Incoming Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar coolly ramped up pressure on the country’s president to resign on Wednesday, moments after being asked to form a government.
Magyar, 45, shared a picture of himself alongside president Dr Tamas Sulyok, standing in front of the flags of Hungary and the European Union with their hands crossed at the Sándor Palace.
He tagged the president, an ally of his predecessor Viktor Orbán, in the post, saying he was “unworthy of representing the unity of the Hungarian nation”, “unfit to serve as the guardian of legality”, and “not fit to serve as a moral authority or a role model”.
“Following the formation of the new government, Tamás Sulyok must leave office immediately,” Magyar wrote. He told reporters that Sulyok said he would “consider” the request during their meeting, which he described as otherwise amicable.
Magyar threatened that if Sulyok does not resign, he would use his party’s big mandate to amend the constitution and other legislation and to force him from office, along with other “puppets” who had been appointed by the Orbán government.
Magyar separately shared a video from the palace of himself and his team watching Orbán, alone, pacing on an adjacent balcony. Magyar framed the image with his hands and said “absolute cinema”, with Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done” overlaid.
Magyar’s Tisza (Respect and Freedom) party won a landslide victory in Sunday’s election, ending Orbán’s 16-year reign and promising to clamp down on corruption and ease rule of law concerns in a bid to repair ties to the EU and unfreeze billions of euros in withheld funding.
“I told the president [Sulyok] …. that Hungarian people have voted for a change of regime,” Magyar said. He said Sulyok told him during a meeting Magyar described as otherwise amicable that he would ”consider” the request.
The election winner said that his cabinet could be sworn in by mid-May as he unveiled plans to rapidly repeal years of autocratic drift in order to avoid the loss of some €10bn of EU pandemic recovery funding before the deadline in August.
Anti-corruption measures included joining the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, restoring and strengthening the independence of the judiciary and investigative authorities, and restoring media and academic freedoms.
As part of wider moves to restore press freedoms after taking office next month, Magyar said he would suspend state media news broadcasts, which critics at home and abroad say became a government mouthpiece under Orbán.
“Every Hungarian deserves a public service media that broadcasts the truth,” Magyar said on Kossuth state radio, where Orbán had been a weekly guest while opposition politicians rarely got invited.
“We will need a little time to pass a new media law, a new media authority, and setting up the professional conditions for state media to actually do what it is meant to do.”
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