Hungary After Dark: The Two Counts
My take on this week in Hungary: By Sunday evening, Hungary had spent a productive week counting what the Orbán state left behind.
In Parliament and government offices, the count moved through mandates, judges, public money, media offices, audit powers, EU conditions, bank records, company registers and the alleged transfer of state wealth into private hands. On the streets of Budapest, the count took another form: 50,000 people marching from the Opera to Vérmező in extreme heat, visible in a country where visibility had recently been treated as a threat.
Counting is the first act of post-authoritarian government. It is how a new state learns what was taken, what was bent, what was hidden and what still has force. It is also the first temptation. Once a government begins measuring the damage, it can start to believe that the scale of the damage justifies almost any instrument of repair.
This week circled around that problem like water going down the drain: inevitable, almost hypnotic, and dangerous if you looked away for too long. How do you repair a captured state without allowing the act of repair to become its own justification?
I have spent enough of my life watching Hungarian politics hide behind procedure to know that procedure is often the story. This week, it showed itself in the grains of power: how decisions are written, who signs them, where authority sits, and how easily it can be redirected without ever appearing to move.
The inventory begins
The week began on Monday, 22 June, in Parliament, where Péter Magyar framed the government’s programme as a systematic review of the decisions, contracts and institutions left behind by the previous regime. That framing carried directly into the government’s first major initiative of the week: Operation Tisztítótűz, a term that translates as purgatory and cleansing fire.
It borrows the language of purification and turns it inward, toward the state and what the previous system left behind in law, ownership and institutions. Rather than a single reform, it is a reset of how authority, property, and accountability work after years of blurred lines. Constitutional change, asset recovery and institutional repair are treated as one problem because the old system reshaped how power could be challenged. Hungary cannot simply break with that past. It has to review decisions, track resources, identify which legal arrangements still bind the present, and decide what can be undone without draining the state.
The draft 17th Amendment to the Fundamental Law is framed by the government as a correction of constitutional capture. The official consultation text says the Fundamental Law had become an instrument for implementing current party-political objectives. In more unadorned terms, the constitution stopped restraining power and started taking instructions from it.
The amendment reaches into the presidency, the Constitutional Court, Parliament and the definition of public money. It would end President Tamás Sulyok’s mandate after entry into force, require Parliament to elect a new president, end the mandates of Constitutional Court judges who have reached the age of 70, and give the Court’s members the power to elect their own president. It would also limit parliamentary mandates to 12 years, reduce the number of two-thirds laws, restore the Constitutional Court’s fiscal review powers, repeal the current constitutional definition of public money and create a constitutional footing for the new National Asset Recovery and Protection Office.
Hungary’s institutions were staffed, insulated, amended, prolonged and defined into obedience. Repairing them will demand more than appeals to continuity. The difficulty is that a constitutional amendment aimed at restoring institutional independence also removes named or identifiable officeholders. The risk sits inside the method.
Post-Orbán reconstruction faces a dilemma: undoing a system embedded in law requires strong legal action, while the challenge is to do so without recreating the same patterns under a new name.
The asset count
The National Asset Recovery and Protection Office gives that risk institutional form. The official consultation page claims that, by conservative estimate, HUF 60,000 billion, roughly $193 billion at late-June exchange rates, moved unlawfully from public sources into private pockets over the past two decades. The figure is vast, even by Hungarian corruption standards. It is also politically advantageous for Magyar because it gives asset recovery the scale of a national mission.
The public mindset around this is not hard to understand. Hungarians have spent decades watching wealth and power drift into friendly hands while being told that everything was legal, procedural and patriotic. Corruption is not an abstract idea for them. It shows up in daily life, in strained public services, failing infrastructure and a sense that the country’s future has been quietly traded away through legal manoeuvres.
The anger around this is not theatrical. Instead, it comes from a very ordinary experience: being told for years that the public could see the theft but could not prove it in a language the state would accept.
That is why the government is right to make asset recovery paramount. It would be reckless to make recovery sacred.
The proposed office is intended to trace those flows through the channels where Orbánism learned to conceal them: company structures, contracts, bank records, tax files, state registers, foundations and protected ownership arrangements. Its draft powers are expansive enough to signal the government’s ambition and the legal hazards that come with it. The office could draw on police, prosecutors and NAV (National Tax and Customs Administration), move cases forward itself, impose penalties, initiate proceedings to reclaim public assets, and, in certain situations, step into roles usually reserved for criminal prosecution.
