013 Vona travelled to Russia to meet with Aleksandr Dugin, with whom he discussed creating potential ties between Hungary and Russia based on a shared affinity for Traditionalism, additionally Vona had a traditionalist adviser by the name of Tibor Baranyi for a period of time.[9]
After the elections, the party's congress elected him to be the leader of the Jobbik parliamentary group. Vona became a member of the parliamentarian Committee of Agriculture, and its sub-committees, the Sub-Committee of Viticulture and Winery, and the Sub-Committee of Renewal Resources.
People's party era
Before the 2014 parliamentary elections Vona proclaimed a new political trend, the so-called néppártosodás (English: moderation to a people's party) in Jobbik. Vona, as the president of the party, introduced a new style of communication while stating that Jobbik has grown out of its "adolescence" and reached its adulthood. Since then Vona has been defining his party as a national people's party that significantly changed its views on the European Union, while in the internal politics the party started to be more open for the different groups of the Hungariansociety.[12][13]
Vona states that his personal political views do not matter anymore. Jobbik should not focus on ideological issues. Instead, they should make efforts to eliminate the social tensions and controversies as well as to fight against corruption that can be found in public life and administration.[13]
Vona withdrew from party politics after the failure in the 2018 parliamentary election. He became a YouTubevlogger and established a political think-tank, the Second Reform Era Foundation (Hungarian: Második Reformkor Alapítvány), dedicated to the preservation of Hungary's traditions. On 29 October 2019, Gábor Vona announced that he quit Jobbik.[14]
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