Prime Minister of Hungary Péter Magyar’s campaign against Viktor Orbán-era holdovers has reached the presidency. On July 13, Hungary’s parliament voted to approve a constitutional amendment removing President Tamás Sulyok, a 2024 appointee of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party. Magyar has repeatedly denounced Sulyok as a “puppet” of the former prime minister.
The amendment does more than remove Sulyok. It also sets a 12-year limit for members of parliament and requires Constitutional Court judges to retire at 70, measures that would push several key Fidesz-aligned figures out of public office.
The right-hook to Sulyok and Fidesz, which Orbán still leads after his electoral defeat to Magyar in April 2026, is not coming from some left-wing revolutionary. Magyar is a center-right former member of Fidesz who left the party in 2024. Magyar left after a particularly egregious scandal in which Katalin Novák, then president and an Orbán appointee, resigned over her decision to pardon a deputy director of a state-run children’s home who had been convicted of covering up sexual abuse at the facility. (RELATED: Hungary’s Democratic Renewal)
Within months, Magyar had risen to the top of the Tisza Party, turning it into a prominent political force centered on a conservative agenda — such as traditional family values and national pride — tied to opposition to the corruption and patronage that helped define Orbán’s 16 years in power.
Orbán may have lost office, but his tenure as prime minister left behind legal structures, institutional tripwires, and a political class of his own making after years of Fidesz’s dominance. Public media, courts, and constitutional rules were all altered under Fidesz’s decades-long rule of Hungary to keep the party and Orbán in power. When Tisza won nearly 30 percent of the vote in Hungary’s 2024 European Parliament election, it marked the highest percentage of votes of any non-Fidesz party since 2006.
After the April 2026 parliamentary elections, Tisza now controls 141 out of parliament’s 199 seats, a two-thirds supermajority. Magyar now has both the votes and the will to turn his anti-corruption mandate into policy through any constitutional or legislative levers of power at his disposal.
The great sin of Orbán’s tenure was that he trained Hungarian politics to treat the constitution as a partisan cudgel to bludgeon one’s opponents. Magyar now risks swinging that cudgel in reverse. Removing Sulyok, forcing out judges by age limit, and blocking long-serving — and thus Fidesz-aligned — MPs from continued office may all have clean anti-corruption justifications. Yet they also continue to operate under the idea that institutional offices can just be rewritten when the new majority finds their occupants intolerable. (RELATED: Hungary’s Right After Orbán)
Magyar has a fresh public mandate to confront corruption and to overturn many of the measures of Orbán’s regime. But how he goes about it does matter. Magyar will not restore respect for the democratic order if he swings the constitution like a mallet at every obstacle and roadblock.
If Magyar’s cleanup becomes indistinguishable from a purge, he and Tisza will have accepted one of the base assumptions of the Orbán regime: that institutions matter only insofar as they serve the ruling majority. Using Orbán’s own means to remove Orbán’s men will create nothing more than a new regime still stuck in the habits of the old.
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