If the government can trace and reclaim assets shifted through foundations, concessions and shell companies during the Orbán years, its reform agenda has a real chance to move beyond rhetoric. Changing leadership alone does not alter ownership structures. Without intervention, the same networks can continue to control the same resources under new political management.
The draft also raises legal questions. It would allow the office to handle sensitive data and access protected financial information. Certain investigations may fall outside standard administrative procedures, and in some cases, the office could assume a role similar to that of the prosecution, with limited scope for the usual authorities to intervene. Its company-supervision powers may also need clear limits to avoid overreach.
Here is where the public mood and the legal problem meet. People want the money followed, not in the abstract but through specifics, until the country can no longer pretend that what happened was normal. A serious recovery process must be strong enough to reach protected wealth and disciplined enough to withstand scrutiny, grounded in traceable decisions, identifiable public losses and evidence that can hold up under judicial review.
My own reading is that public appetite for recovery is real, justified and politically powerful. It will also become dangerous the moment it is treated as a substitute for evidence. But so far so good.
Hungary needs a serious asset-recovery mechanism whose powers are not justified only by the moral bankruptcy of the people it targets.
Operation Purgatory will have to become a legal project rather than a name for the public anger that made it possible. Magyar understands political symbolism and uses it without much discomfiture, repeatedly drawing comparisons between Fidesz and the Cosa Nostra to frame the previous system as a tightly bound network of power and loyalty. The language is deliberately severe, and it works because people recognise the structure it points to. Naming the old system is only the beginning. The opportunity lies in building rules and institutions strong enough to survive the week after the anger fades.
The audit state takes shape
The institutional count persisted through Tuesday, 23 June, when Parliament passed the media-law reform by 145 votes to 39. The law restructures public media, separates MTI, ends existing leadership mandates, creates a new public-media oversight body, reforms selection procedures and creates a press fund. Tisza and Mi Hazánk supported it. Not surprisingly, Fidesz-KDNP opposed it.
Public media sat at the core of Orbán’s design of control, shaping what could be heard and how it was framed. Reforming it is therefore an endeavour to reopen the state’s voice to pluralism. A government elected to dismantle propaganda must now prove that public media will not become a more polished dependency.
The EU-funds package followed the same institutional track, with the government outlining a set of legal changes intended to unlock access to EU funds. In Parliament, Justice Minister Márta Görög distilled the purpose of these efforts into a line that could stand as the week’s institutional motto: “a közpénz közpénz, a közvagyon közvagyon.” Public money is public money. Public wealth is public wealth.
That sounds unmistakable. In Hungary, even the conspicuous has had to argue its case.
Heat makes the state physical
Then the heat arrived, making governance physical.
Hungary moved from a second-degree heat alert to a third-degree nationwide alert beginning at midnight on Saturday, 27 June. A government decree ordered coordinated defence activity because of extremely high temperatures and placed coordination under the prime minister. By Sunday, officials were reporting water restrictions, rail speed limits, ambulance heat cases, vegetation-fire calls, mist gates, bottled-water distribution and reductions at Paks Nuclear Power Plant.
The heatwave stripped governance of abstraction. It showed up in places you could stand in: hospital wards waiting for functioning cooling systems, railway lines under speed restrictions, public taps under pressure, ambulance crews responding to heat cases, firefighters moving from one vegetation fire to the next, and at Paks, engineers reducing output because the Danube had grown too warm to cool the plant safely.
Heat is a useful enemy for a government because it has no party card and no media strategy. It exposes what actually works. But on the other hand, it exposes much more of what doesn’t work.
On Thursday, Magyar and Health Minister Zsolt Hegedűs visited Uzsoki hospital. The government said more than HUF 3.6 billion, around $11 million, had been redirected to replace and develop hospital air conditioners, with work beginning at 32 hospitals. At Uzsoki, the first replacement was reported at more than HUF 130 million, while the hospital’s own account still pointed to unresolved problems in trauma operating rooms and oncology cooling.
Magyar understands the politics of the ladder photograph. He knows that an image of a prime minister inspecting hospital air conditioning travels faster than a procurement notice. But the photograph reveals less here than the chain behind it: funding, procurement, installation, maintenance, cooling and the basic fact of whether patients and staff can survive the heat inside a public hospital.
This is what state capacity looks like when temperatures rise.
The heat also became part of Pride.
