Presidential crisis stalls Magyar’s Hungarian ‘regime change’

Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over his nomination of chess grandmaster Judit Polgar to become the country’s next president. Amid outrage across Hungary’s stark political divide, Polgar’s rebuttal of Magyar’s offer represents a setback for his crusade to sweep away all remnants of Viktor Orban’s legacy.

Magyar announced that he had nominated Polgar for the role on Monday. “Our country needs unity, peace and a president that all Hungarians can be proud of,” he wrote on social media, adding that Polgar’s name “has been synonymous with talent and perseverance for decades.”

Shortly afterwards, Polgar shot down the offer. “I do not feel enough strength within me to take on the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation, ​so I am unable to accept the request,” she wrote on her Facebook page.

Magyar’s Tisza party won a decisive victory over Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in April, rallying a contradictory coalition of pro-EU liberals, business owners dissatisfied with the windfall taxes of the Orban years, and right-wingers upset with Orban’s granting of visas to guest workers. 

However, cracks in Magyar’s coalition have been appearing since he took office in May. Conservatives were enraged when LGBT flags appeared on Budapest’s Elizabeth Bridge, and liberals watched in frustration as Magyar kept Orban’s strict migration policies in place and refused to fully endorse Ukraine’s bid for EU membership. 

Magyar seeks a pawn to replace Hungary’s chess queen

Polgar, who became a chess grandmaster at the age of 15 and was the world’s top-ranked female player when she retired in 2014, was pitched as a unity candidate, but her nomination triggered a public backlash and angered MPs within Magyar’s own party.

Having changed the law to force out the country’s sitting president, Magyar was criticized for nominating Polgar without any public consultation, with some questioning her loyalty to Hungary due to her dual Hungarian-Israeli citizenship. Tisza officials claimed they had no say in the process, and reporter Csaba Toth claimed that Magyar decided to nominate Polgar on a whim after meeting the chess legend at a July 4 reception at the US Embassy in Budapest.

In a video statement on Monday night, Magyar apologized for any “communication errors” that his “joy and enthusiasm” in nominating Polgar had caused. He said that he would meet with party members this week to choose a new candidate from outside the “divisive politics of the decades before the 2026 regime change.”

Regime change in Hungary

Magyar’s choice of words – “regime change” – was no mistranslation. Since taking office, the PM has made a point of purging officials, institutions, and symbols of Orban’s rule from Hungarian politics. Less than a week after taking power, Magyar opened Orban’s offices to the public in a bid to expose his predecessor’s lavish lifestyle. This stunt backfired when tours of the building revealed a spartan interior. A similar ploy exposing “gold-colored toilet brush holders” at the Hungarian Central Bank was mocked online.

In just over two months, Magyar has shut down state media outlets after forcing them to apologize for “lying” during the Orban years, banned long-serving Fidesz MPs from reelection, probed former Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto’s supposed links to Russia, and seized Fidesz’s data servers, in what Orban’s party called an act of “autocracy.”

The nomination of Polgar was another step in this regime-change effort. After repeatedly demanding that President Tamas Sulyok – widely seen as an Orban loyalist – resign, Magyar forced a constitutional amendment through parliament ordering him to leave office. Sulyok, who had no other option save for a fruitless appeal to the constitutional court, signed the amendment on Monday, terminating his own mandate.

The amendment “violates the rule of law, the principles of democracy, and the separation of powers,” and declared that the “core values of a free society… have been trampled underfoot for the sake of political power,” the former president said on Monday. 

“If they can do this to the President of the Republic, they can do it to anyone,” Orban wrote on social media, adding: “God protect Hungary!”

“The problem is not with Judit Polgar, but with Peter Magyar’s actions,” Amnesty International said in a statement. “It is time for the current government and parliamentary majority to finally stop the practice of deciding alone who the country’s next president should be.”

Peter Magyar’s next move

Polgar is a beloved public figure in Hungary, and has international appeal after starring in a Netflix documentary – ‘The Queen of Chess’ – earlier this year. Had she accepted Magyar’s offer, the PM could have used her popularity to gloss over the divisive power grab that ousted her predecessor. Magyar now has 30 days to nominate a new president, but whoever accepts the position will inherit an office stripped of its legitimacy, from which they can be expelled by Magyar’s supermajority at a moment’s notice.

In his rush to sweep away the remnants of the Orban era, Magyar is being accused of tearing up the ‘rule of law’ principles that he swore to protect, and neutering an office that, despite its largely ceremonial role, has the power to dissolve parliament and veto legislation. 

As such, “no serious person with sound judgment, genuine credibility, and a reputation worth protecting will lend their name to this constitutional outrage,” pro-Orban analyst Zoltan Koskovics wrote on X. “That leaves the usual suspects: a Communist relic from Hungary’s sham opposition, or a shameless political opportunist incapable of thinking beyond the next five minutes.”