In Hungary, Scandal and Crisis Suddenly Energize the Opposition
The Orbán regime’s hypocrisy and corruption have created a new star, Péter Magyar.
ALTHOUGH ONE MIGHT NOT KNOW IT given Hungary’s current reputation, the country has noble liberal traditions. In 1848 Hungary gave birth to one of the most successful democratic revolutions in Europe, sadly suppressed after a year by Austrian and Russian armies. The great Hungarian liberal Louis Kossuth, forced to flee his homeland, visited the United States and inspired Americans with his fiery defense of liberty. His bust can be found today in the U.S. Capitol. Another Hungarian liberal of that era, László Újházi, fled to Texas, but was forced to leave his second home because of his opposition to slavery. He served as Abraham Lincoln’s consul in Italy during the Civil War.
Hungarians commemorate the 1848 revolution every March 15, the anniversary of the day it broke out. Like all national holidays in Hungary these days, this one, too, has become politicized and stale. The opposition organizes demonstrations in Budapest that are increasingly uninteresting. The authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has in recent years moved his government’s commemoration to a secure location outside of the capital, fearing he might get booed in the big city.
But March 15 this year in Hungary was eventful. The country has been rocked by a scandal of unprecedented proportions in the Orbán era. It has shaken up the political landscape in Hungary, knocked Orbán on his heels, and given birth to a new opposition movement led by a man who, in the wake of the scandal, decided to defect from the Orbán regime’s inner circle.
A Secret Pardon
THE STORY BEGINS WITH a presidential pardon last April. The identity of persons pardoned by the president in Hungary are not released to the public. But in this case, a technical publication of Hungary’s highest court accidentally referenced the pardon and it was noticed by a small-town lawyer, who forwarded the information to the independent media.
The recipient of the pardon—referred to in the press as Endre K.—had been convicted for covering up acts of pedophilia while working in an orphanage situated only a few miles from Viktor Orbán’s hometown. Endre K.’s supervisor, the director of the orphanage, had molested young boys for decades. Two child-protection social workers reported their suspicions in 2011, and during an investigation Endre K. was assigned as legal guardian to the victims. Endre K. coerced the victims into retracting their accusations—the children allege that he shamed them, beat them, threatened to prevent them from seeing family members, and bribed them—and the case was dropped.
Then in 2016 one of the children committed suicide. This sparked a second investigation that uncovered the whole sordid affair. The director of the orphanage was sentenced to eight years in prison. Endre K. received a sentence of three years, four months.
Scandals in Hungary rarely produce consequences, but this time was different. The pardon cut against the centerpiece of Orbán’s political messaging, which emphasizes the importance of protecting Hungarian children from pedophiles and the sexually decadent West.
Hungary’s president, Katalin Novák, who signed the pardon, had previously been the minister of family affairs—and the public face of Orbán’s pro-family policies. Orbán spent years cultivating her image and raising her profile. She met with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence in 2021 at a splashy conference on demography Orbán hosted. She also spent generous amounts of time with pro-Orbán American expats like Rod Dreher and Gladden Pappin, discussing the importance of the family and Christian culture. A mother of three, Novák was elected by parliament to be Hungary’s first woman president in 2022.
Her pardon of Endre K., therefore, a man who abetted a pedophile and probably bears some responsibility for the death of a child, was considerably off-message. Even though news of the pardon was only reported in independent news outlets, public opinion polls indicated that outrage extended deep into Orbán’s base. Novák’s popularity began plummeting. A week after the news broke, she resigned.
The following day, two independent online news sites, Direkt36 and Telex, published a collaborative investigative report alleging that the push for the pardon had come from the chief bishop of Hungary’s Reformed Church, a man named Zoltán Balog. Balog had worked for six years in Orbán’s government as the minister of human capacities. He stepped down in 2018 and was afterwards elected bishop.
Balog and Novák are widely reported to enjoy an unusually close personal relationship. As recently as last year they traveled together on a lengthy trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea, despite the fact that Balog was no longer in the government. According to Direkt36, Balog interjected himself regularly into the president’s affairs, to the annoyance of her staff. He apparently pushed heavily for the pardon and—as the report quotes an unnamed staffer as saying—“Kate would do anything for him.”