Pride counts the public
The 31st Budapest Pride took place on Saturday, 27 June, under the third-degree heat alert. Organisers chose a shaded route from the Opera to Vérmező, coordinated drinking-water points, warned people to hydrate, advised against bringing pets and ended the march in green space. The march included 19 vehicles, six ambulances, roughly 40 participating civil organisations, groups and supporting companies, and a joint statement from 35 embassies, with cultural institutes also supporting it.
Organisers estimated roughly 50,000 participants.
The number sits inside a complicated political sequence. Last year, Pride gauged courage under threat, after Orbán’s attempted ban helped turn the march into one of the largest acts of public defiance in recent Hungarian history. This year, it reckoned with what remains after fear begins to loosen: a different public posture, still cautious in places, but harder to govern through intimidation, and most significantly, visibly free and happy.
The old muscle memory still appeared. Far-right protesters showed up. Eggs and vegetables were thrown. The march went ahead, crossed the city and ended at Vérmező. Police later described it as peaceful. On stage, Karácsony Gergely, the mayor of Budapest, said he wanted to marry the first same-sex couple in the capital. Annus Szabolcs Sammy announced the first Szeged Pride for next spring.
Legal protection still lags behind public fact.
That is why I read Amnesty International Hungary’s proposal closely. On 12 June, Amnesty published its submission to Magyar on how Hungary could become a more equal country, focusing on marriage equality and the unjustified legal distinctions that still separate registered partnership from marriage.
The polling cited by Amnesty is striking, with one important caveat. A Háttér Society-commissioned survey by Medián and Piackutató Intézet, conducted between 27 April and 2 May 2026, found that 68 per cent of respondents supported same-sex couples being able to marry and adopt children. The question bundled marriage and adoption. Amnesty’s chart gives 28 per cent in 2019, 49 per cent in 2025 and 68 per cent in 2026.
Public opinion has moved faster than the law. Amnesty’s proposal turns that shift into a legislative question for Magyar’s government.
Registered partnership continues to place same-sex couples outside the full framework of ordinary family law, limiting their access to shared naming rights, joint and stepchild adoption, assisted reproduction and automatic recognition of parenthood. It also imposes distinct age requirements and separate rules governing dissolution. Amnesty, drawing on KSH census data, reports that the 2022 census identified 10,030 same-sex cohabiting relationships and 4,125 children being raised by same-sex parents, while acknowledging that these figures almost certainly understate the reality.
Census recognition is not equality. A household can appear in state data and still disappear inside family law.
The state can count these families, but it has yet to fully recognise them. Pride counted tens of thousands of people whose relationships, families and parental rights are still only partially recognised under Hungarian law.
This year’s Pride march carried a joyous, liberating mood across Hungary.
The audit crosses the border
Orbánism also left things abroad that require counting: institutions without visible budgets, commitments made in rooms that Hungary no longer controls, relationships that survived because they were useful to the old order.
Átlátszó reported on Friday, 26 June, that the Orbán government had, under the radar, created a Hungarian Academy in Jerusalem months before the election. It opened in December 2025 in the city’s Talbiyeh district, at 6 George Washington Street, near diplomatic buildings and one of Jerusalem’s most expensive areas. It is led by Győző Vörös, who refers to himself as director until 2030. The institution presents itself as part of Hungarian cultural diplomacy and has already launched its own English-language journal.
The outlet could not find a founding charter, a government decision, an official gazette entry, a visible budget, organisational rules, a clear financing route, or a public explanation of the legal form or property arrangement. Átlátszó sent public data requests to Vörös, the Culture and Innovation Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the National Asset Management Company, and the State Treasury. It had received no answers by the time of publication.
This belongs in the audit of Orbánism. It likewise aligns with Viktor Orbán’s close political ties to Benjamin Netanyahu, a relationship that has shaped Hungary’s posture toward Israel and beyond.
The same week brought another external loose end. In January, Orbán’s government accepted Donald Trump’s invitation to join the Gaza Board of Peace, and Orbán signed its founding charter in Davos. By late June, the Guardian was reporting that the Board was considering sweeping legal immunities for itself, its contractors and security forces in Gaza, while also seeking access to public premises free of charge. The Board denied that any operative immunity framework exists. I found no public Hungarian clarification after the election on whether Magyar’s government still considers Hungary bound by Orbán’s participation, whether any financial commitment exists, or whether Hungary intends to remain involved.
Moscow supplied the week’s older reflex.
VSquare published a previously unused transcript from the Wagner rebellion showing Péter Szijjártó calling Sergey Lavrov on 24 June 2023 to ask whether things were under control and whether Lavrov was personally fine. He also offered personal help. Lavrov laughed and said he did not need anything.
