Hungary’s parliament is expected to pass a constitutional amendment today to remove President Tamas Sulyok, the first major step by Prime Minister Peter Magyar to undo the state capture that took place under his predecessor, Viktor Orban. Magyar won a landslide victory in April’s legislative elections, delivering his Tisza party a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority that allows him to amend the constitution and overrule presidential vetoes.
Sulyok was appointed when Orban’s Fidesz party enjoyed its own supermajority, which Orban used to seed loyalists like Sulyok among Hungary’s democratic institutions. During his 16 years in power, Orban also gerrymandered the country’s parliamentary districts and rewrote electoral rules to tilt the scales in Fidesz’s favor, entrenching his rule.
Even those built-in advantages could not stop Magyar’s insurgent campaign this year, which emerged from his split with Fidesz after years of having been a party insider. It was this appeal to the Fidesz base, combined with an anti-Orban opposition united behind him and a Hungarian electorate frustrated by years of Orban’s cronyism, that allowed him to notch such an overwhelming victory in April.
