5 things to know about Péter Magyar, Hungary's new prime minister
5 things to know about Péter Magyar, Hungary's new prime minister
Péter Magyar, leader of the pro-European conservative Tisza Party, speaks at a Monday press conference the day after his landslide election victory.
In a stunning turn of events, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lost his bid for a fifth consecutive term on Sunday after voters turned out in numbers not seen since the fall of communism in the 1990s.
Voters — fueled largely by concerns about entrenched government corruption — overwhelmingly chose Péter Magyar, a 45-year-old lawyer and politician who until several years ago was a staunch Orbán loyalist.
He burst onto the scene as an opposition leader in 2024, rising rapidly to become the leader of the center-right Tisza Party, which won a two-thirds majority in Sunday's parliamentary election. Orbán, who has led Hungary for 16 years, conceded and congratulated Magyar less than three hours after polls closed.
In a victory speech delivered to a sea of jubilant supporters on the banks of the Danube River, Magyar reiterated his promises to rebuild Hungary's ties with the European Union and NATO, root out corruption and cronyism and "restore the system of checks and balances."
The country has economic incentive to do so: Since 2022, the EU has frozen billions of dollars' worth of funding for the country because it said Orbán was violating key democratic values. Magyar said the country will "never again allow anyone to hold free Hungary captive or to abandon it."
"Today we won because the Hungarian people didn't ask what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country," he said, evoking U.S. President John F. Kennedy, as some spectators chanted "Europe, Europe."
Magyar's landslide victory is "truly unprecedented" for many reasons, says Abel Bojar, research director at the polling platform Europion.
"If you think about the kind of political headwinds that … Magyar had to sail against, such as the funding asymmetry that his party had against the state apparatus of Orbán, media access, the novelty of the party — I mean, he built up a whole machine at extreme levels of professionality in two years," Bojar told NPR on Sunday. "And the list goes on."
Magyar has made a lot of promises to redemocratize the country, and his party now has the parliamentary majority needed to make constitutional changes to that end. But, Bojar says, critics — and even cautious observers — question whether he will follow through.
No comments:
Post a Comment