Magyar Can Beat Orbánism Only by Refusing Its Methods

The first temptation after an autocrat loses is speed. Smash the levers. Fire the loyalists. Seize the microphones before they seize the story. I understand the appeal in Hungary today, because Péter Magyar did not inherit a normal government from Viktor Orbán. He inherited a political operating system.

Magyar was sworn in as Hungary’s prime minister on May 9, 2026¹, after his center-right Tisza party defeated Orbán’s Fidesz and won a two-thirds parliamentary majority, according to the Associated Press. That supermajority matters because Orbán used similar parliamentary power after 2010 to rewrite the rules of Hungarian politics, and because many voters now expect Magyar to use it to unwind them. In his first speech to parliament, Magyar called on Fidesz-appointed heads of state institutions, including President Tamás Sulyok, to resign by May 31, the AP reported¹.

That is the right fight. But it is the wrong first instinct.

I think Magyar should move fast, but not by imitating Orbán’s command style with a cleaner flag over it. The central test of post-Orbán Hungary is whether democratic repair can begin without teaching the country that law is still whatever the latest winner can make it. If Magyar uses Orbán’s centralized machinery to crush Orbán’s network, he may end up proving the most corrosive Orbánist premise: power comes first, institutions later.

The machine is real. Hungary’s problem is not that a defeated party left behind a few loyal appointees, as every government does. Freedom House described Hungary in 2024 as an “entrenched hybrid regime” and said the government had systematically dismantled media independence, freedom and pluralism since 2010³. Human Rights Watch reported that after Fidesz’s 2010 victory, the government used its two-thirds majority to overhaul media law, pack the Media Authority and Media Council with loyalists, fire more than 1,600 journalists and media workers at MTVA, and turn the public broadcaster into a government-controlled outlet according to its 2024 report on Hungarian media freedom⁴.

The electoral field Magyar just won on was tilted, too. International observers from the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said Hungary’s April 12 parliamentary election had “record voter turnout and genuine choice,” but “no level playing field,” citing systemic ruling-party advantages, blurred lines between state and party, misuse of public resources, biased monitored media coverage and campaign-finance problems in their preliminary findings². That combination is important: the vote was real enough to create a mandate, but unfair enough to show that the system around the vote still needs emergency attention.

So no, Magyar cannot simply wait for Hungarian pluralism to heal itself. Public media, state advertising, procurement, regulators, prosecutors, courts and quasi-public foundations are not separate files in a cabinet. They are a web. Tug one thread and the others tighten.

But the fact that the machine is real does not settle the method for dismantling it. This is where post-authoritarian politics gets dangerous. A captured state gives reformers a morally powerful argument for exceptional measures. Then exceptional measures become a habit. Then the public learns that every government calls its opponents’ institutions illegitimate and its own removals “restoration.”

Hungary has seen that movie. The Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s constitutional-law advisory body, criticized Hungary’s 2011 constitution-making process for its lack of transparency, very tight timeframe, weak majority-opposition dialogue and inadequate public debate when it adopted its opinion on the new constitution⁵. It also warned against locking ordinary political questions into “cardinal laws,” which require a two-thirds majority to change. That critique was not just about Orbán’s substantive ideology. It was about process as a democratic safeguard.

Magyar should take that warning personally. A rushed “democratic” redesign, written by the victorious majority and applied to its enemies, would repeat the procedural sin that helped build Orbánism in the first place. The new government can be substantively right and procedurally wrong at the same time. In a country trained for years to distrust institutions, procedure is not decoration. It is the product.

The hardest counterargument is also the most practical one: if Magyar does not remove captured officials quickly, they can sabotage him. Courts can slow reforms. prosecutors can bury cases. State-linked companies can redirect money. Public media can rebrand overnight while keeping the same dependencies. Procurement insiders can accelerate contracts, lose records or convert political privilege into legal claims.

That danger is real. Hungary’s procurement system gives a good example of how formal legality can hide structural capture. The OECD found that Hungary had been among EU countries with high rates of single-bid public procurement, with the rate around 40 percent in 2019-2021 before dropping to 33 percent in 2022, and recommended better monitoring, measurement and competition-enhancing reforms in its 2024 review⁶. Single-bid tenders are not proof of corruption by themselves, but they are a warning light: a market in which only one bidder shows up again and again is not much of a market.

Still, “sabotage is possible” cannot become “the prime minister decides who is captured.” That is the agency problem at the center of Hungary’s transition. If Magyar’s government writes the criteria, appoints the interim boards, freezes the contracts and decides which media executives must go, voters may not be able to tell depoliticization from counter-capture. Fidesz would not even need to invent the grievance. Magyar would hand it the script.

Poland offers a nearby caution. Donald Tusk’s new government had strong reasons to reverse the politicization of state media after Law and Justice lost power in 2023, but its rapid replacement of state-media leaders produced protests, claims of illegality and disruption; AP reported that TVP Info, which it described as one of the previous government’s propaganda tools, went off air and online during the transition after the leadership changes⁸. Poland’s move may have been defensible in context. It still shows the trap: once reform becomes a physical contest over who controls the building, the old ruling party can pose as the defender of pluralism it spent years weakening.

The answer is fast legalism, not slow innocence. Magyar should begin with universal rules that shrink discretion, not personalized removals that enlarge it. Freeze state advertising by formula across the board, not outlet by outlet. Publish all state advertising, public-media, procurement and foundation contracts in machine-readable form. Require court-approved evidence-preservation orders where destruction or contract acceleration is credible. Create interim media and procurement boards through transparent eligibility rules, cross-party representation, professional bodies and outside observation. Make every interim appointment short, public and nonrenewable.

The European Union has already handed Hungary part of the blueprint. The European Media Freedom Act entered into force in 2024, and the European Commission says most provisions applied from August 2025; the law aims to protect editorial independence, ensure independent public-service media, enhance ownership transparency and guarantee transparency in state advertising according to the Commission⁷. Magyar should turn that into domestic law with more visible constraints than Brussels requires, precisely because Hungary’s trust deficit is deeper.

There is one place where I would be more aggressive: records. Documents, databases, tender files, ownership records, state-advertising accounts and foundation transfers should be secured immediately under general law. Evidence preservation is not a purge. It does not decide guilt. It prevents the old machine from destroying the map before the public can see the roads.

Magyar’s two-thirds majority gives him the power to change Hungary quickly. The better use of that power is to make future two-thirds majorities less dangerous. That means reducing the prime minister’s control over appointments, rebuilding public media around multi-source oversight, forcing state advertising into transparent and nondiscriminatory channels, and opening procurement data before prosecuting procurement cases. Prosecution should follow evidence, not campaign applause.

My prediction is blunt: if by the end of Magyar’s first 100 days Hungary has mainly produced resignations, removals and government-appointed interim loyalists, Orbánism will survive in a new accent. If instead the government has published the contract map, frozen discretionary state advertising, created independently observed interim boards and put expiration dates on every transitional power, then Hungary will have done something rarer than defeating Orbán. It will have begun making Orbán’s methods unusable by anyone.