The European Parliament will next week take a major step towards deciding whether Italian MEP Ilaria Salis should face trial in Hungary for her alleged role in a series of violent Antifa-linked attacks in Budapest.
Salis, 41, was arrested and imprisoned in Hungary in 2023 for participating in a series of attacks organised by the Hammerbande (Hammer Gang), a German left-wing militant group linked to Antifa. The members of the group surrounded and bludgeoned nine innocent people—who the attackers decided “looked like” neo-Nazis based on their choice of clothing—with telescopic batons and hammers on the streets of Budapest.
One 61-year-old security guard was left with a fractured skull and lasting facial paralysis.
Hungarian prosecutors charged Salis with three counts of attempted assault and membership of an extremist organisation. She spent more than a year in prison before being placed under house arrest in Budapest.
Her election last year to the European Parliament for Italy’s Greens and Left Alliance secured her immunity and allowed her to return to Italy.
On Tuesday, September 23rd, the Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) will vote on whether to recommend lifting her immunity following a request from Hungarian authorities. If JURI agrees, the matter will move to the plenary session in Strasbourg, expected on October 7.
Hungarian officials argue that Salis should be treated like any other criminal suspect. According to Hungarian conservative MEP Enikő Győri, who shared a photo of one of Salis’s bloodied victims:
Ilaria Salis pretends to be the victim. This is not the case. She escaped justice using parliamentary immunity. She is not accused for political reasons but for carrying out a serious assault against citizens. The cameras recorded everything.
Salis, however, maintains that the case is political. In a post on X, she said:
The revocation of my immunity would not mean submitting myself to justice, but handing me over to a show trial orchestrated by the political power of an increasingly fascist and oppressive autocratic country, where a political opponent is evidently denied any possibility of a fair trial.
Despite Salis’s attempt to present herself as a victim of political repression, the real victims are the Hungarian citizens left injured in the attacks.
Hungarian government spokesman Zoltán Kovács, responding to her statements online, posted the GPS coordinates of Márianosztra prison in northern Hungary.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Hungary will officially designate Antifa as a terrorist organisation, following in the footsteps of the United States.
The Antifa movement is indeed a terrorist organisation. They came here, they beat peaceful people on the streets, some were beaten half to death, and then they went to Brussels to become MEPs, and from there they are lecturing Hungary about the rule of law.
Together with the right-wing Patriots for Europe (PfE) group—of which Orbán’s Fidesz is a member party—the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) are expected to support lifting Ilaria Salis’s immunity, while the Greens and Left are preparing to denounce Hungary’s record on the “rule of law.”
