In Italy, one hundred days is usually the time frame used to take stock of the very first days of a new government, a President of the Republic, and, more generally, a new political direction. A little more than 100 days after Péter Magyar came to power in Hungary—with the spotlight of the major European media now definitively turned away from the country—we can attempt a brief summary of what has happened in Hungarian politics during the months of this sweltering summer, which is now nearly over.
A change of government or a regime change?
In today’s politics, as we know, vocabulary always holds particular importance, and any radical change that claims to be such is always announced first through communication, even before the measures are actually (and possibly) taken. From this perspective, the rise to power of Magyar and his brand-new Party of Respect and Freedom (TISZA) was no exception. On the evening of April 12, with the polls closed for just over an hour and the outcome now very clear, addressing an ecstatic crowd along the Budapest riverfront, Magyar spoke of his electoral victory as “a regime change.” The end of the Orbán era—which had lasted uninterrupted since 2010 (following a first term in office from 1998 to 2002)—was thus presented not as a mere change of leadership between two political forces but as a return to democracy in Hungary and the country’s return to the status of a “normal country.”
In truth, the rhetoric of regime change had already largely permeated TISZA’s rhetoric during the hard-fought but, all things considered, fair election campaign, with the slogan Most vagy soha! (“Now or never!”), taken directly from the 1848 anti-Habsburg Revolution, when the national poet Sándor Petőfi included it in the patriotic anthem Nemzeti dal (National Song) to call the Magyar people to arms against the foreign occupier and the weak local institutions that were collaborating with Vienna. The slogan—a foundational part, like the entire Nemzeti dal, of Hungary’s cultural and historical heritage—had also been reused during the anti-communist uprising of 1956, when, together with the lesser-known Ruszkik háza (“Russians, go home!”, which Magyar also invoked against what he termed Orbán’s “pro-Russian” policy), was shouted from the burning barricades of Budapest, Csepel, and Mosonmagyaróvár.
Furthermore, speaking of regime change allowed Magyar not only to draw a connection to two pivotal events in national history but also to reestablish ties with events much closer to our own time, in particular the peaceful uprisings that marked the beginning of the end of the Warsaw Pact, such as those in East Germany between 1989 and 1991 and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989—events that are chronologically distant for us but are, in fact, still deeply felt beyond the old Iron Curtain. While Orbán and FIDESZ presented themselves as the guarantors of stability and continuity, Magyar managed to position himself—thanks in part to a highly effective image and communication strategy—as a genuine alternative to what, until just a couple of years earlier, had been his own party.
A New Constitution or a New Hungary?
But speaking of a regime change rather than a change of government is a lexical choice whose significance extends far beyond that of a mere electoral victory—albeit one achieved with unequivocal numbers. Changing the regime means, in fact, not only assuming the position of the deposed leader but also establishing a new regime. It should be noted that the term “regime” is not being used here with the pejorative connotations it often carries today: a regime can very well be democratic, just as there can be authoritarian ones. However, if the intention is to change the regime—replacing a decrepit one (or one presumed to be so) with a new one—it becomes imperative to reform the state from top to bottom, radically transforming its character both in terms of the form taken by its institutions and with regard to the leaders and officials who run them. All of this has been and remains—openly—an objective of the new Hungarian prime minister.
In this regard, it should be noted that TISZA managed to win more than two-thirds of the seats in the Országgyűlés, the Hungarian national parliament, and would therefore, according to the constitution enacted by Viktor Orbán in 2012, have the power to draft a new one—a commitment that Magyar, moreover, solemnly undertook during his victorious election campaign. The drafting of a new Fundamental Law (Magyarország Alaptörvénye), however, quickly fell off the new government’s agenda, as it had most likely assumed it would win but not by such a landslide. According to many assessments, in fact, drafting a new constitution would have required such a massive amount of work that it would have prevented the new government from addressing other issues, thus convincing Magyar to focus only on certain points deemed critical in the “Orbán Constitution” without rewriting it from scratch. While this approach may seem to contradict the rhetoric of regime change, it is also important to remember that Hungary—a country that only transitioned to democracy in 1989—managed to transform itself into a democratic state by amending only certain parts of the old constitution countersigned by Stalin in 1949, while keeping that constitution in effect for another twenty-three years. For more radical changes—according to Tisza—there will be time later.
Militant Democracy: The Polish Example
When it comes to actual changes in Magyar’s new Hungary, the feeling is that the question has been asked too soon. The question in question here is “what has changed?”. A little over one hundred days after a new government took office, the most common (and most appropriate) response is to let the leaders do their work and return to this same question later. However, it would be false to claim that nothing has changed in Hungary in recent months. While things themselves may not have changed, it is certainly true that many faces have changed, and this is undoubtedly noteworthy—both for the facts themselves and, above all, for the manner in which they have unfolded. As already noted, the rhetoric of regime change—especially when backed by a strong electoral mandate—grants a government such leeway and confidence that it can carry out, and above all justify, actions that skirt the boundaries of legality or sometimes even cross them. This is the Polish model defined by Warsaw’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk as “militant democracy,” that is, a democratic practice which, compelled by the emergency of having to hastily amend a “regime” (in Poland, this referred to the PiS led by the elderly Jarosław Kaczyński and his then-heir apparent, Mateusz Morawiecki), could not afford to linger over complying with all the cumbersome constraints imposed by the rule of law.
In this regard, it should be noted that Poland, governed by the liberal-progressive Koalicja Obywatelska and its left-wing allies, was from the very beginning the true sponsor of Péter Magyar; the latter had visited the Polish capital several times even before the election to seek advice from the local prime minister, and it was in Warsaw, following his victory, that he made his first state visit as incumbent prime minister.
A change of guard or vae victis?
From a rhetorical standpoint, what we see today in Budapest closely resembles what we’ve been seeing in Warsaw for several years now. To an outside observer, the feeling of witnessing a goulash version of Tusk’s rise to power is very strong. From the perspective of the founding values of the nations in question, neither Tusk nor Magyar has, in fact, promised or implemented any major upheavals. What has been touted in Italy—and elsewhere—as a “woke” and “rainbow” victory over an identitarian, right-wing autocracy is, quite simply, a false image. Nothing has changed in Warsaw, nor will anything change in Budapest, as far as immigration, patriotic education, and, more generally, “national sentiment” are concerned; rather, everything must change—as already mentioned—in terms of who the key players are. From this perspective, both Warsaw and Budapest are capitals immune to the kind of transformational “Gattopardo-style” maneuvers to which Italian politics has accustomed us since the days of the struggle for independence, and while it is certainly true and normal for a government to replace the representatives of the previous ruling party, it is certainly less common for this to occur even outside the standard elected institutions, targeting anyone who in the past has shown themselves to be a friend or general sympathizer of the predecessor’s party.
In Hungary, the purge began by targeting none other than President Tamás Sulyok, who had been in office since 2024 and was regarded by Magyar as a friend of Orbán’s “corrupt and autocratic” regime. Although he had not completed his term and had not been found guilty of any crime, Sulyok was removed (and replaced with former European Court of Human Rights judge András Bálint Baka) not through a proper impeachment procedure—which the Hungarian constitution would require in this case—but by a simple decree declaring the immediate end of his term; a procedure that goes far beyond the bounds of legality and has even been criticized by Amnesty International, an NGO that certainly cannot easily be accused of being close to the Orbán system.
The former prime minister himself was the target of a brand-new ad personam law, which retroactively bars anyone who has already served as prime minister for more than two consecutive terms from running for office. Since the only Hungarian political figure who fits this profile is Viktor Orbán himself, the law has been dubbed “Lex Orbán.” But what Magyar has grandly renamed Operation Purgatory certainly does not stop there. With “anti-corruption” rhetoric that strongly reminds Italian observers of the early days of the Five Star Movement, TISZA intends to sweep away most of FIDESZ’s most experienced parliamentarians by passing a new law imposing a two-term limit on lawmakers, whose salaries have, moreover, been nearly halved; Since TISZA is a brand-new party with very few actual members (no more than three thousand), there is a strong suspicion that what we are seeing here is not so much an anti-corruption law as a Lex FIDESZ.
The Breakup of the Media
The media, too, are not—and will not be—immune to Operation Purgatory. Magyar had in fact declared from the very beginning that public radio and television and the state media’s online portals were compromised by Orbán and, as such, needed to be privatized or at least thoroughly reformed. To understand what is meant by “reform” in this context, we must once again look to Warsaw, where public media outlets have been more or less “cleansed” of figures unwelcome to Tusk because they were suspected of being close to the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. Websites such as hirado.hu have been taken offline, and in their place appears a message that reads:
Dear visitor,
Our mission is to comprehensively review the public media’s online news service.
We ask for your understanding and patience during this period as we work to create independent and credible public media. Thank you
All this while Duna Media, the Hungarian broadcast equivalent of RAI, was first blocked and then dissolved by decree, set to be replaced this coming October by the new Hungarian Radio and Television (Magyar Rádió és Televízió). The theatrical manner of the shutdown, which took place on July 7, with a black screen appearing suddenly and a message apologizing for having reported false and biased information up to that point, is, moreover, an exact replica of the identical Polish measure adopted by the Warsaw government in December 2023.
On the left is the screen that appeared on Polish national television in December 2023, with the message “The Sejm has approved a resolution on the restoration of the rule of law and on the independence and reliability of public media.”; on the right is the screen that appeared on July 7 on Hungarian national television with the message “Public media cannot lie. We apologize for having done so for many years! Public media are now changing so that in the future they will be independent and credible. News coverage is temporarily suspended.”
On the left is the screen that appeared on Polish national television in December 2023, with the message “The Sejm has approved a resolution on the restoration of the rule of law and on the independence and reliability of public media.”; on the right is the screen that appeared on July 7 on Hungarian national television with the message “Public media cannot lie. We apologize for having done so for many years! Public media are now changing so that in the future they will be independent and credible. News coverage is temporarily suspended.”
Justice: Renewal or Purge?
Non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and research centers deemed close to FIDESZ and the former prime minister will face—and in some cases are already facing—the same treatment. All of these entities, deemed “accomplices” of the “fallen regime,” have had all public funding they received cut off; others will face dissolution, while the “luckiest” ones—such as the state-run humanitarian organization Hungary Helps, which assists persecuted Christians around the world—will “only” see their entire leadership replaced.
The judiciary, for its part, will not stand idly by. Many of these organizations are, in fact, under investigation as authorities seek evidence of alleged corruption from which they are said to have benefited (or which they are alleged to have facilitated) during the sixteen years of the recently concluded “Orbán Era.” In this regard, many investigations have already begun, in a manner described as intimidating by those targeted, such as the well-known conservative intellectual and writer Mária Schmidt, director of the Museum of Terror in Budapest (dedicated to the memory of the victims of communist atrocities and the Arrow Cross Party), who recently reported an intimidating visit by law enforcement to the museum’s offices following an anonymous tip.
Even the Constitutional Court has not been spared: four judges of the high court, including its president, Péter Polt, have in fact been removed from office after a new law passed by the executive branch mandated that judges of the Budapest Constitutional Court must retire upon reaching the age of seventy. The government’s relentless campaign against FIDESZ and its supporters has led the conservative party itself—long a beacon for all European conservatives—to wonder whether it might be better to dissolve and re-emerge under a new name, in order to better defend itself against attacks and revitalize its image.
Many challenges still to be overcome
Grappling with “Operation Purgatory,” the current Hungarian government has had little time to address all other issues, as evidenced by the critical summer now drawing to a close.
In fact, Hungary—along with Spain, France, and Italy—was one of the countries hardest hit by the five heat waves that have occurred in succession over the past three months. The low water levels of the Danube forced the shutdown of the Paks nuclear power plant (which produces 47% of the country’s electricity), consequently leaving large areas of the country without electricity for air conditioning and lighting.
In conclusion, we will have to wait longer to determine whether we are looking at a new Hungary or merely a rehash—with a few new faces—of the old one. The prospects, however, as far as the rule of law and pluralism are concerned, might be more encouraging.
[photo © EU, 2026 CC BY 4.0]
