I cannot remember ever hearing the winner of a democratic election stand in front of the cameras after their victory to promise “regime change.” A new dawn or era, yes. Hope, transformation, integrity, a drained swamp, for sure, ad nauseam. However, not what Hungary’s Peter Magyar pledged after routing Prime Minister Viktor Orban at the polls on April 12.
Regime change is what the US and Israel hoped to achieve in Iran. It implies the removal not of a legitimate government willing to concede defeat in the normal course of an election cycle, but of an entire system aimed at the accumulation and preservation of power.
So, amid all the euphoria as Hungary seems to come in from the European cold, we should be asking whether this is a red flag, or just the radicalism needed to restore a damaged democracy. Either conclusion would have consequences, not just for Hungary, but also for other nations — including, possibly, the US in a few years’ time.
Orban has been the model that other populists dream to follow. He transformed Hungary into what he called an illiberal democracy across a 16-year spell in power. So, as Magyar prepares to take over, he faces an increasingly familiar question: How to return independence to institutions captured by a populist state, without resorting to the same abusive, law-and-ethics-bending methods used to subvert them in the first place.
I am not sure that you can, and perhaps this is the conclusion for which Magyar has been preparing his supporters. He has called for the criminal investigation of old-guard officials, pledged to take public TV stations off air, and told President Tamas Sulyok to resign or find himself removed — together with “all the puppets nominated to top posts by the Orban system.”
It is clear why Magyar would want to clean house fast. His friend and ally, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has struggled mightily to get things done in Warsaw ever since he drove the populist Law and Justice Party (PIS) from power in the 2023 elections. Ensconced PIS appointees in the presidency, Constitutional Court and other legally protected institutions have blocked him at every turn. And Poland was one of the positive exceptions cited by a paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which found that just four of 25 countries that saw democratic backsliding since 1990 have been able to repair some or all of the damage.
Unlike Tusk, Magyar would have the power to crush that kind of rearguard action — for the same reasons Orban became such a rock star for the populist right. A quirk of Hungary’s electoral law turns basic majorities into super-majorities. This enabled Orban to first rewrite the constitution, and then further amend it whenever needed to legalize his agenda.
“It’s like having a magic wand that can rewrite all law — and then enforce those laws with immediate effect,” Princeton University professor Kim Scheppele said.
How democratic was that? And if Magyar resorts to the same democratic distortion to consolidate his own position, is there not a risk he turns out little better than his predecessor?
This post-populist conundrum is now sufficiently common that in December last year, the Venice Commission — Europe’s constitutional watchdog — added a new section to its rule of law checklist on “restoration.” It includes questions such as: “Do the restorative measures affect the Constitutional Court? If yes, is its role as an independent body and objective arbitrator respected?”
The European Commission, for example, has required Poland to return lost independence to its Constitutional Court, but when Tusk proposed replacing its entire slate of judges, the Venice Commission disapproved. Not only did the necessary amendments stand little chance of adoption (unlike Magyar, Tusk had no supermajority), but they would also violate the security of tenure that is the bedrock of judicial independence.
Venice Commission US member and University of California Irvine law professor David Kaye sees this as “acknowledging the need for potentially ‘radical’ change and cautioning against steps that reinforce a lack of confidence in the rule of law.”
That sounds right, but Tusk and Magyar could also be excused for viewing it as a Catch-22: Yes, you should restore independence to a stacked court, but no, you cannot do what it really takes to unstack it, because that undermines its independence.
Depoliticizing Hungary’s Constitutional and Supreme Courts is a top priority for Magyar. Their capture by Orban was a key justification for the European Commission’s decision to withhold funds from Hungary that total some 17 billion euros (US$20 billion), with a further 16 billion euros in defense funds awaiting approval. Magyar desperately needs that money. The EU wants to give it to him, but first he needs to show he is reversing Orban’s judicial power grab.
Magyar has a better argument than Tusk for applying a little rough justice. Whatever your opinion of the PIS and its eccentric leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, they are true believers, motivated by an ideological, conservative agenda. Orban has one, too, but it was always secondary, acting to some extent as the facade for a centralized oligarchy driven above all by the thirst for power and money.
Hungary’s richest man, Lorinc Meszaros, is Orban’s childhood friend. He is now big in construction and worth US$5.1 billion, according to Forbes’ billionaires list, which is more than 2 percent of the country’s annual GDP. Like others in Orban’s circle of trust, he got rich largely on state contracts offered in questionable tenders.
So what should be allowed to stand?
The success of Magyar and his party Tisza came down to their ability to connect the endemic corruption of the system Orban built to the stagnant economy and broken services voters saw all around them. For Balint Magyar, a former Hungarian politician who is no relation to the likely next prime minister, this popular recognition of Orban’s Hungary as what he calls a mafia state would make the new government’s job easier.
For where the PIS can rebuild in Poland by frustrating Tusk and continuing to campaign on their conservative, populist agenda, too many Hungarians now see Orban’s Fidesz party as a criminal enterprise for it to get renewed traction. Criminal prosecutions would be accepted as not just legitimate, but also due.
“This is not revenge. It’s just that if you want to build, this cannot be a country without consequences anymore,” Central European University’s Democracy Institute research fellow Balint Magyar said.
This is dangerous stuff. The risk is real that the expediency of controlling the institutions designed to check his powers as a future prime minister proves so attractive to Magyar, too? He is, after all, a former Orban acolyte — he simply uses his constitutional majority to restack the deck in his favor.
However, that is a reason for vigilance, not for standing in the way of doing what is needed to dismantle Orban’s system. So bring out the wrecking ball.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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