Clearing the rot: Hungarian parliament votes to dismantle Orbán's network

(CN) — Hungary’s new government on Monday used its supermajority in parliament to carry out its topmost election promise — a root canal treatment to eradicate Viktor Orbán’s illiberal and corrupt regime.

With a two-thirds majority, Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s ruling Tisza party passed constitutional amendments to oust Orbán allies from power, including Hungary’s president and top judges, and establish a new agency with sweeping powers to investigate corruption.

Magyar called the vote “a crucial milestone in dismantling the Orbán political and economic mafia.” He’s dubbed his anti-Orbán campaign as “Operation Clean Sweep.”

The move triggered a series of conflicts with Orbán-aligned officials, most immediately with Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok, a former Constitutional Court president elected head of state in 2024.

In Hungary, as with many European political systems, presidents serve mostly a ceremonial role but they can veto legislation or send it to the Constitutional Court for review.

Government supporters justified Monday’s bare-knuckles tactics as crucial for the restoration of liberal democracy in Hungary.

They say Sulyok must be prevented from derailing Magyar’s sweeping agenda to undo 16 years of rule by Orbán and his Fidesz party.

Orbán was a bête noire in the European Union for his far-right views and accused of turning Hungary into an authoritarian state by changing the constitution to centralize power and control nearly all state institutions.

But in April, Orbán was ousted from power by Magyar, an upstart 45-year-old politician who defected from Fidesz in February 2024 and struck a chord with Hungarians by making public denunciations about the party’s corruption.

After taking power in 2010, Orbán infamously introduced what he said would become the country’s new social contract, the “System of National Cooperation,” better known by its Hungarian initials NER.

But by the time of his ouster, NER came to stand for the rot in Orbán’s Hungary: a deep state-like network of political and business elites who shaped the country and enriched themselves.

Gábor Halmai, a Hungarian constitutional law expert at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, said Magyar’s election landslide was a mandate for a “change of regime.”

“The Orbán governments ever since 2010 dismantled all elements of a constitutional democracy: separation of powers, rule of law, guaranteed fundamental rights,” he said in an email.

Across the government, Sulyok and other top officials were “elected exclusively with the votes of Fidesz” and their entrenchment “were instrumental” in making Hungary an autocracy, he said.

Sulyok played a pivotal role in this process, he added. First as the Constitutional Court president and then as the head of state, Sulyok “served the autocratic regime, and would do everything in his power to prevent the restoration of constitutional democracy,” Halmai said. “Therefore, it is a legitimate aim of the new government to replace him, and other ‘autocratic enclaves.’”

Besides voting to remove Sulyok, the parliament set a retirement age of 70 for Constitutional Court judges, which presumably will force four Orbán allies off the court.

The parliament also imposed a three-term limit for members of parliament — a provision that bars only MPs from Fidesz and other opposition parties from running in the next elections.

Perhaps the most consequential part of Monday’s 12-part package was the establishment of the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, an agency with broad powers to investigate the misuse of public funds. It is expected to probe Orbán and his network of friends and family members who got rich from public contracts.

Magyar said Monday’s amendments will be valid until a new constitution is adopted, which Tisza says it will start drafting in September alongside public consultation. Its adoption is expected to be put up for approval at a general referendum. Halmai said the constitutional amendments were needed to clear the way for a new constitution.

Fidesz and its allies denounced Magyar as behaving like an autocrat. Before resigning in protest Monday, Gergely Gulyás, the Fidesz parliamentary leader, called it a “political cleansing” and the “beginning of tyranny.” He resigned in part because he would not be able to run for reelection under the new term limits.

Others beyond the opposition have raised concerns about Magyar’s coercive methods. One of them was the rights group Amnesty International Hungary. It worried that removing Sulyok through a constitutional amendment did not give the president a chance to defend himself at an impeachment trial.

The constitutional amendments will face scrutiny from European institutions, including the European Commission and the Council of Europe, a body that upholds the European Convention on Human Rights. Orbán’s government was repeatedly found violating democratic principles by European institutions.

Many legal experts praised the Magyar government for taking necessary steps to undo the damage caused by Orbán.

“The reconstruction of the rule of law, or frontsliding as we sometimes call it, has to consist of two parts and the first is destruction and the second is reconstruction,” said Petra Bárd, a Hungarian legal scholar at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She specializes in rule-of-law matters.

She said ridding Fidesz-aligned officials, including judges, from top positions must take place to “reconstruct the rule of law.”

The European Court of Justice, the European Union’s top court, and the European Court of Human Rights have approved removing judges when their appointments were made through “irregular procedures,” she said, speaking by telephone.

With its powerful two-thirds majority in parliament, it looks like Magyar will not encounter the difficulties his counterpart in Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has faced since taking power in December 2023.

During its eight years in power in Poland, the hard-right, ultra-nationalist Law and Justice party was accused of following Orbán’s script and undermining democratic values. But two presidents aligned with Law and Justice repeatedly thwarted Tusk’s attempts at rolling back the previous government’s laws and policies.

Bard said Hungary is grappling with how to deal with the Orbán era — whether it is best to move on or force a reckoning.

“The question is whether society should simply move on, or whether the state should ensure institutional accountability through legal processes," she said.

For her part, she favored getting tough.

“Constitutional capture produced victims,” she said. “The harm was not limited to financial losses or corruption. It also meant destroyed careers, unlawful dismissals, intimidated judges, silenced media, persecuted NGOs, universities driven out of the country, and countless individuals whose rights were violated.”

She added: “Where criminal law has been breached, as in cases of grand-scale corruption, there must, of course, be legal consequences. But accountability is not only about corruption; it is also about acknowledging the broader injustices that people experienced under the previous system.”

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.

Follow @cainburdeau