Hungary’s Prime Minister has put his head of state to a choice with one outcome: sign the text that removes him, or be removed for refusing.
Tamás Sulyok would either “submit his resignation now, or sign this constitutional amendment within five days”, Magyar told a press conference. Otherwise impeachment would follow and the Speaker would sign for him.
Sulyok has refused. “I have no reason to resign; there is no constitutional basis for my removal,” he said.
Parliament adopted the seventeenth amendment on July 13 by 139 votes to six. Fidesz and its Christian Democrat allies boycotted the sitting; 54 MPs took no part.
AN AMENDMENT WITH ONE NAME ON IT
The operative clause is a single transitional sentence ending the mandate of the President in office the day after the amendment takes effect.
The Basic Law already provides a route: Article 13 allows impeachment for an intentional violation of the law, decided by the Constitutional Court.
The amendment does not repeal that route. It goes around it, framing the removal not as a finding of misconduct but as an exercise of the extraordinary mandate of a two-thirds majority.
No European state has removed a sitting head of state through a constitutional clause written for him.
Sulyok has argued that removing a president for political reasons by tailor-made provision is unprecedented in Europe and breaks the separation of powers. Fidesz called it unprecedented too.
The amendment does not follow a precedent. It makes one, and any future majority may use it.
The office is unprecedented. The technique is not.
In 2011 Orbán’s majority used transitional provisions to end the mandate of Supreme Court president András Baka, a former judge of the European Court of Human Rights, weeks after he criticised its judicial reforms. Strasbourg’s Grand Chamber found against Hungary in 2016, holding that constitutional form does not shield a state when the substance is removing a named office-holder.
The Council of Europe then asked Hungary for safeguards against ad hominem constitutional measures, the Helsinki Committee recorded. They never arrived.
THE MANDATE ARGUMENT
Magyar’s defence is arithmetic: the people are the ultimate source of power, and Tisza asked for this mandate and got it.
“If the yardstick moves with the majority, it is not a yardstick,” Garayová wrote. She also observed that Magyar spent 12 years in senior posts in Fidesz-linked state institutions, the association treated as disqualifying when it attaches to Sulyok.
The amendment would also bar anyone who has served 12 years from standing again. Every Tisza MP entered parliament for the first time in May, so it falls on the opposition alone. Consultation ran five days; Hungarian law sets eight.
Amnesty International, which agrees Sulyok should go and has criticised the new government’s rule-of-law record, called the method “not okay”.
“Hungary has the right to resist. And we will do so,” Viktor Orbán wrote on Facebook after the vote. A president installed unlawfully could not be lawful, the Fidesz leader added, and nor could his decisions.
The phrase is not loose talk. Article C of the Basic Law says no one may act with the aim of acquiring or exercising power by force, and that “everyone shall have the right and obligation to resist such attempts in a lawful way”.
The clause passed from the 1989 constitution into the Fundamental Law Orbán’s majority adopted in 2011, the text Magyar is amending now. Its wording also bounds him: resistance by lawful means.
BRUSSELS’ MAN
Magyar’s charge against Sulyok is that he was Orbán’s puppet. Fidesz returns the compliment, and the record is public.
European People’s Party (EPP) President Manfred Weber went to Budapest in 2024 to recruit Magyar, and said by that October he wanted him leading Hungary. “The trust we invested in him is paying off,” Weber said in an interview after the election, calling the result a return on that investment.
Asked on July 7 whether the changes were democratic, Weber did not criticise them. Magyar had a clear mandate and was carrying it out, he said: “I fully support his effort to deliver everything he promised to Hungarian citizens”.
Weber called for the Article 7 procedure against Hungary to be wound up within a fortnight of the April vote. The EP triggered it in 2018 and condemned democratic backsliding in Budapest as late as November 2025.
Its Conference of Presidents refused a debate on rule-of-law concerns under the new government on July 2, with left-wing groups and the EPP voting it down. Kinga Gál of the Patriots for Europe group said the European Commission’s silence was “deafening”.
“We can already feel a strong wind of change across Hungary,” Ursula von der Leyen said after meeting Magyar on May 29. Budapest must satisfy the EC by the end of August to unlock €16.4 billion in frozen funds.
“The new Prime Minister has received a blank cheque,” Fidesz MEP Csaba Dömötör told Brussels Signal, adding that it was unclear what Brussels expected in return. The institutions that talked about Hungarian democracy for years have gone quiet, he said, which showed the rule of law had been leverage, not a standard. Magyar’s government rejects that, arguing the package modernises Hungary’s constitutional framework and targets no one.
The Venice Commission, which Sulyok asked to examine the amendment, will not discuss it until October. The money is due before then.
