Judge removed by Orbán elected Hungarian president in historic shift

András Baka walked into the Hungarian parliament chamber on a summer afternoon in 2026 and was elected president by a vote of 140 to 6. At seventy-three, the former Supreme Court chief had spent nearly two decades as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He was not a politician. He had never sought high office. Yet here he was, about to become the symbolic head of a nation in the midst of tearing itself apart and rebuilding.

The irony was sharp enough to cut. Fifteen years earlier, in 2011, Orbán's government had removed Baka from his post as president of the Supreme Court precisely because he had tried to stop them from dismantling the rule of law. Now, with Orbán's political machine in ruins and a new government under Prime Minister Péter Magyar in power since May, Baka was being asked to oversee the demolition of everything Orbán had built. The Hungarian presidency is largely ceremonial—a figurehead role—but Baka's tenure promised to be anything but quiet.

The new Magyar government had wasted no time. In just three months, they had passed twenty-seven laws and two constitutional amendments. The states of emergency that Orbán had declared and renewed—first for migrants, then for Covid, then for the war in Ukraine—were all cancelled, stripping away the legal cover he had used to govern by decree. The Sovereignty Protection Office, the instrument Fidesz had wielded against critical journalists and NGOs, was abolished. In its place came a National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, armed with sweeping powers to investigate and prosecute officials accused of stealing state funds under the old regime. Public service radio and television had gone dark on July 9th, their news programmes being remade from the ground up, officially to restore independence from what had been little more than state propaganda.

Two constitutional amendments had reshaped the basic rules of power. The first limited the prime minister to two terms in office and members of parliament to three. The second restored the Constitutional Court's ability to oversee acts of parliament—a power Fidesz had stripped away. All fifty-one Fidesz MPs walked out of the chamber before Baka's election, in protest at the removal of their preferred candidate, Tamás Sulyok, from the presidency the month before. The party accused the Tisza government of establishing a new tyranny. The accusation carried a bitter historical weight: Fidesz itself had been the architect of the very erosion of democratic norms it now condemned.

Baka's inaugural speech struck a careful note. "We cannot build the new Hungary on revenge," he told parliament. He acknowledged the fracture running through the country: "The majority of society now feels a sense of liberation and hope. Others feel disappointment and uncertainty. In a democratic society, this is not an anomaly, but a natural state of affairs." He promised the broadest possible debate on the writing of a new constitution to replace Orbán's 2011 document. He spoke of the state as existing for the people, not for itself.

But there was a complication. In a BBC interview before he was asked to take the presidency, Baka had made clear his opposition to term limits for MPs. He saw them as an intrusion on the fundamental right of voters to choose their representatives freely. The Tisza government, which had just written those very limits into the constitution, might have assumed they were getting a compliant figurehead. They may have miscalculated. Baka was not a political man, he had said—he had come to politics through his professional, legal way of thinking. That distinction mattered. A judge trained to read law closely and think independently was not the same as a politician trained to follow the party line.

Under the constitutional amendment that made his presidency possible, Baka would likely serve only until the new constitution came into force, or for a maximum of five years. He was a transitional figure, a bridge between the Orbán era and whatever came next. But bridges, by their nature, connect two sides. And Baka had already shown he was willing to stand in the middle and push back against the Hungarian tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a single leader. The real test of his presidency would come when the government's own ambitions collided with his commitment to the rule of law.