The whiz kid Peter Magyar is the new Prime Minister of Hungary.Image: keystone
analysis
May 9, 2026, 2:02 p.mMay 9, 2026, 2:02 p.m
With the election of political whiz Peter Magyar as Prime Minister, the 16-year era of right-wing populist Viktor Orban is coming to an end in Hungary today. According to the agenda, the parliament elected in April will elect the leader of the bourgeois Tisza party to the highest government office in the afternoon hours. Magyar will then take the oath of office and thus take over the reins of government. Nothing less than a system change is on the horizon in the East-Central European EU country.
In the parliamentary election on April 12, Tisza secured 141 of 199 mandates – and thus has a two-thirds majority that can change the constitution. Orban’s Fidesz party only has 52 members. Only one other formation was able to overcome the five percent hurdle: the right-wing extremist party Our Homeland (Mi Hazank) won 6 mandates.
After the election, Magyar emphasized: “The voters have given us an enormous mandate, which comes with an enormous responsibility for us.” A “humane and functioning Hungary” was the central promise in his election campaign, which he conducted with tireless personal commitment.
Champion of “illiberal democracy”
In the years since 2010, Orban had created a hybrid system of rule with autocratic elements. With a new constitution, with laws and with the partisan appointment of institutions such as the Constitutional Court, he has dismantled the rule of law in Hungary and undermined democracy. The European Union (EU) therefore froze billions of euros in funding.
Orban’s pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine stance made the country an outsider in the European Union (EU). With his vetoes, the controversial Hungarian sometimes brought the European alliance to the brink of inability to act. The “illiberal democracy” proclaimed by Orban inspired right-wing populists worldwide – from the German AfD to the MAGA movement around US President Donald Trump.
Systemic change, but under the rule of law
“We have set ourselves the goal of turning the system around,” said Magyar at his press conference the day after the election. “But we will not rebuild the rule of law with measures that violate the rule of law,” he added. The Tisza party’s two-thirds majority at least allows it to change the constitution and approve laws with constitutional status. At the same time, the criminal prosecution of alleged corruption under Orban, while adhering to constitutional norms, could become a lengthy procedure.
Magyar has called on those responsible in key institutions installed by Orban to resign on their own initiative. He set a deadline of May 31st for this. Among “Orban’s puppets,” as he calls them, are President Tamas Sulyok as well as the presidents of the Constitutional Court, Peter Polt, and the Supreme Court, Andras Varga, as well as the Supreme Prosecutor, Gabor Balint Nagy. In the end, Magyar could more or less brutally remove them from their positions with the Tisza party’s two-thirds parliamentary majority.
“Repatriation” of the frozen EU funds
In his election campaign, Magyar promised tax cuts for low earners, but also the retention of Orban’s social benefits, including lifelong income tax exemption for mothers with more than two children and the gradual introduction of the 14th month pension. In order to be able to finance this, he has to get rid of the around 18 billion euros in frozen EU funding as quickly as possible.
Around 10 billion of them have to be released by August if they are not to expire. Magyar and his future Foreign Minister Anita Orban therefore entered into intensive negotiations with the Brussels Commission before the change of government.
“The political will to solve the problem is there on both sides,” says analyst Robert Laszlo from the Budapest think tank Political Capital. A fundamentally different tone will prevail in the relationship between Budapest and the Brussels institutions. Under Orban, he was recently hostile.
Orban’s waning influence
The defeat of the long-term prime minister is painful for him because his Fidesz party was unable to prevent the challenger from gaining a two-thirds majority. Without a blocking minority, Orban cannot sabotage Magyar’s government actions. Guided by this insight, a few days after the election he announced that he was giving up his parliamentary mandate, which he had won as his party’s top candidate.
Signs of erosion in its camp are rapidly becoming apparent. An oligarch close to the government recently asserted tearfully in a media interview that he had “ceded” his companies worth around 30 million euros to the state. Police and public prosecutors have already begun investigating and blocking accounts against people and companies from the network of ceding power.
In a leaked letter to party activists, Orban wrote: “From the opposition, Fidesz will not be able to renew the entire Hungarian right.” Rather, this task would now fall to “smaller and larger clubs and circles” that “believe in the national idea”. Some observers believe that Orban, who will turn 63 at the end of May, has reached the end of his political career. They consider the prospect that he or a possible successor will lead the until recently all-powerful system party from right-wing debate clubs to new heights to be utopian. (sda/dpa)