Hungary After Orbán: A Warning from the Other Orbán
By Matthew Parish
Friday 2 October 2026
A curious document has begun circulating in Brussels. Dated 30 September 2026, printed on European Parliament stationery and addressed simply to “Dear Member of Parliament”, it is signed by Balázs Orbán, newly installed as a Hungarian Member of the European Parliament. Its central contention is arresting. Hungary, Orbán says, has exchanged one alleged authoritarianism for another. Viktor Orbán, after sixteen years in office, accepted electoral defeat and surrendered power peacefully; the government of Péter Magyar, having defeated him, is now allegedly using its two-thirds parliamentary majority to destroy the political opposition, seize institutions, imprison former ministers and reconstruct the Hungarian state around its own interests.
Some of the letter is political advocacy and some of its language is plainly polemical. Yet rather more of its factual foundation survives scrutiny than might initially be expected. That is what makes the document interesting. It should not simply be accepted as a neutral account of contemporary Hungary, because its author is anything but a detached observer. On the other hand, dismissing it as the propaganda of a defeated political movement would overlook a serious constitutional question now confronting Hungary: how does a democracy dismantle institutions created during a period of democratic backsliding without employing methods that themselves damage constitutional pluralism?
The first thing to understand is who Balázs Orbán is. Despite sharing his surname, he is not related to Viktor Orbán. Politically, however, the two men have been extremely close. Balázs Orbán became Viktor Orbán’s political director in 2021, was appointed Fidesz campaign chief in 2025 and ran the party’s unsuccessful 2026 election campaign. He is also chairman of the board of trustees of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, an institution that became closely associated with the intellectual infrastructure of the former Fidesz government. After Fidesz’s defeat he moved to Brussels as an MEP, declaring that the party intended to become more, rather than less, active at European level.
That background matters enormously when reading the letter. Balázs Orbán is not a concerned European parliamentarian who has happened upon an alarming situation in another member state. He was one of the principal strategists of the political order that has just lost power, and indeed the campaign manager of the defeated government. His letter is therefore better understood as an intervention by a senior figure in the Hungarian opposition, addressed to fellow parliamentarians abroad in an effort to internationalise concerns about what the victorious Tisza government is doing.
Yet authorship does not determine truth. A partisan can identify a genuine abuse, just as a government can invoke worthy objectives while employing questionable means. The assertions in the letter consequently deserve examination one by one.
Orbán’s strongest point concerns the new constitutional limitation upon parliamentary service. In July, the Tisza-dominated Parliament amended Hungary’s Fundamental Law to impose a twelve-year limit on service as an MP. The provision is not merely prospective. Its effect is to prevent many long-serving politicians from Fidesz, KDNP and some from Mi Hazánk from contesting future parliamentary elections. Contemporary Hungarian reporting estimated that it would exclude around two-thirds of the Fidesz parliamentary group and three-quarters of KDNP’s. The government justified the measure as encouraging political renewal and preventing ossified political structures; opponents argued that it allowed the incumbent majority to decide which opposition politicians voters would be permitted to elect.
The distinction is important. Orbán’s letter says that “opposition leaders” have been barred from running in future elections. That is rhetorically selective because the constitutional rule is formulated as a term limit rather than expressly as a prohibition upon Fidesz. Nevertheless, its immediate political consequences fall overwhelmingly upon experienced opposition politicians precisely because Fidesz governed for sixteen years. A rule can be neutral in grammatical form while having highly asymmetric practical effects. Retrospective application of a parliamentary term limit is therefore a legitimate subject for democratic concern, particularly where it is introduced by a newly elected supermajority against politicians belonging principally to the defeated governing parties.
The removal of institutional office-holders is similarly grounded in real events, although again the letter supplies the most accusatory possible interpretation. The constitutional changes terminated the mandate of President Tamás Sulyok and forced changes affecting the Constitutional Court, including the departure of its president, Péter Polt. Reuters reported that Sulyok himself warned that the mechanism threatened constitutional democracy and the rule of law, while the government maintained that the measures were necessary to dismantle institutional entrenchment inherited from the previous administration.
