Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok signed a constitutional amendment Saturday that immediately ended his own term in office, five days after Parliament voted to remove him as part of Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s campaign to dismantle the political network built by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Parliament passed the measure, the 17th amendment to Hungary’s Fundamental Law, on Monday by a vote of 139 to 6 in the 199-seat chamber. Orbán’s Fidesz party and its ally KDNP boycotted the session. The amendment’s text cited a “serious loss of confidence” in Sulyok among the public as grounds for ending his term.
Sulyok, a former chief justice of Hungary’s Constitutional Court, was elected president by lawmakers in February 2024, when Fidesz still held power, to replace Katalin Novák. Novák had resigned weeks earlier, in February 2024, after it emerged that she had pardoned a man convicted of covering up child sexual abuse at an orphanage, a scandal that badly damaged the Orbán government’s standing at the time. Sulyok is the seventh president since Hungary’s transition away from communist rule in 1989 and 1990, and was widely regarded, including by Magyar, as a loyalist who would shield Orbán-aligned interests from scrutiny.
Saturday’s signing caps a broader constitutional overhaul Magyar’s government launched after the April election, in which Tisza’s landslide victory ended Fidesz’s 16-year grip on power and gave Magyar’s party the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to rewrite the constitution largely at will. Magyar had called on Sulyok to resign repeatedly in the months beforehand, accusing him of failing to represent national unity and of serving Orbán’s interests rather than the country’s.
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Sulyok said he had no legal avenue to block the amendment and signed it after weighing his options, but he did not go quietly. “By removing public office holders in a manner that openly violates the rule of law … it sets a negative precedent that inflicts a deep wound on the constitutional values of democracy,” he said Saturday, calling the move a watershed for Hungary’s constitutional order and warning it damaged the separation of powers.
Before the amendment was formally introduced, Sulyok had tried to head it off. In June, he appealed to Hungary’s Constitutional Court and to the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, an advisory body on constitutional law, asking both to intervene. A Venice Commission delegation subsequently visited Budapest and met with Sulyok, Magyar, and other senior officials; the commission’s experts are expected to formally take up the case at a meeting in October, by which point Sulyok will have already left office.
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The amendment does more than remove Sulyok. It establishes a National Asset Recovery and Protection Office with broad authority to investigate financial abuses from the Orbán era, restores the Constitutional Court’s power to review budget legislation, and imposes a 12-year term limit on members of Parliament. A separate provision sets a mandatory retirement age of 70 for constitutional court judges, a change that will force out the court’s president, Péter Polt, a longtime Orbán ally.
Parliament Speaker Ágnes Forsthoffer will serve as interim president starting Monday, Magyar said, until lawmakers elect a permanent successor. Under the amendment, that successor will serve until a new Hungarian constitution takes effect or for a maximum of five years, whichever comes first. Magyar has framed the change as reversing years of what he has described as Orbán-era efforts to concentrate power beyond public accountability.
Orbán, who led Hungary for 16 years before Magyar’s Tisza party won power in an April landslide, condemned the amendment on Facebook. “Tyranny is no longer a threat but reality,” he wrote, arguing that removing a sitting president by legislative fiat left no official safe from a similar fate. Fidesz has called the amendment an unprecedented assault on Hungary’s democratic order and staged a protest against it last week that drew roughly 3,000 people; Orbán did not attend, having traveled to the United States to watch the final matches of the men’s World Cup.
Fidesz has faced a string of high-profile resignations and falling public support in the months since its April defeat, a decline critics attribute partly to the party’s inability to slow Magyar’s dismantling of Orbán-era institutions. Parliament has not set a date for electing Sulyok’s permanent successor.