Hungary's anti-corruption push gains momentum with high-profile arrests

Peter Magyar arrived at the Hungarian parliament building as prime minister with a single, unambiguous mission: to dismantle what he called Viktor Orban's "mafia state." During his election campaign, he had promised a "program for the road to prison." By late June 2026, he had formalized this pledge into "Operation Purgatory," a government initiative designed to investigate corruption from the Orban era, recover stolen assets, and prosecute those responsible. The rhetoric was sharp and uncompromising. The reality, three months in, had been quieter—some funding streams to Orban-aligned businessmen had been cut, a handful of unknown figures had been questioned, and an asset recovery agency had been established but not yet activated. Then, on a Monday in late September, the machinery finally moved.

Parliament lifted the immunity of two prominent figures from Orban's government. Balazs Hanko, who had served as minister for culture and innovation under Orban and now held a seat in the opposition Fidesz party, faced allegations that he had unlawfully diverted approximately 50 million euros from the National Cultural Fund—money he had overseen as minister—in 2025 and 2026. Some of those funds, prosecutors alleged, had been earmarked for election campaigns. Miklos Sesztak, a former development minister now representing the Christian Democratic People's Party, a longtime Fidesz affiliate, faced far graver charges: he allegedly accepted around 30 million euros in bribes between 2015 and 2018, payments connected to contracts involving the state-owned bus company Volanbusz and construction projects. Sesztak was among the wealthiest lawmakers in Hungary and had spent more than a decade at the center of personal corruption scandals—a pattern that had defined the Orban system itself.

Sesztak went directly to the prosecutor's office after his immunity was stripped and was placed in pretrial detention. Hanko's departure was more theatrical. He arrived at Parliament that Monday morning with his wife and four teenage children. After his immunity was lifted, he announced he would wait for the authorities to act—and then remained inside the building. Only after the Parliament Speaker formally ordered him to leave in writing, and after he received a summons from prosecutors, did he exit, flanked by his family and Fidesz lawmakers who denounced what they called Magyar's "arbitrary rule." The entire scene was livestreamed on Viktor Orban's Facebook page. As Hanko said goodbye to his family outside the building, his SUV driver apparently mistook the moment and drove away without him. Hanko ran after the vehicle. The livestream cut out. By evening, Hungarian media reported that Hanko, too, had been taken into pretrial detention.

That same afternoon, Magyar delivered a speech in Parliament addressing both cases. His own immunity had been lifted hours earlier—over a case classified in official records as theft. In June 2024, Magyar had taken a phone from a man filming him without permission at a nightclub and thrown it into the Danube River, where it was later recovered. Magyar had explicitly requested that his immunity be lifted, a calculated move designed to demonstrate that the same legal standards applied to everyone, including the prime minister himself. The risk was real: if convicted, he could lose his parliamentary seat. In his speech, he offered Fidesz and KDNP lawmakers a stark arithmetic: "How many hundreds of thousands of phones would you have to throw into the Danube to come close to the trillions allegedly stolen by the Fidesz-KDNP mafia?"

The arrests marked the first significant moment in Magyar's promised reckoning with the Orban system, but they also exposed the tensions embedded in that promise. Magyar had spoken forcefully about reforming Hungary's justice system, praising rank-and-file judges and prosecutors while accusing the leadership of the prosecutor's office of having been "collaborators of the Orban system." This criticism had become concrete in a dispute over the appointment of a new prosecutor general. The Tisza Party, which holds a two-thirds parliamentary majority, had rejected the candidate proposed by President Andras Baka, citing concerns that the candidate's brother worked for the Office for Constitutional Protection and was a suspect in a politically sensitive investigation known as the "Gold Convoy" affair. In March 2026, Orban had ordered the detention of a legal Ukrainian money shipment; the escorts were arrested dramatically, and cash and gold bars were seized. Orban and other Fidesz politicians had indirectly accused Magyar's Tisza Party of receiving Ukrainian funding. Several people involved in the operation now faced investigation for abuse of office, and Orban himself could eventually be drawn into the proceedings.

Magyar's involvement in these disputes—his public criticism of prosecutors, his role in blocking judicial appointments—had created an impression that he was getting ahead of judicial decisions or becoming too deeply involved in cases that should be independent. Yet the pressure from below was immense. A recent poll found that a large majority of Hungarians viewed the former Orban government as "systemically corrupt" and a "mafia state." Public discourse frequently returned to a single phrase: people wanted to "hear the handcuffs click." The hunger for accountability was real and widespread. At the same time, prominent voices—including attorney Gyorgy Magyar, who had represented people in numerous human rights and rule-of-law cases under Orban—were calling for restraint. He urged "prudence, patience, calm, discipline, and professionalism" in handling the reckoning. The challenge facing Magyar's government was acute: how to satisfy legitimate demands for justice while maintaining the independence and integrity of the courts. Whether "Operation Purgatory" would become genuine reform or political theater remained an open question.