Here lies the central difficulty of post-Orbán Hungary. Fidesz spent sixteen years constructing a constitutional architecture in which long appointments and institutional arrangements extended its influence beyond ordinary electoral cycles. The new government therefore faces what might be called the problem of democratic entrenchment: if institutions have been deliberately designed to survive an electoral defeat, merely winning an election may be insufficient to change them. Yet if the victorious government responds by altering constitutional rules to remove office-holders associated with its predecessor, constitutional independence can become indistinguishable from political rotation. The cure begins to resemble the disease.
Orbán’s account of foundations is also based upon genuine developments. The new government has targeted the network of public-interest asset-management foundations created during the Fidesz period. These structures had acquired control over substantial state assets, including universities and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. Tisza’s programme proposed treating their assets as national wealth and returning them to state control. The European dimension complicates Orbán’s claim that this is straightforward political confiscation: reform of these foundations was itself connected with European Commission requirements concerning frozen EU recovery funds. Critics nevertheless warned that the mechanism chosen could establish troubling precedents for property rights.
The House of Terror Museum provides perhaps the clearest example of the letter moving from fact into exaggeration. Orbán states that its founding director was dismissed, that “the museum was closed” and that the authorities intend to “review” its exhibition. The first and third propositions are substantially correct. The government dismissed longtime director Mária Schmidt and initiated a professional review of the exhibition. But the suggestion of a permanent closure is misleading. The museum announced a temporary closure on 15 September; the government announced the following day that it would reopen on 22 September and that the existing exhibition would remain accessible while the review proceeded. The museum’s own website subsequently confirmed the reopening and was publishing visitor information by 24 and 29 September.
That distinction substantially changes the impression conveyed by the letter. A government taking over an institution, dismissing its director and reviewing the historical interpretation of its exhibition is certainly open to criticism, particularly where historical memory is politically contested. But it is not the same thing as suppressing the museum. Balázs Orbán’s wording encourages the reader to infer something closer to the latter.
The new National Office for Asset Recovery and Protection presents a more complicated case. Calling it a “super-agency” is not invented terminology: Hungarian reporting has itself used the expression because the institution combines investigative, prosecutorial and asset-recovery powers normally dispersed among different bodies. It can also impose exceptionally large fines for non-cooperation and, in certain public-asset proceedings, install supervision over companies. These are formidable powers and their concentration within one institution deserves close constitutional scrutiny.
The letter goes further, however, saying that the agency “investigates, prosecutes, and passes judgment” and can take control of companies “without judicial review”. That formulation appears too sweeping. Available descriptions indicate that imprisonment remains a judicial decision and that intrusive surveillance requires a court order. The agency’s ability to impose business supervision is nevertheless novel and unusually powerful. The sensible criticism is therefore not that Hungary has literally abolished courts in corruption cases, but that a newly created authority combines an unusually broad collection of investigative, prosecutorial and asset-control functions whose safeguards will have to be tested in practice.
The imprisonment of former Culture Minister Balázs Hankó likewise requires context absent from Orbán’s letter. Hankó was indeed detained after Parliament lifted his immunity, but prosecutors allege the misuse of 17.3 billion forints — approximately €47 million — from Hungary’s National Cultural Fund. They allege that public money intended for culture was allocated through a politically directed system benefiting Fidesz-associated organisations and election campaigning. Hankó denies wrongdoing and describes the proceedings as a political show trial. Another former minister, Miklós Seszták, is separately accused of receiving large bribes in connection with public procurement and also denies wrongdoing.
It is therefore inaccurate to leave the reader with the impression that Hankó is simply imprisoned “because he also supported right-wing artists and events”. That is Fidesz’s interpretation of the prosecution, not an adequate description of the allegations against him. Whether the prosecution ultimately proves its case is another matter entirely, and due process requires that allegations remain allegations until adjudicated. The distinction between prosecuting corruption and prosecuting political enemies is precisely what Hungary’s courts will now be required to demonstrate.
There is an interesting counterpoint. On the same day that Parliament removed the immunity of two former Orbán ministers, it also removed the immunity of Prime Minister Péter Magyar himself in an unrelated criminal investigation, at Magyar’s own request. That does not prove the impartiality of the Hungarian criminal justice system, but it complicates a simple account in which criminal law is being applied exclusively to members of the defeated opposition.
