Hungary president agrees to step down after parliament backs removal

Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok has agreed to resign after signing a constitutional amendment that concluded his presidency at midnight Sunday. The move follows a swift legislative push by Prime Minister Péter Magyar's Tisza party, which secured parliamentary backing to remove Sulyok, widely perceived as aligned with former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

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the amendment marked a “breaking point in Hungarian constitutional democracy” and said the “core values of a free society… have been trampled underfoot for the sake of political power.”

Sulyok had a five-day window to sign the amendment or face potential impeachment proceedings and a constitutional crisis. He confirmed his compliance on Saturday evening, the deadline, but issued a statement criticizing Magyar's government. He asserted that the amendment represented a "breaking point in Hungarian constitutional democracy" and that the "core values of a free society... have been trampled underfoot for the sake of political power."

This action marks a significant development for the Tisza government, which came to power after a landslide victory in April. The party had campaigned on removing Sulyok, whom they considered a holdover from the previous administration. Since their electoral success, Tisza has enacted major constitutional changes. In contrast, Orbán's Fidesz party has experienced a sharp decline in support following their defeat, with Orbán himself largely absent from public view and declining to take his parliamentary seat.

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I quite agree with the removal of the president.

Orbán has denounced the amendment as an act of tyranny and called for public protests. His Fidesz party, in power from 2010 to 2026, had significantly reshaped Hungary's state institutions, filling supposedly independent positions with loyalists through its two-thirds parliamentary majority. Following the vote, András Baka, former head of Hungary's Supreme Court, expressed agreement with Sulyok's removal, arguing that Hungary had operated under the rule of law from 1989 to 2010 before Fidesz established an authoritarian state. Baka noted the difficulty in dismantling such a sophisticated regime designed to persist beyond electoral defeats.

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Hungary was governed by the rule of law from 1989 to 2010, he argued, after which Fidesz captured state institutions and created an authoritarian state. And it is now very difficult to break up a sophisticated authoritarian regime… which was designed to survive even after electoral defeat.