Daniel Köster, press spokesman for the European People’s Party, said on Friday that “we won’t vote in favor of immunity for Ilaria Salis.” Parliament is expected to vote on the case on Tuesday, October 7th, during the plenary in Strasbourg. If EPP representatives vote to lift Salis’s immunity, her chances of avoiding having to stand trial in Hungary are slim.
The Italian left-wing activist was arrested in Budapest in 2023 and spent fifteen months in pretrial detention, accused of taking part in violent attacks linked to the extremist Hammerbande (Hammer Gang), an Antifa-inspired group. A German court last week sentenced another member of the group to five years in prison for the assaults. Salis’s election to the European Parliament was a result of the Italian Green and Left Alliance putting her on their list with the stated intention of getting her the parliamentary immunity that would get her out of the Hungarian jail.
After postponing the vote three times, the EU Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) voted in late September—with a one-vote margin—to maintain her immunity, reportedly with a split among the EPP members of the committee.
Without the 190 EPP votes in Parliament, it would be difficult to find a majority for shielding the Italian MEP from having to face justice. Only the left wing—the Left, Greens/EFA, S&D, and Renew—are expected to solidly support her immunity.
However, as the vote is secret, MEPs can choose to vote against party lines. This may be the case for Italian MEPs wanting to avoid seeing Salis go to trial. However, Raffaele Nevi, spokesman for Forza Italia (EPP), said,
We always maintained that this is not a political affair, but judicial facts that must not be instrumentalized. Parliamentary immunity serves to protect parliamentarians in the performance of their mandate; we cannot turn it into a shield to avoid trials on facts that occurred before the election.
The EPP, Köster said, draws a distinction between Salis’s case and that of Hungarian MEP and leader of the Hungarian Europhile opposition Tisza Party Péter Magyar, whose immunity is also under consideration. Three separate requests are currently pending for the suspension of Magyar’s parliamentary immunity. The decision on his case has also faced delays, in striking contrast with the swift lifting of immunity of right-wing MEPs such as Poland’s Patryk Jaki and Germany’s Petr Bystron. Hungarian critics pointed to Magyar’s alignment with EU leaders as a political reason for delaying a decision—or, indeed, for refusing to lift his immunity.
In a recent interview with europeanconservative.com, Ágoston Sámuel Mráz of the Nézőpont Institute, warned, “If Tisza were to win, the most likely scenario is that they’d pledge loyalty to the current EU leadership and act accordingly.”
