A brutal strike on a Roma family in the Hungarian city of Cegléd at the hands of neo-Nazis calling themselves the “Peacekeepers” has left them scared and homeless after they were threatened, attacked with a firebomb, and permanently injured.
According to local law enforcement, on April 19, two men wearing ski masks attacked a farm where the family lived. Shouting “police,” they broke through an exterior window and allegedly threw a lit Molotov cocktail into the house where the family, including eight children, was sleeping.
After telling the family, “You are going to die now,” the alleged perpetrators forced open the door and attacked the children’s father with a blade while he reportedly fought them off with a shovel.
One of his fingers was severed during the struggle.
“The kids were screeching in terror, and I was screaming to my partner, ‘Don’t let them in because they will kill us all,’” the mother of the family told the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC). “As the bits of the smashed glass were flying inwards, my partner called out, ‘Who is it?’”
She added, “If they had gotten to us, they would have killed us all.”
The family told reporters at the Hungarian news channel TV2 that they recognized their attackers as local residents. One of the men allegedly dragged the mother out of the house during the attack.
Little is known about the group known as the Peacekeepers, though police released images showing weapons seized, including firearms and brass knuckles with a swastika etched into the metal.
Authorities have launched an investigation for “armed trespassing and grievous bodily harm causing permanent disability, and they also issued a restraining order against the perpetrators,” the ERRC said about the incident.
Legitimizing Vigilantism
The attack on the family in Cegléd is startling in its brutality, but anti-Roma sentiment is present on Hungarian streets and can be traced back to mainstream political parties.
Members of the nationalist group Bűnvadászok (Crime Hunters) are facing a criminal investigation for their repeated targeting of Roma people. Charged in February 2026, members of the group have been accused of using intimidation and physical violence to remove individuals they find allegedly squatting in abandoned or empty properties.
Founded by András Bartal, a municipal representative in Budapest for the far-right Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) party, the complaint against the Bűnvadászok compares its tactics to the Sturmabteilung (S.A.), also known as the “Brownshirts,” the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
Saying the group, “shows an eerie parallel with the SA terror seen at the dawn of the Nazi dictatorship: civilians provoke a crime, then ‘pass judgment’ with physical violence and intimidation, while the police legitimize the vigilantism through passive assistance,” the complaint reads.
The group’s YouTube channel, with more than 360,000 subscribers, contains over 100 videos that borrow a reality show-style format to show members harassing individuals purportedly to prevent crime and evict squatters from properties. Other times the videos claim to have uncovered fraud, resolved property disputes, and exposed criminal activity. The content serves to create a spectacle out of the Bűnvadászok’s harassment of primarily Romani people and communities.
The highly edited videos show Bűnvadászok members in black and green bomber jackets engaging in vigilantism to protect what they view as “true Hungarian values,” stepping in where they believe the police and the state have failed. The group will visit or enter properties, sometimes dismantling doors or windows to make the homes uninhabitable, and demand personal information from the occupants.
The criminal proceedings began after multiple complaints were filed by a Romani man, József Ferenczik, who allegedly first reported the Bűnvadászok to law enforcement in March 2025.
Anti-Roma sentiment is also fueled by Hungarian far-right political parties. The political party Mi Hazánk was founded by former members of the opposition Jobbik party in 2018. Jobbik, which began as an antisemitic, far-right political party, began to gravitate towards more mainstream conservatism in the 2010s. Mi Hazánk is led by László Toroczkai and has gained representation in several local governments as well as the European Parliament. The party is explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Roma. The European Roma Rights Centre has called Toroczkai a “virulent, anti-Roma racist,” and the party has run under racist slogans like “Hungary will not become a Gypsy country,” which appeared on leaflets for the national 2022 election.
The party also used the election to promote their own version of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory—the far-right concept that there is a large-scale effort to replace indigenous Europeans with immigrants or other ethnic groups. Pointing to falling birth rates in its election program, it added “Gypsies are producing a population explosion typical of the Third World. The number of Gypsies doubles by generations, while the number of Hungarians is almost halved.”
