In way or another, bigots are almost always the thing they hate.

It just isn’t always literally so as in the case of Hungarian politician Csanad Szegedi, who was a far-right anti-Semite, until discovering he was Jewish. That stunning revelation, which occurred three years ago, knocked him from his perch, forcing him to learn to walk again as an adult. Nick Thorpe of the BBC follows up with a report. An excerpt: 

He comes across a bit like the American singer Johnny Cash. “Hello, I’m Csanad Szegedi.” And the schoolchildren of the Piarist Secondary School in Szeged hang on every word.

“I’m speaking to you here today,” says the tall chubby faced man, with small, intelligent eyes, “because if someone had told me when I was 16 or 17 what I’m going to go tell you now, I might not have gone so far astray.”

As deputy leader of the radical nationalist Jobbik party in Hungary, Szegedi co-founded the Hungarian Guard – a paramilitary formation which marched in uniform through Roma neighbourhoods.

And he blamed the Jews, as well as the Roma, for the ills of Hungarian society – until he found out that he himself was one. After several months of hesitation, during which the party leader even considered keeping him as the party’s “tame Jew” as a riposte to accusations of anti-Semitism, he walked out.

Not a man to do things in half-measures, he has now become an Orthodox Jew, has visited Israel, and the concentration camp at Auschwitz which his own grandmother survived.•