Deurbanization of Hungary: Who will be the new president

The Hungarian president has mostly symbolic duties. Now Hungary gets a president who is a symbol in himself, and whose election this Tuesday (August 11) means the symbolic end of the order of the former prime minister Viktor Orban, who ruled Hungary for 16 years, writes Deutsche says.

András Baka (73), one of Hungary's most respected lawyers and judges who defeated Orbán's government in a dispute over the reorganization of the judiciary, will become head of state.

Baka, as his biography suggests, will perform his duties carefully. The new Hungarian Prime Minister, Peter Magjar, and the caucus of his Tisa party explicitly emphasize that they do not want to fill the position of president with a party politician.

Baka's nomination is therefore strong evidence against the claim that the new Hungarian prime minister is striving for arbitrariness or building a new version of Orbán's regime.

 

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Why a new president?

In Hungary, the president is elected by the parliament with a two-thirds majority. Baku was nominated by the Tisza parliamentary club only last Saturday (August 8).

The rush around the nomination and election is related to the fact that the Hungarian Parliament had a month to elect a new president after the dismissal of President Tamas Šuljok and the expiration of his mandate in mid-July.

In fact, the Hungarian president has almost no executive powers and cannot permanently interfere with the work of the government. Nevertheless, the Hungarian prime minister declared the removal of Szuljok, whom he repeatedly called "Orbán's puppet", a central political issue even before his election victory in April.

One of the reasons is that the rise of the Hungarians and the Tisa party is directly linked to the so-called affair of pardoning the accomplices of pedophile criminals.

Photo: AP Photo/Denes Erdos

In that affair, the then president Katalin Novak had to resign in February 2024, and that was the reason for the first public appearances of Hungarians as opponents of Orbán's Fidesz party. Since then, the Hungarian has continuously accused the incoming president Šuljok of being silent during many moments of injustice by the Orbán regime.

Conscience of the nation

Although the president is not obliged to make public statements, some holders of that office often used that opportunity, above all the first Hungarian post-communist president Arpad Genz, a writer and anti-communist resister.

In the nineties, Genz constantly called for respect for human rights and democratic rules. That is why many appreciated him as the "Hungarian conscience".

The fact that Peter Magjar has so often complained that Šuljok failed to be the conscience of the nation in the last two years will now become a benchmark for Andraš Baka.

Grandpa is not really a loudmouth and he only became a fighter late. As early as 1978, he received his doctorate in legal sciences, and then worked at various universities, partly abroad, in the field of comparative law.

He was not against the system.

Since the mid-1980s, Baka has researched the implementation of human and minority rights in an international comparison. The latter was already an important topic in Hungary at that time, because the rights of the Hungarian minority were severely violated in neighboring Romania under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
However, Baka was not an open opponent of the communist dictatorship. He belonged to those who, in the relatively open Hungary of the 1980s, worked on reforms within the system.

Since 1988, Baka has been active in academic union initiatives, which played a major role during the changes in Hungary. After the first free elections, in 1990 he entered the parliament as a non-party person for a little over a year, through the list of the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum. From 1991, he worked as a judge of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

In 2008, after two mandates, Baka returned to Hungary and was elected President of the Supreme Court. He became recognizable in Hungary when Orbán's government removed him from that position by a legal trick in 2011, as part of the reform of the judiciary - allegedly because he had previously criticized part of the reform plans.

Formally, the Supreme Court was reorganized into the Curia; Baka's office thus ceased to exist, but he remained a judge. Baka appealed his dismissal to the European Court of Human Rights and won the case in 2016, but he never returned to office. Namely, the most important part of the judgment, by which the Hungarian state was obliged to annul the judicial reform, was never implemented.

He is not a man of street protests.

Baka remained a critic of Orbán's regime until the end, but he always based his views on legal arguments - he was not someone who organized protests or took to the streets. The Tise Club explained his nomination as president as follows:

"Throughout his life so far, Andraš Baka attached special importance to the division of power and consistently advocated for the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary."

As expected, representatives of Orbán's Fidesz party strongly criticized Baka's nomination. Since Shulyok's dismissal in July was illegal, there can be no legal successor, their argument goes.

In the circles of Fidesz and by the far-right party Naša domovina, Baki also blames "hypocrisy" - specifically, the fact that he accepts Shulyok's dismissal through a special law, while he condemned exactly such a practice in his own case.

Many commentators, however, point to an important difference, for example publicist Gabor Cene in the Nepsava daily: "Baka's previous dismissal was one of countless steps in the overthrow of the rule of law. His election as president is helping to restore it."

The Budapest Institute Political Capital estimates that Baka will not have an easy task. "The Orbán regime has additionally politically emptied the office of the president, which is not equipped with particularly broad powers. Now András Baka must restore the reputation of the presidential office. This requires political rather than legal work. Baka's chances for this are still higher than any other president elected during the Fidesz rule."

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