Péter Magyar won 138 of 199 parliamentary seats in April. He still cannot get the president to go home.

With 97 percent of precincts counted after the April 12 election, Magyar's centre-right Tisza party secured 138 seats on 53.6 percent of the vote, while Viktor Orbán's Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8 percent. The mandate was unambiguous — the largest in democratic Hungary's history, sufficient for the two-thirds supermajority required to amend the constitution Orbán spent 16 years building. Magyar stood before tens of thousands on the banks of the Danube and declared that truth had prevailed over lies. Europe agreed. Brussels began releasing frozen EU funds. The foreign policy posture shifted overnight.

Then Tamás Sulyok declined to resign, and the transition met the first serious test of how far a democratic majority can reach into a system designed by the previous government to be unreachable.

Who Sulyok is and what he controls

Tamás Sulyok, 70, assumed the Hungarian presidency on 5 March 2024, having previously served as president of Hungary's Constitutional Court since 2016 — an appointment made by the Fidesz-dominated parliament. He replaced Katalin Novák, who resigned in February 2024 after a pardon scandal involving the cover-up of child sexual abuse. He was, by design, a safe pair of hands — a constitutional lawyer with institutional credibility and deep Fidesz roots, installed to manage the symbolic functions of the presidency while Orbán ran the country.

The presidency is mostly a ceremonial role. But Hungary's president is responsible for signing legislation into law and has the power to send bills passed by parliament to the Constitutional Court for review. That review power is the live issue. The Constitutional Court is itself still packed with Fidesz-era appointees. A president willing to refer Magyar's legislative programme — on media reform, anti-corruption measures, unlocking EU funds — to a court stacked with Orbán loyalists could delay or derail the new government's agenda for months, potentially years.

Magyar understood this from the start. He repeatedly called on Sulyok to ensure the transfer of power happened as soon as possible, referring to him as "Orbán's puppet" and demanding his resignation. He set a deadline of 31 May. Sulyok's answer was no.

What Sulyok's refusal actually looks like

The president did not simply decline to resign. He escalated.

On the Friday before Magyar's deadline, Sulyok's office released a statement arguing that Magyar's calls for resignation "adversely affect both the constitutional functioning and the authority of the institution of the President of the Republic." The statement added that Sulyok had requested a legal assessment from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional law.

The Venice Commission gambit is striking for what it reveals about Sulyok's strategic positioning. His sudden reliance on the Venice Commission is particularly noteworthy given that Fidesz routinely ignored its opinions for years and repeatedly described it as politically biased and "a Soros agent." The institution that was dismissed as irrelevant when it was inconvenient to Fidesz is now being invoked by Fidesz's man in the presidency as a constitutional shield. It is a transparent manoeuvre — but it is not without effect. The Venice Commission has expressed its intention to investigate the case under an accelerated procedure, with its experts prepared to travel to Hungary to obtain complete information about the situation.

Fidesz accused Magyar of issuing an "unlawful ultimatum" and said Sulyok was fulfilling his lawful mandate, which runs until 2029. On legal grounds, that position is not entirely without merit. A president serving a fixed term does not normally vacate office because the incoming prime minister asks him to. The question is whether Hungary's current circumstances are normal — or whether they represent a rearguard action by a defeated political movement using constitutional architecture it designed to resist a democratic verdict.

Magyar's response and its risks

Magyar's answer to the impasse is a constitutional amendment. He confirmed that Sulyok did not resign during their meeting at Sándor Palace, and announced that Tisza would move to amend Hungary's Fundamental Law — not as a tailor-made instrument directed at one person, but as a framework that would also allow other state leaders to be removed from office. The legislative process, he said, would take about a month and would involve removing "all the puppets" who took part in "dismantling" the democratic state.

The framing raises legitimate questions that even sympathisers of Magyar's project are beginning to ask. Using a constitutional supermajority to rewrite removal procedures for officials in the middle of a dispute with those officials looks, from the outside, like exactly what Orbán used to do — win a large majority, amend the constitution to suit your immediate political needs, proceed. The fact that Magyar's targets are Orbán-era appointees does not entirely answer the structural concern.

As constitutional scholars at Verfassungsblog noted: "The planned removal from office of the President and the heads of other independent constitutional organs may cause a constitutional crisis and constitute a threat to fundamental constitutional principles." The question of whether the removal mechanism is impeachment, constitutional amendment, or some bespoke procedure matters — because each sets a precedent the next government will be able to invoke.

What is actually at stake

Hungary's post-Orbán transition is being watched not as a local story but as a regional test case. If Magyar's government can dismantle the institutional capture Orbán engineered over 16 years — the captured media, captured courts, captured presidencies — without replicating the methods of capture, it demonstrates that illiberal consolidation is reversible through democratic means. That matters for Poland's contested institutions, for Romania, for Slovakia.

More than 16 billion euros in EU COVID-19 recovery funding remains blocked over rule-of-law concerns, with an end-of-August deadline to meet Brussels' conditions or risk losing the money entirely. That deadline runs concurrent with the constitutional removal process. Magyar cannot afford a months-long institutional standoff with a president who has direct access to the legislative brake.

Sulyok's mandate runs to 2029. He has said publicly he "wants to continue to cooperate with the government and to help with the legislation needed to draw down EU funds" — a formulation designed to present himself as reasonable while denying the legitimacy of Magyar's demand. Whether that offer of selective cooperation is genuine or a stalling tactic will become clear when the first contested bill lands on his desk.

The transition is not broken. But it is slower, messier, and more contingent than the election night photographs suggested. This is where democratic reversals actually happen — not in dramatic coups, but in the steady institutional friction between a government with a mandate and a system built to outlast whoever wins the vote.