László Toroczkai


László Toroczkai is a Hungarian politician, journalist, leader of the Our Home Movement political party and mayor of Ásotthalom. He is also founding member of the HVIM youth organization, the Hunnia national radical movement and former Vice President of Jobbik. Between 2002 and 2013 he served as editor-in-chief of the Magyar Jelen newspaper.
Born in Szeged, Toroczkai studied communication at the University of Szeged. He became a nationally known political figure during the 2006 protests in Hungary and especially because of his role in the Siege of the Headquarter of Magyar Televízió, the Hungarian public television where he led the protesting crowd in Budapest from the Kossuth Square to the Liberty Square. Since 2013 he is the mayor of Ásotthalom. It was his idea early 2015 to build a border fence on the southern border of Hungary which was later implemented as the Hungarian border barrier the same year by the Hungarian government.
On June 8, 2018 Jobbik withdrew Toroczkai's membership and excluded him from the party. In response he established a new political movement which formed into a party called Our Home Movement.
He defines himself as a national radical.

Life

In 2004, Toroczkai was banned from Serbia for one year because of a fight in the town of Palić. In 2006, the authorities of Slovakia also banned him from the country for five years because of demonstrations that he organized in front of the Slovak Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Since 2010 he is a local representative of Csongrád County. He is the former vice president of the Jobbik party and led its county list during the elections of 2010 and 2014.
He resigned from the leadership of the movement in 2013 when was elected as Mayor of Ásotthalom with 71.5% of the votes. In 2014, by the regular elections he was re-elected with the total number of the votes.
In 2017, Toroczkai endorsed policies to ban pro-LGBT rights messages and Islamic religious practices in the city, arguing that homosexuality and Islam posed a threat to Hungarian traditions.
After the 2018 Hungarian parliamentary election Toroczkai would run in the Jobbik leadership election against the other candidate Tamás Sneider. Toroczkai received 46.2% of the votes. He would later tell reporters he had formed a new serious platform and gave party leaders until June 23 to integrate it in party policy or risk a break-up of Jobbik.
He said the platform entailed a return to goals pursued by the original Jobbik, including an end to immigration, stemming emigration of Hungarian youth to the wealthier west of the EU, a tough line on Hungary’s Roma minority and support for ethnic Hungarian minorities in neighboring states.
In June 2018 Toroczkai formed a new party Our Home Movement with fellow former Jobbik MP Dóra Dúró.