The experience was memorable. “It’s very shocking to see a person whom two weeks ago you saw on TV as one of the main figures of an anti-Semitic party,” Köves said. “Not only to learn that he was a Jew but to see him totally broken. On the one hand, you have mercy on such a person, naturally. On the other hand . . . he has a very big responsibility, not only toward Jews but in general, in whatever Hungary got up to in the last few years.”
Others I spoke to in Budapest used the word “broken” to describe Szegedi in this period; he had lost his friends and his place in the political milieu that he had helped to create. Szegedi told Köves at their first meeting that he wanted to apologize for his role in creating Jobbik. He’d already apologized to his grandmother, he says, “but I felt it was not enough.”
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