Guests at the Brussels 'daddy orgy' where an anti-LGBT politician was caught breaking lockdown rules thought the police who arrived to break up the party were part of the romp, the organiser claims.
David Manzheley said some of the 30 male guests had 'tried to unzip the pants of the policemen because they thought that the raid was part of the orgy' after the event at his Brussels apartment was shut down last Friday.
Manzheley's guests included Hungarian MEP Jozsef Szajer, a married conservative politician who has supported anti-LGBT measures and who allegedly tried to escape through a window when police arrived.
Szajer apologised and resigned from the nationalist Fidesz party on Wednesday after a rebuke from Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban, who called the MEP's actions 'indefensible'.
Manzheley told Polish outlet Onet that he sometimes has 100 guests at his parties including politicians from Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Spain and Ukraine.
While the orgies are normally entirely legal, police closed down Friday's party because it was breaking lockdown rules, following what Manzheley suspected was a tip-off by a rival sex party organiser in Brussels.
David Manzheley, left, the host of a 'daddy orgy' in Brussels with guests including conservative MEP Jozsef Szajer, right, said some of the guests at last Friday's event had mistaken police officers for participants
Images have revealed the inside of the Brussels flat where Hungarian MEP Jozsef Szajer was busted by police attending a male orgy on Friday night in breach of lockdown, forcing him to resign
Viktor Orban's Fidesz and its 'rule of law' EU row
Viktor Orban's Fidesz party has dominated Hungarian politics since 2010, when it teamed up with the Christian Democrats to gain a parliamentary supermajority.
It was founded as a liberal party in the 1980s and campaigned for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, formerly part of the USSR.
After the end of the Cold War, Fidesz shifted to the right and adopted a socially conservative stance, including Euroscepticism and anti-LGBT policies.
MEPs and EU officials have criticised Fidesz for suppressing civil liberties and reducing the independence of the press and judiciary under the pretext of 'illiberal democracy'.
The party is now being formally investigated by the EU, which believes that Fidesz is exploiting the rule of law to crack down on dissent – in turn undermining public trust in political parties, parliament and the courts.
The bloc has long required member states to be democratic, law-abiding countries. However, EU officials are reportedly concerned that Hungary, which was admitted as a member state in 2004 on the understanding it would remain democratic, offers an example to other EU states whose ruling parties would seek to amass further powers - like Poland and Malta.
In September 2018, the European Parliament voted to suspend Hungary's voting rights within the EU, accusing it of breaching democratic norms and EU's core values.
Fidesz challenged the legality of the vote, while Orban also attacked the EU for its criticism of Hungary's possible reintroduction of the death penalty and the bloc's handling of the 2015 migrant crisis.
The EPP suspended the membership of the Hungarian conservative party in the group in March 2019 amid controversy over Orban's increasingly authoritarian rule and crackdown on independent press and NGOs.
Orban's party has also been condemned by EU politicians and institutions for launching a government campaign involving ads, billboards, and letters sent to all citizens suggesting that EU immigration policy is being controlled by Jewish businessman George Soros.
As a result, the EU has gone to war with the Fidesz party over Hungary's access to funds from the bloc's emergency coronavirus recovery budget, which they want to tie to a 'rule of law' requirement.
Orban's Fidesz have accused the EU of 'blackmailing' member states like Hungary to sign up to policies such as mass migration – an issue which Orban has used to accrue political power in the eastern European country.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said an EU leaders summit on December 10-11 will be crucial in determining whether a solution can be found.
Belgian police detained about 20 people at the house party. Prosecutors did not name anyone, but said a man with initials SJ and born in 1961 had tried to flee the venue along a gutter.
Authorities said he was found with narcotics in his backpack, but Szajer denied taking drugs and said he had offered to take a drugs test at the scene but police did not carry one out.
'The police said they had found ecstasy pills. They were not mine, I know nothing of who put them there and how. I told that to police,' he said in a statement.
Szajer was not carrying any ID, so police followed him back to his apartment where he showed his diplomatic passport and claimed immunity.
Two others at the party also claimed immunity, one with the initials DO who was born in 1977 and the other with initials PB, born in 1987, police said. They did not give any more details.
Manzheley did not know everyone there but recognised Szajer subsequently, he said. Guests at his parties would undress on arrival, some of them donning fetish gear, he said.
'We have Christmas coming. People are thirsty for meetings... It is absolutely normal that guys in the gay community are going to be searching for solutions to meet,' he said.
'We don't sit around drinking tea. People are here for sex,' Manzheley said.
Manzheley said he had not been charged and complained of rough treatment by the Belgian police.
'Suddenly my whole living room was full of cops,' he told the Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper in a separate interview.
'They immediately started shouting: 'Identity card! Now!' But we weren't even wearing pants, how in God's name could we quickly conjure up our identity card?'
The scandal has caused a political fallout in Hungary, where Szajer was seen as Orban's strongest voice in the European Parliament after being an ally of the current PM for more than 30 years.
