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Hungary’s president has accused the government of undermining the separation of powers through a constitutional amendment that removed public officials and changed the country’s legal framework.
In a dramatic final statement, outgoing President Tamas Sulyok launched an attack on the country’s new leadership as he agreed to step down under heavy protest.
Sulyok warned that the law change marked a “breaking point in Hungarian constitutional democracy” and declared that the “core values of a free society… have been trampled underfoot for the sake of political power.”
The constitutional crisis follows a landslide election victory by the Tisza party earlier this year, led by the country’s new Prime Minister, Peter Magyar. Magyar’s party routed the long-standing right-wing populist Viktor Orbán, who had run Hungary since 2010.
Sulyok, while officially an independent, was closely associated with Orbán’s party, prompting the new government to accuse him of being a “puppet” of the previous administration.
To remove him, the new parliament passed the Seventeenth Amendment, which terminates Sulyok’s presidency early due to a “serious loss of confidence” in him. The law also axes the head of the Constitutional Court and bars long-serving politicians from running again, a clause that wipes out more than half of Orbán’s current MPs.
Orbán has fiercely condemned the overhaul, describing the new amendment as “an act of tyranny” and calling for mass protests in response.
Sulyok faced a five-day deadline to sign the amendment or face a constitutional crisis and likely impeachment. Signing under protest, Sulyok issued a formal decree stating that the new laws “violate the rule of law, the principles of democracy, and the separation of powers.” He claimed that public discourse has been “overwhelmed by an extreme form of verbal abuse and open, direct, violent threats.”
Sulyok stated that the goal of this strategy is “to silence, incapacitate, and remove from the Hungarian constitutional order those actors who… ensure the realisation of the diversity of legal, professional, and political opinions,” calling the new government’s conception of power “alarming.”
Supporters of Prime Minister Magyar argue that these legal maneuvers are necessary to clean out an old corrupt system, and that Orbán spent over a decade and a half capturing state institutions with likeminded figures who would otherwise remain in power even after his party’s electoral defeat.
The development comes as European Union member states have just approved the release of €10 billion in frozen pandemic recovery funds to Budapest subject to certain conditions. This massive financial package, consisting of grants and loans, was completely withheld under the previous Orbán government.
Magyar’s new government secured the agreement after promising a strict transparency and anti-corruption programme to Brussels.
Nevertheless, the decision means European leaders are proposing potentially unlocking billions for Hungary at the exact moment its new leaders are using unprecedented constitutional power to forcibly remove their political opponents from office.
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