The Hungarian parliament has passed a bill to remove President Tamás Sulyok from power. Sulyok is considered to be a loyalist of the former prime minister Viktor Orbán of the Fidesz party, which lost power in April.

With 66 percent of the seats, the two-thirds supermajority of Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s Tisza party was able to pass the 17th amendment to the constitution. This broad legislation halts the term of both President Sulyok and Constitutional Court head Péter Polt from the day of their incorporation.

It was the most dramatic day in the legislature since the new government was sworn in in early May. The change of leadership came after a surprise landslide win by the Tisza party in April 12 election over Fidesz.

Sulyok now has five days to either sign the amendment into law, thereby ending his own term, or send it back to the Constitutional Court for consideration. Prime Minister Magyar has said he will immediately take impeachment proceedings against the president if he decides to refer it up.The president would automatically be suspended if Prime Minister Magyar decides to take impeachment proceedings against him. Or the new government has strongly encouraged him to step down so that there will be no constitutional crisis in the country’s best interests.

Deputies of the opposition Fidesz party, who left Parliament in protest of Monday’s vote, also demonstrated against. They attacked the Tisza party for creating a tyranny, saying that the amendment gives the government the right to do anything it pleases to any public official without giving him an opportunity to defend himself.

Dismantling an Entrenched Political System

Former opposition president candidate Péter Rona highlighted the irony in the situation, saying Fidesz is by its own definition, suffering from its own concept of power. The “winner takes all” principle was explicitly codified in the constitution, drafted and adopted by Orbán’s government in 2011.

From 2010 to 2026, Fidesz consistently operated with its own two-thirds majority to ‘cleanse’ the various ‘independent’ institutions of its opponents, replacing them with Fidesz supporters. 141 Tisza deputies were jubilant about the political turnabout they witnessed when the results of the 17th amendment vote were announced with a standing ovation.

The 17th amendment is a set of laws designed to take the President out of the picture and keep the country running until a new constitution can be formally adopted in 2-3 years. The package excludes Constitutional Court judges over 70 years old, and prohibits deputies who have served three terms from seeking re-election. Over half of the deputies of this government are affected by this term limit.

Former head of the Supreme Court, András Baka, agreed with the removal of the president. He claimed that between 1989 and 2010 Hungary was a rule-of-law country, but since then Fidesz has taken over the state apparatus and built a “new, advanced authoritarianism” that would “mitigate the consequences of losing the elections.” However, Baka challenged the new restrictions on deputies’ terms, saying that this violates the public’s right to elect their preferred candidates.

In the interim, Viktor Orbán’s party has been in downtrend since it was soundly defeated at the polls. Orbán has been barely visible in public and abstained from taking up his seat in parliament. He was allegedly not in Hungary on the day of the election and went to the football World Cup finals in the USA. His departure has left a lot of the other Fidesz supporters angry and confused, as party number two, Gergely Gulyás, suddenly resigned as head of the parliamentary group.