Hungarian Parliament passes law ousting Orbán-allied president

On Monday evening, the Hungarian Parliament adopted the 17th amendment to the Fundamental Law with 139 votes in favor and 6 against. Prime Minister Péter Magyar had submitted the amendment three weeks ago under the name “Operation Cleansing Fire.” The Fidesz and KDNP factions boycotted both Monday’s session and the vote, and Gergely Gulyás resigned from his position as Fidesz's faction leader in protest over its content. The Mi Hazánk faction voted against the amendment, while representatives of the Tisza Party broke into a standing ovation after the vote.

If the President of Hungary signs the amendment, his term and the terms of four judges of the Constitutional Court—including the court's president Péter Polt—will end the following day, and anyone who has served as a member of parliament for at least twelve years will be barred from running in the next parliamentary election.

“It would be a betrayal of the Hungarian nation if we did not amend this Fundamental Law, as it is the founding document of the Cosa Nostra built by Fidesz–KDNP,”

the Prime Minister declared in Parliament on Monday. According to him, on April 12, the Tisza Party received a “clear, unprecedented two-thirds mandate” to dismantle this system, and the newly adopted amendment to the Fundamental Law” brings the era of the destruction wrought by Fidesz to a close,” so that, as promised, work can begin on drafting a new Constitution, in which they would like to involve every Hungarian citizen.

Fidesz reacted to the amendment by calling it “The end of constitutional democracy and the beginning of autocracy in Hungary”—and last Thursday, they demonstrated by the Presidential Palace in defense of the rule of law and against tyranny. According to Gergely Gulyás, the governing majority is removing the president for political reasons, it is dismantling the Constitutional Court, and restricting democratic elections by ensuring that more than half of the current opposition lawmakers will no longer be eligible to run for office in Hungary. “This is not merely a matter of crossing a line. If this can be done to the head of state, the Constitutional Court, and the parliamentary opposition, then from now on, anything can be done to anyone in Hungary.”

The most important—and perhaps most controversial—provision of the now-approved proposal is that

the day after it enters into force, President Tamás Sulyok’s term in office will end, and his successor will need to be elected by the Parliament within thirty days.

Péter Magyar did not hide his intentions to do this; throughout the election campaign he had been promising that they would remove the public officials he called “Orbán’s puppets,” and in his first speech as prime minister, he also called on the president to resign. In his view, this is necessary because Sulyok does not represent the unity of the nation, having served the Orbán government in every way as a puppet, and because he has failed to take a public stand on important social issues.

Sulyok did not resign by the May 31 deadline he was given and launched a counterattack: in recent weeks, he has repeatedly expressed his constitutional concerns in several forums. He turned to the Constitutional Court and to the Venice Commission, the advisory body of the Council of Europe, for assistance, and protested the proposed amendment in statements and interviews.

Fidesz has been speaking about the dismantling of the rule of law and legal security, as well as dictatorship; however, according to Péter Magyar, this amendment does not grant any new parliamentary majority the authority to remove leaders it dislikes at will and replace them with its own people in place of former party loyalists. “Today’s decision gives us the authority to once and for all put an end to a one-time, serious, and untenable situation, because we did not win a two-thirds majority so that we could install new masters in Hungary.”

The amendment will reintroduce the maximum age limit of 70 for judges of the Constitutional Court, which means that the terms of the Court’s President Péter Polt and three other justices who are over the age of 70 will end two months after the amendment enters into force. In the future, the president of the 15-member Constitutional Court will again be elected by the members of the Constitutional Court from among themselves for a three-year term, instead of by Parliament and the terms of office for constitutional court justices will be limited to nine years, down from the current 12. Fidesz abolished the age limit of 70 in 2013 because, otherwise, the terms of several judges they had appointed to the body would have expired. With the new amendment, the terms of the remaining judges will also expire once they reach the age of 70.

The adopted proposal restores the Constitutional Court’s right to review certain budgetary and tax matters. This restriction was introduced by Fidesz in 2011 as an act of retaliation after the Constitutional Court struck down their retroactive provision imposing a 98 percent special tax.

In the future, judges will play a greater role in the selection and removal of the president of the National Judicial Office (OBH) and the president of the Supreme Court. The presidents of the OBH and the Supreme Court will be elected by Parliament for only six years, instead of the current nine, and the provision that they cannot be re-elected will be enshrined in the Fundamental Law. Under the amendment, the terms of office of the presidents of the OBH and the Supreme Court may also be terminated at the initiative of judges.

A twelve-year (or three-term) term limit is being introduced for serving as a member of Parliament. In the future, anyone who has already served as a member of Parliament for at least three terms will not be eligible to run in an election. This affects the opposition: most members of the Fidesz–KDNP parliamentary group and several members of Mi Hazánk will no longer be able to serve as MPs.

Gergely Gulyás, the head of Fidesz's parliamentary group announced on Monday that he is resigning from his post due to the amendment, because he believes that the parliamentary group of the largest opposition party should be led by someone whose eligibility to run for office is not restricted.

“This amendment excludes the majority of the opposition from the political playing field. From now on, it is not the voters but those in power who will decide who people can vote for,”

Gulyás wrote on his Facebook page. According to Fidesz's now-resigned group leader, although the Orbán government has been accused of dismantling democracy and the rule of law over the past sixteen years, they have never attempted anything like this. “With this amendment, they are barring me from representing the Hungarian people. I am no longer eligible for election as a member of parliament.”

According to the government, limiting the term of office for MPs will help ensure that “experiences from new segments of society and fresh perspectives are more broadly represented in political decision-making, thereby strengthening the democratic and pluralistic character of the country’s system of representation.” The government also maintains that the regulation is suitable for “mitigating the continued existence of political structures which have developed and become rigid over time, and for promoting the continuous renewal of public institutions and democratic dialogue.”

The amendment to the Fundamental Law narrowed the scope of laws requiring a two-thirds majority—that is, cardinal laws—and created the constitutional basis for establishing the National Office for the Recovery and Protection of Public Assets. According to the amendment to the Fundamental Law, the new office’s mission will be “to protect public assets and to facilitate the tracing and recovery of public assets which have been managed or used unlawfully,” and to this end, the body will be granted authority to conduct investigations and exercise prosecutorial powers. The president and vice presidents of the new office will be elected by a two-thirds majority of the National Assembly for a term of six years. The Fundamental Law also stipulates that members of the office’s staff may not be members of any political party and may not engage in political activities.

As a symbolic change, from October 1, the Hungarian term for "county" will once again be "megye" rather than the archaic “vármegye”. The Orbán government went back to using the old term in 2022, with the justification that "the basic territorial units of Hungarian public administration bore this name from the foundation of the state until 1949".

Péter Magyar justified the current decision by saying that “In 21st-century Hungary, we don’t need landlords, county governors, or oligarchs—we need a modern European state.”

The Prime Minister made the announcement about launching "Operation Cleansing Fire" in his pre-agenda remarks in Parliament on 22 June, as well as that they would amend the Fundamental Law. He first presented the details of the proposal to Parliament, and the draft was later posted on the government’s website, where the public were able to submit comments for a period of five days. According to the government, more than 23,000 proposals were received, which were compiled with the help of artificial intelligence.

The amendment to the Fundamental Law will only take effect once the President of the Republic signs it. Tamás Sulyok will have five days to do so. He has the option of referring it to the Constitutional Court, but the Court can only rule on whether the procedural requirements for amending the Fundamental Law were violated; control over the content of the amendment was abolished by Fidesz lawmakers in 2013.