Rizky Amelia
Hungary's parliament voted overwhelmingly on Monday to strip Prime Minister Peter Magyar and two ministers who served under his predecessor, Viktor Orban, of the legal immunity that protects them from prosecution while they hold office. The decision clears the path for prosecutors to pursue separate criminal investigations into each of the three politicians, marking a dramatic break with the impunity that shielded Hungary's former governing elite for more than a decade and a half.
Lawmakers approved the move in response to a request submitted by prosecutors the previous week. Orban's Fidesz party and its smaller allied party, the KDNP, boycotted the session entirely, so the vote was carried by the ruling Tisza party's majority alone. The absence of the opposition — which includes the two former ministers now facing criminal scrutiny — underlines how completely the former governing camp has been excluded from the institutions of state since Tisza came to power.
The most striking feature of the vote is that Magyar, the incumbent prime minister, was the one who asked for his own immunity to be lifted. He is the subject of an investigation into theft, and he said he wanted the protection removed so that he could answer the accusations directly and put an end to what he described as his "character assassination". Sitting prime ministers almost never volunteer to place themselves outside the protection of the criminal process, which suggests Magyar is confident in his defence or that he calculates the political benefit of appearing open to scrutiny outweighs the risk.
In Magyar's case, the investigation concerns an incident at a Budapest nightclub in June 2024. Prosecutors allege that he took a mobile phone from a man who was filming him and then threw the device into the Danube River. Magyar has dismissed the case as a "sham". He has also accused prosecutors of seeking to "conflate" his matter with the separate corruption cases against the former Orban-era ministers, describing that as part of a political attempt at character assassination which, he says, has already failed several times.
The other two figures named in the immunity vote are former Minister of Culture Balazs Hanko and former Minister of National Development Miklos Sesztak. Both remain members of parliament — Hanko as a Fidesz legislator and Sesztak as a KDNP lawmaker — and both deny any wrongdoing. Their cases are the first corruption investigations opened against senior members of Orban's government since Tisza defeated Fidesz in a landslide election less than six months ago, ending 16 years of uninterrupted rule by the nationalist party.
Hanko is accused of embezzling more than 40 million euros ($46m) in public funds. According to prosecutors, part of that money was used to help finance the campaign for the 2026 parliamentary election, while other sums allegedly benefited individuals personally. The allegation places alleged misuse of state resources squarely at the centre of party financing, an area of persistent controversy in Hungarian politics where governing parties have long been accused of channelling public money into electoral campaigns.
Sesztak faces the largest sum of the three cases. He is under investigation for allegedly accepting more than $37.2m in bribes and kickbacks connected to vehicle purchases made through Hungary's state bus company, as well as to state construction projects. Both allegations concern procurement — the awarding of public contracts for buses and building work — an area that successive Hungarian governments have been accused of using to channel funds to politically connected business interests at inflated prices.
Removing immunity is a procedural step rather than a verdict. It gives prosecutors the legal authority to pursue the cases without the shield that parliamentary and ministerial immunity normally provides, but it establishes nothing about guilt, and all three men remain presumed innocent. Even so, the investigations and any eventual trials could run for years, and the eventual outcome will be seen as a test of whether Hungary's new leadership can deliver on the anti-corruption promises that brought it to power.
Those promises were explicit during the election campaign. Magyar's Tisza party campaigned on pledges to tackle corruption, restore rule-of-law safeguards and rebuild Hungary's strained relationship with the European Union. Since taking office, the government has made the fight against alleged corruption and overpriced public procurement a central plank of its programme, and has announced plans to establish a dedicated asset-recovery office focused on wrongdoing linked to the Orban era.
The timing is politically significant. Investigations reaching into the funding of an election campaign and into state contract awards of the kind still being carried out by government-linked companies are likely to keep public attention focused on how the Tisza administration manages the transition from rhetoric to enforcement. Any sign that former officials face real consequences would strengthen the government's standing at home and in Brussels; delays, dismissals or acquittals would do the opposite.
Orban's Fidesz party, which boycotted Monday's session, is expected to contest the process politically, and its former ministers' cases provide a ready-made rallying point for a party whose support has been severely diminished. For now, the immediate consequence of the vote is that three separate criminal probes — one concerning a phone thrown into the Danube, two concerning tens of millions of euros in alleged corruption — move from the political arena into the hands of the courts.
How those cases unfold will be watched closely inside and outside Hungary. Parliament has removed the legal obstacle to prosecution; the harder task now lies with investigators and judges, and with a government that has staked its early credibility on the principle that no one, including those recently in the highest offices of the state, is above the law.
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