Hungarian lawmakers approved former supreme court chief András Baka as the country's new president on Tuesday after the contested removal last month of the previous head of state. The ruling Tisza party, armed with a two-thirds majority in parliament, elected Baka with 140 votes in favour and six votes against. The numbers are neat. The politics are not.
Tisza nominated the 73-year-old Baka on Saturday for what the article itself calls a largely ceremonial role. Prime Minister Péter Magyar said Baka's life served "as an example of commitment to the democratic rule of law and constitutional principles" and said the country needs to be "guided back onto the path of the rule of law and constitutional governance." That’s the language of restoration, but the machinery remains the same: parliament, amendments, nominations, and a president chosen from above while ordinary people watch the choreography.
The State Rewrites Its Own Rules
Hungary's previous president, Tamás Sulyok, saw his mandate cut short by a constitutional amendment adopted as part of Magyar's reform push. Magyar's party won elections in April by a landslide, ending nationalist Viktor Orbán's 16 years in power and promising "system change." The phrase sounds grand. The method is familiar. One bloc of rulers replaces another, and the constitution gets treated like a tool for whichever faction has the votes.
Rights watchdogs criticised Sulyok's removal, comparing the move to the methods Orbán used to build his self-styled "illiberal" system. Orbán's Fidesz party, along with its ally KDNP, boycotted the parliamentary vote, arguing Sulyok's ouster was "tyrannical" and "illegitimate." The old guard denounces the new guard using the same vocabulary of legitimacy, while the state keeps its grip on the same levers.
Baka did not soften the picture. He said: "In a country governed by the rule of law, such extraordinary measures cannot be used, but Hungary became a captured state under Orbán." He added that state officials like the president "were appointed not to restrain the government's power, but to ensure the political survival of the former system even after an electoral defeat." That line lands because it describes the job of the office without the ceremonial varnish.
European Norms, National Power
Bulcsu Zsiga, from the Centre for Fair Political Analysis, said installing Baka as president signals a "guarantee that the restoration of liberal democracy will proceed along a clearly defined path." The phrase sounds orderly, almost soothing. Yet the path is still drawn by institutions deciding who gets to speak for everyone else.
Baka's own record gives the appointment its symbolic charge. He had a brief stint as a lawmaker, elected from the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum's party list in 1990 after the democratic transition, but otherwise did not hold political positions. He was a judge at the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights from 1991-2008. In 2009, he was nominated as the head of the Supreme Court, but was ousted in 2012 after he condemned a move under Orbán to reduce the age of mandatory retirement for judges from 70 to 62, calling it a judicial purge.
The European Union and the United States both called the age-limit reduction illegal, and in 2016 the ECHR ruled that Baka's dismissal amounted to a violation of his freedom of expression. So the same European order that likes to speak in the language of norms and rights also watched one of its own judges get pushed out after challenging a government move. The paperwork was different. The power relation was not.
Zsiga said: "His nomination also carries a symbolic meaning, given that Baka went all the way to prove that what happened to him was not really in line with European Union norms." That’s the Brussels script in miniature: norms, violations, symbolic meaning, and then another round of institutional repair.
Last month, Magyar offered the nomination as president to chess legend Judit Polgar, but she declined after the prime minister faced mounting outrage for not consulting the public as promised. Magyar has indicated the new president would only serve part of his term, until the completion of a process to replace the Orbán-era Basic Law with a constitution drafted through wide public participation. Magyar has estimated rewriting the constitution would take one or one and a half years, and he promised to launch consultations on it next month. Another constitution. Another consultation. Another promise that the people will be asked after the real decisions have already been staged in parliament.