His father, Miklós Szegedi, a Christian ethnic Magyar, is a wood carving sculptor, and his mother, Katalin Molnár (née Meisels), was a software engineer born to Jewish parents.

[13] In August 2012 he apologized to Rabbi Köves for his anti-semitic remarks,[14] and in 2013 he traveled to Israel where he and his wife visited the Western Wall and the Yad Vashem museum.

In 2007, he was a founding member of the Hungarian Guard, which was banned in 2009, at which time Szegedi joined the Jobbik party.

[19] Szegedi paid from the European Parliament budget three men – Előd Novák, Balázs Molnár and Roland Kürk – who according to Tamás Polgár, better known as Tomcat, were members of the editorial board of the kuruc.info, a racist website associated with Jobbik.

On 28 July 2012, Szegedi released a statement to the press, which was reproduced on the party's website[21] that he had with immediate effect resigned from all the various positions still held in Jobbik.

[21] The Jobbik statement confirmed that the news of his mother's Jewish ancestry "did not pose any threat to his positions in the party.

"[21] The statement went on to say that Szegedi allegedly "tried to stop news published about his origin by offering money," which he denied.

This prompted Jobbik vice-president Előd Novák to call for Szegedi's full resignation, describing the MEP's actions as a 'spiral of lies'.