How to Rebuild Hungarian Democracy

The scale of illiberal inheritance is vast. Outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orban rebuilt the state around a single party, entrenching Fidesz’s power by replacing the country’s 1949 constitution with the 2011 Fundamental Law. The judiciary was systematically captured through packed courts and an untouchable prosecutor general. Public media became a state-controlled propaganda apparatus, reinforced by the surveillance of journalists, civil servants, and opposition figures. Civil society faced Russian-style legal constraints and regulatory harassment, while the Central European University was forced to relocate to Vienna. State contracts were funneled to regime-allied oligarchs, and the bureaucracy, diplomatic corps, and intelligence services were hollowed out through purges of career professionals and the installation of party loyalists.

Magyar’s supermajority gives him the constitutional power to undo all of this. The electoral system engineered by Orban to entrench his own rule has now been turned against him; the same mechanism that supercharged Fidesz’s slim pluralities into supermajorities has handed Magyar the tools to dismantle the entire edifice. But there are numerous traps ahead, and how the future prime minister navigates them will determine whether Hungary’s transition produces durable democratic institutions or merely replaces one form of majoritarian excess with another. Magyar’s government must resist the temptation of speed without process in three critical areas: judicial reconstitution, public media governance, and anti-corruption enforcement. Meanwhile, the European Union must unfreeze Hungary’s funds to assist with the transition—but only once institutional milestones are verified.

The central challenge for Magyar’s administration will be to find the balance between speed and legitimacy. The new government must act quickly and decisively, using the momentum of the revolutionary moment before it fades. But speed creates its own risks, as demonstrated in Poland: After taking power in 2023, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government moved to dismantle the previous Law and Justice (PiS) party’s control over Polish public media, leading critics—including some sympathetic to the democratic project—to accuse him of using executive power in ways that mirrored PiS’s own methods, creating a legitimacy deficit that Tusk is still managing today. Magyar must learn from this: Every institutional reform must be anchored in a transparent process.

This is especially true for the judiciary, to which Orban appointed loyalists with long-term mandates. Magyar has called on these officials to resign, and some will—but others will not. The temptation will be to legislate their immediate removal. But any process that looks like a political purge will be weaponized by Fidesz, challenged in European courts, and cited by illiberal governments as proof that “the other side does it, too.” The alternative is harder but more durable: Magyar’s government must establish a transparent, consistently applied appointment process grounded in Council of Europe standards, and accept that full reconstitution may take years. Judges who enabled institutional abuse should face accountability through principled proceedings, but those who served honorably should not be subject to blanket purges based solely on their appointment under Orban. Hungary must demonstrate that the rule of law it seeks to restore applies equally to the restoration process itself.

Another task for the incoming government is to restore the independence of public media. Hungary’s state broadcaster, MTVA, was structurally designed as a government instrument under Orban: Fidesz controlled roughly 80 percent of Hungary’s media resources. In 2018, the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA) consolidated hundreds of private television, radio, and wire services into one conglomerate. Led by a board of regime loyalists, KESMA produced content indistinguishable from Fidesz campaign material. State and KESMA media outlets routinely aired stories subsequently ruled defamatory by courts.

In this realm, Magyar must innovate, not just restore. Simply replacing the KESMA board with Tisza-friendly appointees would replicate the problem with different beneficiaries. Instead, Hungary needs an entirely new governance model. Germany’s public broadcasting councils, which include representatives from civil society, trade unions, and cultural institutions alongside political appointees, offer one model; the British Broadcasting Corporation’s former trust structure, which separated editorial decisions from government and commercial pressures, offers another. While neither model maps perfectly onto Hungary, the principle is clear: Public media governance must be designed for perpetuity, not optimized for the current regime. Meanwhile, investigations into whether the original consolidation of independent media companies violated EU state aid rules can begin.

Finally, Magyar’s government must confront the corruption that was the organizing principle of Orban’s system. For 16 years, public procurement was weaponized to enrich a small circle of regime-allied oligarchs, while billions in EU funds were diverted through rigged tenders. The regime’s beneficiaries still control vast economic resources and will use them to sabotage the transition. Oligarchs who owe their fortunes to Fidesz have every incentive to fund obstruction, bankroll Orban’s comeback, and spotlight any prosecutorial overreach as evidence of political vengeance.

Magyar has already announced the creation of a National Asset Recovery and Protection Office tasked with reviewing questionable real estate transactions, examining lucrative concession deals, and retroactively auditing major public procurements. He has also pledged to join the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), the EU body that investigates fraud involving European funds (and which Orban deliberately eschewed). EPPO membership would embed independent European prosecutors within Hungary’s own legal system with the exclusive authority to investigate and prosecute fraud involving EU funds—precisely the level of independent oversight that Orban spent years blocking.

But prosecution alone will not unwind 16 years of systemic looting. Hungary should consider a time-limited, voluntary disclosure and asset recovery program offering amnesty in exchange for full public disclosure. Individuals and companies that voluntarily return illicitly obtained assets and cooperate with investigators would receive reduced penalties, while those who do not would face the full weight of criminal prosecution. Hungary must also reclaim public assets—media outlets, real estate, and infrastructure concessions—that were transferred to regime allies through legally dubious mechanisms by launching transparent competition law and state aid investigations.

The European Union is well-positioned to help Magyar’s government with the transition, but it must be measured in its approach. Once again, Poland offers a cautionary tale: Within weeks of taking office, Tusk’s government presented Brussels with a rule-of-law action plan, joined the EPPO, and fulfilled two “super milestones” on judicial independence, prompting the almost-immediate release by the European Commission of 137 billion euros in frozen recovery and cohesion funds.

But these funds were released based on political commitments rather than verified institutional change, and when PiS-backed candidate Karol Nawrocki won the presidential election in June 2025, many of the deeper judicial reforms Tusk had pledged remained unfinished and threatened by the new president’s veto power. The early release, which had been Brussels’s primary leverage, left the EU with fewer tools to support Tusk’s reform agenda when he needed them most. Now, the approximately 32 billion euros at stake for Hungary in recovery funds, cohesion money, and defense loans represents roughly 15 percent of its GDP, an enormous incentive. Used wisely, that leverage has the potential to sustain reform momentum.

Given that legitimacy must temper speed, how long will all of this take? Poland, after almost three years, has not completed its democratic restoration process, and PiS’s capture was shorter and less constitutionally entrenched than Fidesz’s. For Hungary, full judicial reconstitution will take years; rewiring the information ecosystem will take even longer. 16 years of systematic institutional capture cannot be reversed in a single parliamentary term, but what can be established is a legal framework that makes the restoration irreversible: a new constitution drafted through genuine civic participation, independent judicial appointment mechanisms, a public media charter insulated from political interference, and the institutional infrastructure for accountability without vengeance.

Civil society should be the guarantor of this process. The surviving independent organizations, investigative journalists, and civic movements must now become the watchdogs of this new government with the same intensity they brought to Orban’s regime. Democratic restoration fails when the forces that fought for it become co-opted by the government they helped elect. Hungary’s civil society must now hold the new majority accountable, insist that checks on executive power be restored, and resist the seductive assumption that having the “right” people in power means the work is done.

Hungary is about to attempt a feat rarely tried at this scale: the systematic, constitutional dismantling of a competitive authoritarian state from within—by democratic means, under democratic constraints. If it can avoid the traps along the long road ahead, it may offer the world something more valuable than a dramatic election night: a model for how democracies can confront illiberalism without abandoning the rule of law.