Hungarian parliament votes to remove president

Hungary’s parliament voted Monday to remove President Tamás Sulyok from office, using Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s new supermajority to target one of the most prominent remaining figures associated with former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The constitutional amendment passed with 139 votes in favor and six against, Al Jazeera reported. The BBC reported that Magyar’s Tisza party used its two-thirds majority to push through the 17th amendment to the constitution, ending the term of Sulyok and the head of the Constitutional Court, Péter Polt.

Sulyok now has five days to sign the amendment or refer it to the Constitutional Court. Magyar has said parliament will launch impeachment proceedings against him if he does not sign it, a step that would automatically suspend him from office. The government has also urged Sulyok to resign to avoid a constitutional crisis.

The vote marked the most dramatic parliamentary confrontation since Magyar’s government took office in early May, following Tisza’s surprise landslide victory over Orbán’s Fidesz party in the April 12 election. The result ended 16 years of Fidesz rule and gave Tisza the power to rewrite key parts of Hungary’s political system.

Sulyok, a former chief of the Constitutional Court, was elected president by parliament in February 2024 after Katalin Novák resigned over her pardon of a man convicted of covering up child sexual abuse. The presidency is largely ceremonial, but the president can approve laws or send them to the Constitutional Court for review.

Magyar had demanded Sulyok’s departure soon after Tisza won its two-thirds majority, calling him “unworthy to embody the unity of the Hungarian nation,” according to Al Jazeera. In June, after a deadline for Sulyok to resign had passed, Magyar called him a “puppet” of Orbán and vowed to remove him and other holdovers by constitutional means.

Fidesz deputies walked out before Monday’s vote and accused Tisza of building a tyranny. The party argues that the amendment gives the government arbitrary power to dismiss public officials with immediate effect. Sulyok and other members of Fidesz boycotted the session, Al Jazeera reported.

Tisza lawmakers celebrated the vote. The BBC reported that the party’s 141 deputies gave a standing ovation when the result was announced.

The amendment is part of a broader package intended to guide Hungary until a new constitution can be adopted in two or three years, according to the BBC. Al Jazeera reported that it also introduces judicial reforms, creates a body to investigate alleged financial abuses under the previous government and imposes a 12-year term limit on lawmakers. The BBC reported that the package removes Constitutional Court judges over 70 and bars lawmakers who have served three terms from standing again, a provision that applies to more than half of current Fidesz deputies.

“The great irony of the situation is that Fidesz have fallen foul of their own concept of power,” Péter Róna, a former opposition presidential candidate, told the BBC. He referred to the 2011 constitution written under Orbán, which he said enshrined the principle that “the winner takes all.”

András Baka, a former head of Hungary’s Supreme Court, told the BBC he supported removing the president, saying Fidesz had captured state institutions and created an authoritarian state after 2010. “And it is now very difficult to break up a sophisticated authoritarian regime… which was designed to survive even after electoral defeat,” Baka said.

Baka said he opposed the provision barring three-term lawmakers from running again. “This limits the right of the public to vote for whom they wish,” he said.

Fidesz has been under strain since its election defeat. The BBC reported that Orbán has rarely appeared in public, refused to take his seat in parliament and left Hungary on Monday to watch the World Cup final in the United States. Gergely Gulyás, Fidesz’s number two, resigned Monday as head of the party’s parliamentary group.