It revealed a reflex more than a policy. Orbánism left institutions at home and a web of commitments abroad that now require careful examination, from cultural initiatives and diplomatic ties to lingering connections and unresolved obligations. Some may prove minor. Others may entail carrying money, legal obligations, or diplomatic costs. The first task is to put them on the record.
Magyar counts himself
By Sunday evening, Magyar had offered his own count.
In a Facebook post marking the Tisza government’s first 50 days in power, he said he was proud of what had already been done. The list was long and purposefully political: Hungary’s return to Europe, the reopening of Visegrád cooperation, progress on Transcarpathian Hungarian minority rights, public-media reform, assembly rights, the ban on hate-inciting political advertisements, new standalone ministries, the end of decree governance, accession to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, continued membership of the International Criminal Court, the publication of pardon-case files, the review of diplomatic passports, hospital air-conditioning investment, preparation for a wealth tax and school-start support, and the beginning of the process to open the agent files.
It was exactly the kind of post a new government wants at the 50-day mark: evidence of motion, evidence of control, evidence that history has not simply changed skin but started moving.
Magyar’s godsend is that he understands the public hunger for visible repair. The ladder photograph on top of the hospital, the 50-day list, the language of Operation Tisztítótűz, the insistence that Hungary has returned to Europe: all of it answers a public desire to see motion after years of suffocation.
By the end of the week, Hungary had opened a constitutional overhaul and asset-recovery drive, passed media reform, marched nearly 50,000 people through Budapest Pride, managed a nationwide heat emergency and watched its new prime minister publish the first balance sheet of his own government.
For those of us who learned politics under Orbán, the strange part is not that the state lied. It is watching the state try to account for its own lies in public.
The count will now move from rhetoric into cases: which assets can be traced, which laws survive review, which offices can be remade, which families gain recognition, which foreign commitments still bind the country, and which of the government’s 50-day achievements harden into institutional fact.
What I am watching next
The next phase will unfold in duller places, where the real story usually goes. I will be watching the consultation summary on the 17th Amendment, the safeguards in the Asset Recovery Office draft, the new public-media structure, and the first asset-recovery cases. Those cases will show whether Operation Tisztítótűz rests on evidence and due process, or whether recovery begins to outrun the law.
But I am also overseeing something less technical.
Hungarians feel different right now. You can see it in the polling: Tisza is far ahead, and Fidesz is at numbers that once felt impossible. You can see it in the streets, in the Pride crowd, in the heatwave photographs, in the way people speak about institutions that used to feel closed. There is a lightness in the country, even under the legal work and summer exhaustion. People are not just watching a government change; they are feeling it and living in it.
Authoritarian politics captures the face a country shows to the public. It teaches people to lower their expectations, speak carefully, laugh bitterly, and assume nothing serious can move. Something in that posture has loosened. Hungary is not fixed. The work ahead is enormous. But for the first time in a long while, many people are moving through public life as if the future has reopened.
I will also be watching whether Magyar’s 50-day list becomes an accountability tool or a victory poster: which items are completed, which are only started, and which depend on institutions still being rebuilt. Optimism is not a substitute for scrutiny, but it is part of the Hungarian mood now.
I will be watching whether Magyar’s government answers Amnesty’s marriage-equality proposal, or leaves LGBTQ+ families visible in politics and partial in law.
Abroad, the unanswered questions remain: whether the Jerusalem Academy produces a budget, whether Hungary clarifies its role in the Gaza Board of Peace, and whether the Russian channels revealed by VSquare become part of a wider audit of foreign policy.
The next weeks will show whether this count becomes evidence, theatre or law. But this week also showed something else: a country recalling how it feels to believe that public life can move again.
Source: Official government consultation pages on the 17th Amendment and the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office; draft NVVH bill, explanatory memorandum and impact assessment; Parliament bill T/200 on media-law reform; Parliament bill T/174 on EU-funds legislation; Magyar Közlöny, including 97/2026. (VI. 25.) Korm. rendelet; Magyar Péter’s Facebook post on the Tisza government’s first 50 days; Budapest Pride organiser statements; Amnesty International Hungary; KSH-cited census data via Amnesty; Telex; 24.hu; 444; ATV; Magyar Nemzet; Átlátszó; VSquare; The Guardian; PolitPro; Kormány.hu; NNGYK; HungaroMet.