Tamás Meszerics
Tamás Meszerics | |
---|---|
Member of the European Parliament | |
Assumed office 25 May 2014 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Győr | 4 December 1964
Political party | LMP |
Occupation | Politician Historian |
Tamás Meszerics (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈtɒmaːʃ ˈmɛsɛrit͡ʃ]; born 4 December 1964) is a Hungarian historian and politician. Since 2014 he is a Member of the European Parliament as part of the The Greens–European Free Alliance.
Biography
He studied at the Faculty of Arts at Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest where he earned his Master of Arts in history and English Studies in 1990. After graduation he was a fellow at the Institute for International Studies at the University of Leeds and at the George Mason University. Beginning with 1992 he became a program coordinator, in 1995 a research assistant at the Political Science Department of the Central European University. Meszerics earned his PhD degree in comtenporary history at his alma mater about Anglo-American foreign policy in 2000.
He was appointed assistant professor in 2002. In 2011 he was a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies of the Harvard University. His fields of interest are theories of democracy, historical and theorical studies of intelligence, bureaucracy, bureaucratic politics and their theories, the history of modern Central European countries and behavioral game theory.
Political career
He joined the Alliance of Free Democrats in the wake of the end of communism in Hungary but did not hold any offices. He left the party in 1995 but returned to politics in 2009 when he was a founding member of the new green party Politics Can Be Different (LMP). Between 2009 and 2010 he was secretary of the party board and was later co-chair of the party's political council. After the successful 2010 general election where the party managed to get parliamentary representation he worked as a foreign policy expert for the parliamentary group. In 2013 he returned to the party board as a member. He held his office until the 2014 European Parliament election where he headed the party list.
As the party surpassed the threshold of 5%, he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament where he automatically joined The Greens–European Free Alliance group. The group elected him as co-coordinator of foreign policy. He is a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and substitute member of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs.