Hungary’s prosecutor general has resigned under sustained pressure from Prime Minister Péter Magyar, who had publicly described him as a puppet of former prime minister Viktor Orbán. Gábor Bálint Nagy said on July 22 that he had asked for his mandate to end on August 25.
In a statement published by the prosecution service, Nagy said the independence of the judiciary and of the prosecution was a pillar of any democratic system. He argued the office must not become an instrument in the struggles of political actors or a stage for daily power games.
Nagy said the attacks directed at him had “gone far beyond the bounds of acceptable professional and public debate”. He denied that he or his family had any party links, noting he had held the post for little more than a year.
He also warned that public figures who demanded the removal of a prosecutor general because criminal proceedings were not going as they had hoped sent a deeply negative signal. Any future officeholder, he said, would fear dismissal for failing to meet political expectations.
Magyar welcomed the departure within minutes, writing on Facebook that the country had been freed from “another Orbán puppet who obstructed the change of system”.
Since his Respect and Freedom (Tisza) party won a two-thirds majority in the April 12 election, the Prime Minister has demanded that senior officials appointed under Orbán stand down, setting a deadline of May 31. Nagy was named alongside Tamás Sulyok, whose term as head of state ended this month.
Parliament approved a 17th amendment to the Fundamental Law on July 13 by 139 votes to six, with Fidesz and its Christian Democrat allies boycotting. The measure closed Sulyok’s mandate and cut short the Constitutional Court terms of four judges, among them Nagy’s predecessor Péter Polt.
Nagy served as Polt’s cabinet chief before succeeding him in June 2025 on a nine-year term. Speaker Ágnes Forsthoffer, who has taken on presidential duties, had been urged by Magyar to put Nagy’s removal to Parliament.
Fidesz parliamentary group leader János Bóka called the resignation “a protest against the Tisza-style political autocracy being built in Hungary”. Amnesty International Hungary, a long-standing critic of Orbán, said the Prime Minister had no business pressuring the acting head of state and called for a transparent parliamentary procedure.
The announcement came a day after investigators raided a data centre hosting Fidesz servers as part of a corruption inquiry into culture grants. The European Commission remains in talks with Budapest over frozen European Union funds tied to rule-of-law conditions.