Responding to growing pressure, Balog eventually offered to resign his position as president of his church’s synod, but refused to step down from the bishop’s office, plunging the Hungarian Reformed Church into crisis.
An Elite Defection
KATALIN NOVÁK WAS NOT THE ONLY PERSON in Orbán’s party, Fidesz, made to walk the plank. Another popular female politician, Judit Varga, was also tossed overboard. Varga had been minister of justice at the time of the pardon and had countersigned for it. She withdrew from public life within minutes of Novák’s resignation.
What happened next turned this scandal into a political earthquake. Just hours after Varga’s resignation, her ex-husband, Péter Magyar, announced on his Facebook page that he was severing all connections with Fidesz. “I don’t for one minute want to be part of a system in which the people who are truly responsible hide behind women’s skirts,” he wrote. As the former husband of a prominent Hungarian politician, Magyar moved among the upper echelons of Fidesz. Trained as a lawyer himself, he had worked as a diplomat, and as the CEO of a number of enterprises owned by the Hungarian state.
Such a high-level defection from Orbán’s inner ranks was simply stunning. On February 11, the day after his Facebook announcement, Magyar gave an extended interview to an independent news magazine show on YouTube called Partizán. The interview has been viewed 2.4 million times, a number that surpasses 20 percent of the Hungarian population.
Having just stepped into public life, Magyar is still unknown and somewhat of an enigma. On the one hand, he is extraordinarily self-possessed, sharp, tough, articulate, and strikingly patriotic. On the other hand, he often comes off as idealistic and naïve. Like an escapee from Plato’s cave, only slowly adjusting to the light and coming to recognize the extent of his previous illusions, Magyar is a man who still doesn’t fully understand the nature of the political regime he’s turned his back on.
The world Magyar described in his Partizán interview aligned closely with what external critics of the Orbán regime have called a mafia state. Magyar alleged that, at the time he was separating from Varga, he had been summoned to a meeting with a high-ranking government minister. The minister offered friendly advice about how best to arrange things, suggesting that Magyar work abroad as a diplomat. But Magyar didn’t want to move away from his children. Some days later, government investigators showed up at Magyar’s business, announced they were conducting an investigation, and confiscated all the computers. Magyar called a friend in the government to ask what was going on. He was told not to worry. It was just a warning. So long as his divorce went smoothly, there wouldn’t be any problems.
But even after relating this story, Magyar appeared to accept the government’s general modus operandi as legitimate. In response to questions about Orbán’s propaganda minister, a man who supervises both the government media and domestic intelligence, Magyar said, “Let’s not pretend we’re saints, every government has people who are responsible for fixing things.” Asked about the fact that Orbán’s government had planted spyware on the phones of opposition figures and journalists, he replied that every government does the same. Politics, he said, is “about you getting hold of power.” Democracy and the rule of law are unimportant slogans that obscure what really matters, namely, what a government achieves.
What bothered him about Orbán’s regime was the unbridled greed and corruption. “When you realize that half of the country is in the hands of a couple families, where are you supposed to go?” he asked. He told how once, when driving through Budapest, one of his children asked who owned a large hotel they were passing by. Passing another hotel, the child asked who owned that one. Magyar said to the child, “Don’t ask again, because the same person owns all of them.” And that’s just the hotels, he added, that’s not the office buildings, the banks, and the businesses. In other words, Magyar was suggesting, half the country was owned by Orbán’s family.
Still, when it came to explaining the causes of Hungarian kleptocracy, Magyar’s explanations were risible. Rather than considering the possibility that the dismantling of democratic institutions had something to do with it, Magyar blamed the political opposition. “The biggest problem right now in Hungary is that there’s no functioning opposition able to govern, which could offer a credible competitive alternative. If there were, the government wouldn’t operate the way it does.”
“You can’t have a good tennis match unless you have two good players,” he said.
But, to stick with the metaphor, even Roger Federer couldn’t beat an unworthy opponent if he were forced to play without a racket. Hungary’s weak opposition isn’t the result of random misfortune. From the rewriting of electoral laws, to legal harassment of opposition parties, to enormous disparities in financing, to government control of the media, Orbán has created a system in which a viable opposition cannot emerge. That Magyar cannot see this suggests that he does not understand the nature and importance of democratic institutions.