Orban's party has positioned itself as a champion of Christian family values against the liberal political culture of Western Europe.
In May, the party passed laws that mean transgender people will not longer be able to change their identities – defining a person's gender by the number of chromosomes they were born with.
Fidesz openly opposes equal rights for gay people, and last month proposed amending the constitution in such a way as to guarantee that only heterosexual married couples will be able to adopt children.
Hungary is under investigation by the EU for allegedly undermining the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary and the media, while Orban has also clashed with the EU over policy on migrants and asylum-seekers.
Szajer, a founding member of the party, was one of the lead architects of a new constitution in 2011 which opponents criticised for enshrining conservative Christian ideology into the nation's guiding document.
'The actions of our fellow deputy, Jozsef Szajer, are incompatible with the values of our political family,' the Magyar Nemzet quoted Orban as saying. ''We will not forget nor repudiate his thirty years of work, but his deed is unacceptable and indefensible.'
Neighbours called police at 9.30pm on Friday to report an illegal gathering taking place inside this apartment block in Brussels' gay bar district, before officers battered the door in (pictured centre)
The Hungarian MEP is an ally of the country's prime minister Viktor Orban, pictured, who leads a socially conservative party which has been accused of overseeing a turn towards authoritarianism in Hungary
In a statement on Tuesday, Szajer apologised to his family, colleagues and voters.
'I ask them to evaluate my misstep against the background of 30 years of devoted and hard work. The misstep is strictly personal,' he wrote.
'I am the only one who owes responsibility for it. I ask everyone not to extend it to my homeland, or to my political community.'
Ferenc Gyurcsany, the leader of Hungary's DK opposition party, seized on the episode to accuse the ruling party of hypocrisy.
'While Fidesz politicians are teaching us about Christianity, family, traditional gender roles and morality, they are actually living a completely different life, as far away as possible from the values they voice,' he said.
Belgium, once one of Europe's coronavirus hotspots, went into a strict national lockdown on October 30 as Covid-19 cases and deaths soared to one of the highest rates in Europe.
All non-essential shops were closed, people were banned from socialising indoors unless in a three-person 'bubble', and gatherings outside were limited to four.
Those measures were eased slightly starting on Tuesday this week, but only so that retail shops could open. All other shops, including bars and restaurants, must remain shut while a curfew in Brussels remains in place.
Viktor Orban: The Right-wing strongman who has reduced Hungary to authoritarianism by cracking down on press freedoms and restricting civil liberties
Viktor Orban is Hungary's longest-serving premier, having ruled the eastern European country continuously since 2010
Orban was born in Székesfehérvár in May 1963, studying law before entering Hungarian politics in the wake of the 1989 Revolutions which swept through the former USSR at the end of the Cold War.
In the same year, he demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary in a speech which shot him to national fame. As Hungary transitioned to democracy in 1990, Orban was elected to the country's National Assembly and served as the leader of Fidesz's parliamentary caucus until 1993. The party underwent a political shift under his leadership, away from its liberal and pro-European integration platform towards Right-wing nationalism.
Orban was appointed prime minister for the first time after the 1998 election. He was ejected from high office after losing the 2002 election to the Socialist Party, and became Leader of the Opposition for the period until his landslide election victory in 2010 — as the government fell out of favour with the public following the 2008 financial crisis.
Orban then formed a coalition with the Christian Democrats to gain a super-majority in the National Assembly, which he used to ram through major constitutional and legislative reforms.
Orban's critics, who have included Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, and Jean-Claude Juncker, have accused him of pursuing anti-democratic reforms, cracking down on press freedoms, reducing the independence of the judiciary and central bank, cronyism, and amending the constitution to prevent amendments to Fidesz-backed legislation.
During the 2015 migrant crisis which rocked Europe, Orban ordered the erection of a Serbo-Hungarian barrier to block the entry of illegal migrants so that Hungary could register migrants arriving from Serbia. At the time, migrants were passing into Hungary from Serbia, which had a responsibility under the Dublin Regulation to register the migrants.
Orban has openly promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, stating: 'If Europe is not going to be populated by Europeans in the future and we take this as given, then we are speaking about an exchange of populations, to replace the population of Europeans with others.' Writing about the EU's immigration policy, Orban said: 'Europe's response is madness. We must acknowledge that the European Union's misguided immigration policy is responsible for this situation'.
Orban's policy on migration was criticised by businessman George Soros, who said: 'His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle.' The Hungarian government began attacking Soros and his NGOs in 2017, particularly for his support for more open immigration.
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Hungarian parliament voted 137 to 53 to pass laws creating a state of emergency without a time limit, granting Orban the power to rule by decree and suspend the parliament with no elections. Under the state of emergency, Orban could also impose prison sentences for spreading 'fake news' and breaches of Covid-19 quarantine. The law granting the power to rule by decree was lifted on June 16.
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