Hungarian Parliament elects András Baka, former head of supreme court as president

András Baka was elected as President of Hungary on Tuesday afternoon. Of the 146 representatives who voted, 140 voted in favor and 6 against Baka’s appointment. There were no abstentions.

The former head of the Supreme Court was nominated for the post by the Tisza Party last Saturday. Electing a new president became necessary after the term of the previous, Fidesz-appointed president, Tamás Sulyok was ended prematurely by the adoption of 17th amendment to the Fundamental Law in mid-July. The move was part of the Tisza Party’s campaign promise to remove all “puppets appointed by Fidesz to do their bidding”.

In Hungary, the president’s role is largely ceremonial. The president represents the country internationally, signs and promulgates the laws that have been passed (and has the authority to return them to Parliament for reconsideration or refer them to the Constitutional Court if he or she considers them to be contrary to the Fundamental Law), and may grant pardons, among others.

The newly elected head of state, András Baka is best known to the Hungarian public for being unlawfully removed from his position as head of the Supreme Court after criticizing the Orbán regime’s plans for reforming the judiciary. Throughout his legal career he specialized in human rights and minority rights and spent more than twenty years as a research fellow at the Institute of Political and Legal Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). He was a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, France and Germany, and spent two terms serving as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights between 1991 and 2008.

Fidesz representatives did not participate in the vote because the party considers Tamás Sulyok’s removal illegitimate. The party's group leader János Bóka previously stated that by removing Sulyok from office, the Tisza government had launched an attack against the office of the presidential institution. In his view, this will make things difficult for András Baka, who will become an illegitimately elected president—a sort of “glitch in the matrix.”

Instead of participating in the vote, the former governing party's MPs travelled to Tata, where they laid a wreath at the memorial erected in memory of the 1956 Revolution and War of Independence.

According to the law, the new president will take office on the 8th day following his or her election, that is, on August 19. Until that happens, Ágnes Forsthoffer will continue to perform the duties of the president before returning to her post as House Speaker.

An election result alone does not restore the rule of law

In his first speech as president, András Baka said that he considers it a great honor to have been asked to be president at this time and added that he accepted the nomination because, in his view, we are in a period when we must seriously reconsider how the country functions. The recent change has shown that a society is capable of reclaiming its self-determination. The question now is what we will do with it in the future, because an election result alone does not restore the rule of law.

“We must uncover legal violations and monitor the use of public funds, but we cannot build the new Hungary on a foundation of revenge,” he continued.

Under the previous system, the government had taken the country hostage, and by the end of those 16 years, it had resorted to governing by decree, while the separation of powers and checks and balances had ceased to exist. András Baka said that he considers it to be part of the tasks of the President of the Republic to serve as a guardian against this happening again.

According to Baka, among other things, Hungary now needs independent courts, free elections, an effective constitutional court, a free public sphere, accountable governance, and a democratic, functioning constitutional culture where criticism is not treason, limits on power are not obstacles, political opponents are not enemies, and compromise is not a sign of weakness. He stressed that we are all responsible to ensure that what we've seen take place a Hungary over the past 16 years never ever happens again, he said.