The scandal reverberates
A FEW DAYS AFTER MAGYAR’S INTERVIEW, a group of Hungarian YouTube influencers announced they were coordinating a demonstration in Budapest. Organized on a Friday night, the event attracted an enormous crowd of young people—estimates vary from 50,000 to 150,000 people. Meanwhile, according to recent polling, 97 percent of the Hungarian population is familiar with the pedophile scandal, and a majority of voters hold Viktor Orbán responsible. More than two-thirds of the population said they had heard of Péter Magyar. Perhaps most surprising, 13 percent of voters said they were either certain or highly likely to vote for Magyar were he to run for office. Another 20 percent said they would consider voting for him.
No doubt reading the polls, Magyar announced he would be holding a rally on March 15. Very likely as a response, Orbán announced he would be commemorating March 15 in Budapest this year. The prime minister was not about to be upstaged.
Orbán’s rally took place in the morning. Speaking in front of the Hungarian National Museum before an audience that needed admission tickets, Orbán went on the attack with a speech best described as frightening. After referring to Brussels as an empire that wants to force migrants on Hungarians and change the gender of their children, Orbán turned his attention to traitors, to those who “have written themselves out of history, who have violated their oaths to serve the nation, who treacherously stab their nation in the back.” The unnamed target of these remarks was clearly Magyar—but perhaps beyond Magyar, anyone within Fidesz who sympathizes with Magyar and has also been contemplating defection.
Magyar’s rally took place in the afternoon. By every account it was larger than Orbán’s. The rally began with videos from 1989. Later, a well-known actor recited a poem by Sándor Petőfi. Petőfi was killed in battle during the revolution of 1848, defending his country against Russian troops advancing to occupy his country. His poem, “National Song,” is memorized by every Hungarian school child:
Stand up, Hungarian, the nation calls
The time is now or not at all
Slavery or freedom, find your voice
That’s the question
Make your choice!
Then Magyar himself, a green politician no one had heard of five weeks ago, standing in front of tens of thousands of people, delivered a very good political speech.
Unlike Orbán, Magyar emphasized national unity. “Let’s show them that we—conservatives, middle-class democrats, social democrats, liberals—are first of all Hungarians. . . . The Hungarian people aren’t interested in unnecessary ideological and social divisions.” At the end, Magyar announced he was founding a civil organization that would soon register a new political party with the name “Stand Up Hungarians.”
At the same time, Magyar made clear that he did not intend to work with the opposition parties, which he considers part of the broken system that is oppressing Hungarians. His intention, as best one can tell, is to build a new center of political power that can knock Orbán out of power without cooperating with the rest of the opposition. Even as he laid out this farfetched plan, Magyar assured the crowd that Orbán could be removed through democratic elections.
About this last point, many observers of Hungary, myself included, would disagree. Although venturing predictions is a fool’s game, a fool might venture three possible forecasts for Hungary. Either the regime collapses internally under the strain of some unmanageable crisis—maybe EU money really does dry up, or perhaps Orbán, who some people speculate is unhealthy, unexpectedly dies. Or the regime is brought down by a color revolution apart from elections—although conditions are not yet ripe for that. Or, if geopolitical conditions change, Hungary converts to a full-fledged dictatorship.
Orbán’s regime, having secured its hold on power and stolen all the wealth to be had, has grown brittle. The country faces numerous imposing challenges: a crumbling health-care system, ongoing crises in education, a declining birth rate and large-scale emigration, a weak currency and stagnating economy, an ongoing conflict with the EU that threatens to freeze European subsidies, increasingly open diplomatic clashes with the United States, and complete isolation within NATO. Perhaps sooner rather than later, these problems will come to head.
Péter Magyar’s unexpected and meteoric rise is a symptom of Hungary’s deep crisis. Something has shifted in the country. There’s been a political earthquake of sorts, although one measuring only a few points on the Richter scale.
Magyar may not be the solution to Hungary’s crisis. But he has harnessed the outrage unleashed by the pedophilia scandal; he has re-energized the political opposition; and he has given people hope. At the moment in Hungary, that’s all one can ask for.
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