The weakest historical passage in Balázs Orbán’s letter may be the one in which he contrasts the behaviour of the old and new governments. For sixteen years, he writes, Viktor Orbán endured “relentless accusations” of threatening democracy, yet ultimately accepted the electorate’s verdict and transferred power peacefully. The second proposition is important. Viktor Orbán did indeed lose the April 2026 election and leave office. Peaceful alternation of government is a fundamental democratic act and should not be treated as insignificant merely because one disapproves of the defeated administration.
But describing the preceding sixteen years merely as a period of “accusations” understates the documentary record. Long before the 2026 election, concerns about Hungary’s democratic institutions were not confined to Orbán’s domestic political enemies. The European Commission’s 2025 Rule of Law assessment recorded problems involving media pluralism, party finance, emergency powers, pressure upon judges and civil society and surveillance, while substantial EU funds remained frozen because of rule-of-law concerns. The British House of Commons Library similarly describes the Orbán period as one during which domestic opponents and international institutions repeatedly identified authoritarian tendencies, noting Viktor Orbán’s own 2014 declaration that he intended to construct an “illiberal” state.
None of this answers whether the Magyar government is now behaving properly. Indeed, there is a danger in allowing the previous government’s record to become a universal defence of its successor. “Orbán did it first” is not a constitutional principle. If institutions were politicised under Fidesz, replacing their occupants with people sympathetic to Tisza does not automatically depoliticise them. If constitutional amendments were previously manipulated for partisan purposes, the fact that a new parliamentary majority possesses the legal power to amend the constitution does not mean that every use of that power is democratically wise.
Independent observers have identified precisely this tension. The Carnegie Endowment’s recent assessment describes the new government as attempting democratic reconstruction after sixteen years in which Fidesz embedded an extensive political and institutional system. Yet it simultaneously observes that Tisza’s two-thirds majority gives the new administration extraordinary power over constitutional reform, the state apparatus and significant parts of the economy. That combination ought to make both admirers and critics of Péter Magyar cautious.
Balázs Orbán’s letter is therefore best read neither as a revelation nor as a fabrication. It is an opposition document, written by one of Viktor Orbán’s closest former political advisers and campaign strategists, and it selects facts accordingly. It omits inconvenient context surrounding corruption investigations, converts a temporary museum closure into an apparently definitive one and portrays reforms directed at institutions constructed under Fidesz exclusively as political persecution. The document is advocacy, and it should be read as advocacy.
Nevertheless, several of the constitutional developments to which it draws attention are substantial. Retrospectively preventing long-serving parliamentarians from standing for election is not a trivial matter. Removing a sitting president and constitutional judges through constitutional amendment raises genuine questions about institutional independence. Concentrating investigation, prosecution and asset-control functions in a powerful new authority creates an obvious requirement for safeguards. Nationalising or reclaiming assets placed in foundations by a former government similarly requires transparent legal procedures capable of distinguishing public-property recovery from partisan confiscation.
There is also a deeper irony here. Hungary may have arrived at a moment in which the former architects of an illiberal system have become unusually eloquent advocates of liberal constitutional restraints because they now find themselves dependent upon them. That does not make those restraints less valuable. Constitutional protections are meaningful precisely because they protect one’s political opponents. Freedom of opposition is easiest to defend when one’s friends are in opposition and hardest — but most important — when one’s enemies are.
The democratic test for Péter Magyar’s Hungary will therefore not be whether the new government succeeds in dismantling the Orbán system. Its constitutional significance will lie in how it does so: whether allegations are tried by independent courts, whether confiscation is subject to meaningful legal review, whether historical institutions remain intellectually independent and whether voters retain the widest reasonable freedom to choose their representatives. Those questions cannot be answered simply by observing that Tisza won a large democratic mandate, any more than the criticisms of Viktor Orbán could once be answered by pointing to his repeated electoral victories.
Balázs Orbán ends his letter by asserting that eliminating political competition and political opponents can never be a legitimate objective in a parliamentary democracy. As an abstract constitutional proposition, there is little controversial about that observation. The dispute is over whether this is what the Magyar government is actually doing, or whether it is undertaking an exceptionally aggressive — and in places constitutionally hazardous — dismantling of an entrenched political system left behind by sixteen years of Fidesz rule.
The distinction matters. Hungary has already conducted the hardest elementary test of democracy: power changed hands peacefully after an election. Its next test may prove more sophisticated. A democratic revolution must eventually know where to stop.