Mi Hazánk currently holds six seats in the national parliament, making them a distant third.
Mi Hazánk also has close ties to the Betyársereg (Outlaw Army), one of the most active white nationalist groups in Hungary. The Betyársereg is a frequent participant in anti-Roma protests and has previously targeted Roma neighborhoods for its marches.
In the run-up to the May national election, Betyársereg and Mi Hazánk marched alongside Hatvannégy Vármegye Ifjúsági Mozgalom (HVIM) and the Hungarian Self-Defence Movement (MÖM). Reporting indicates that 1,000 people attended a March 28 rally held in support of Mi Hazánk.
MÖM was founded in 2014, after a similar anti-Roma “anti-crime” group was disbanded for engaging in campaigns of intimidation and fear in Roma neighborhoods.
HVIM is a youth movement focused on uniting all ethnic Hungarians.
During a separate campaign event, both Mi Hazánk and Bűnvadászok were run out of the Northern Hungary village of Kálló. Around 50 protesters gathered to push back against a “street forum” being held by Mi Hazánk’s vice chairman and local candidate, Dávid Dócs.
In a video on his over 300,000-subscriber YouTube channel, Toroczkai called the region a “no-go zone,” claiming it was not safe to enter due to criminal activity by Roma people.
Anti-Roma sentiment is a pervasive problem in Hungary, including in its politics. Minister János Lázár, a member of the Fidesz Party, used a slur for Roma people during remarks he made in January 2026.
“If someone has to scrub the toilets on our Intercity trains — because Hungarian voters aren’t exactly lining up to clean the crap out of overflowing toilets — then we have to turn to our domestic reserves,” Lázár said. “And our domestic reserves are the Hungarian Gypsies.”
The comments led to protests in Budapest and calls for his resignation. He remains part of the National Assembly.
The recent attacks in Hungary are a stark reminder of a particularly dark chapter for the Roma community. Between 2008 and 2009, a 14-month series of deadly attacks were carried out, targeting Hungary’s Romani minority. These included two fire bombings against Roma households. When the residents fled the building, gunmen outside shot them down.
In total, six people lost their lives to the senseless murders, including children, and 50 others were injured.
The perpetrators, four members of a neo-Nazi gang, were reported to have carried out the attacks as an “ethnic-type solution” in response to crime allegedly committed by Roma people.
A Europe-Wide Problem
The Roma make up an estimated 10 to 12 million people across the European continent where they face widespread discrimination and stereotyping. This is not confined to the far right, who also share and spread conspiracy theories related to the community and associate them with crime. Mainstream and fringe politicians use the Roma as the subject of derision and blame across the continent.
In Italy, Roma people have been the subject of frequent targeting for evictions from informal camps they sometimes use as residences. The ERRC studied the impacts of these evictions and found that between April 2021 and March 2025, Italian authorities carried out at least 129 evictions of “living spaces inhabited by Romani people,” impacting approximately 696 people who were in most cases made homeless or put into “unstable housing conditions.”
Roma communities are also frequent targets of Italian far-right politicians like Alessio Di Giulio, who, as leader of the Lega Party in 2022, released a campaign advertisement that showed a Roma woman in the street and promised to remove her if people voted for the party.
The recent Slovenian election also included anti-Roma rhetoric. Current Prime Minister Robert Golob of the center-left Freedom Movement party was accused in 2025 of supporting a law that disproportionately subjects Roma neighborhoods to increased security pressure.
Golob later clarified his remarks, stating, “Not against any particular ethnic group, but against crime itself.”
Also in Northern Ireland, June 2025 saw the neighborhood of Ballymena descend into three days of riotd targeting Romani people. After an accusation of sexual assault was brought by a girl against two Roma teens, what was described as an “attempted pogrom,” was carried out, targeting a variety of immigrants, but particularly the Roma.
Properties were burned as rioters clashed with police.
The recent attack in Hungary is not an isolated act of extremism but part of a wider trend in which anti-Roma rhetoric, vigilantism, and political scapegoating are increasingly translating into real-world violence.
