Hungary's Parliament Elects Orban Critic Baka as President

Hungary's parliament voted on Tuesday to install Andras Baka, a 73-year-old jurist and longtime critic of Viktor Orban, as the country's next president. The move marks a sharp symbolic break from the Orban era and forms part of Prime Minister Peter Magyar's broader effort to dismantle the institutional legacy of his predecessor, who governed Hungary for most of the past 16 years before losing decisively in April's general elections.

Baka's path to the presidency is itself a story of political reversal. He spent nearly two decades as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights before returning to Hungary in 2009 to lead its Supreme Court. In December 2011, shortly after Orban returned to power, Baka was removed from that role three years before his term was scheduled to end—a move that effectively sidelined him from Hungarian public life. Now, Magyar has brought him back to occupy the country's largely ceremonial but symbolically significant top office.

The parliamentary vote itself was never in doubt. Magyar's TISZA party holds 141 of 199 seats in parliament, a commanding majority born from Hungary's winner-takes-all electoral system. The final tally showed 140 lawmakers voting in favor and six against. Orban's Fidesz party, which holds 52 seats, boycotted the vote in protest—a gesture of defiance that carried no practical weight. Magyar's two-thirds supermajority meant the outcome was predetermined from the start.

But the path to Baka's election revealed the tensions embedded in Magyar's reform agenda. To remove Baka's predecessor, Tamas Sulyok—an Orban appointee installed in 2024—Magyar used that same two-thirds majority to amend the constitution and terminate Sulyok's term early. The irony was not lost on observers. Fidesz condemned the move as tyrannical and illegitimate, while international rights groups noted that it mirrored the very mechanisms Orban had used to consolidate power. Magyar defended it as necessary to pursue the "system change" voters had demanded. The tension between dismantling authoritarianism and using authoritarian tools to do so hung over the proceedings.

At one point, Magyar had considered nominating Judit Polgar, Hungary's celebrated chess grandmaster, to the presidency. Polgar declined, saying she lacked the strength to shoulder the responsibility of uniting a fractured nation, though she pledged to support whoever took the role.

When Baka addressed parliament on Tuesday, he acknowledged the contradiction without directly condemning Sulyok's removal. He told the AFP news agency last month that Hungary had become a "captured state" under Orban, and that officials like Sulyok had been appointed not to check executive power but to ensure the survival of the old system even after electoral defeat. Yet in his parliamentary remarks, Baka struck a notably conciliatory tone. "There is one thing we certainly cannot do: we cannot build the new Hungary on revenge," he said. He pledged to encourage public debate, maintain parliamentary openness, and ensure that constitution-making would never again become the exclusive project of a single political force.

The statement seemed directed as much at his own supporters as at the opposition. It was a signal that while Baka represents a genuine break from the Orban years, he intends to govern the presidency—a largely ceremonial role—as a unifying rather than a partisan office. Whether that conciliatory posture can hold as Magyar pursues deeper institutional reforms remains to be seen.