BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary’s incoming prime minister, Peter Magyar, arrived Saturday at the Parliament building to be sworn into office, ending Viktor Orban’s autocratic 16-year rule.
Magyar’s center-right Tisza party defeated Orban’s nationalist-populist Fidesz in a stunning blow last month, gaining more votes and seats in Parliament than any other party in Hungary’s post-Communist history.
The win, which gave Tisza a two-thirds parliamentary majority, will allow it to roll back many of the policies that gave Orban a reputation among many of his critics as a far-right authoritarian, clamp down on alleged corruption and transform political dynamics within the European Union, where the former prime minister had upended the bloc by frequently vetoing key decisions.
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A Parliament without Orban
On Saturday, Magyar entered the sprawling neo-Gothic parliament building alongside 140 of his party representatives, controlling 141 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament. Orban’s Fidesz-KDNP coalition will control 52 seats, down from 135, while the far-right Mi Hazank (Our Homeland) party will hold six seats.
The 199 representatives took their oaths of office at around 11 a.m. local time. Orban was not among them for the first time since Hungary’s first post-Communist Parliament was formed in 1990.
The new national assembly has 54 women lawmakers, most from the Tisza party — more than a quarter of the total and the most in Hungary’s history.
Magyar, a 45-year-old lawyer who founded Tisza in 2024 after years as an insider in Orban’s party, has vowed to end official corruption, which he argues has robbed Hungarians of economic opportunity.
The new prime minister has called on Hungarians to attend an all-day “regime-change” celebration outside Parliament to mark his inauguration and the end of the Orban era. Several thousand people had already gathered as the new representatives were sworn in.
After he takes his oath at around 3 p.m. local time, Magyar is set to address the crowd outside.
Repairing relations with the EU
Magyar has promised to repair his country’s ties with the EU, which Orban had pushed to the breaking point, and to restore Hungary’s place among Western democracies, whose standing had been called into question as Orban drifted ever closer to Russia.
Unlocking about 17 billion euros ($20 billion) of EU funds for Hungary frozen during Orban’s time in office over rule-of-law and corruption concerns is among the incoming prime minister’s top priorities. The money is sorely needed to help jump-start Hungary’s struggling economy, which has stagnated for the last four years.
In a sign of that commitment, Tisza officials say they will once again fly the EU flag on the Parliament building’s facade after Orban’s government removed it in 2014.
A party to celebrate the end of Orban’s rule
Budapest’s liberal mayor, Gergely Karacsony, posted an open invitation to a party by the Danube River later Saturday to celebrate Orbán’s fall and the formation of the new government.
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Karacsony wrote in a social media post the party was to express gratitude to Hungarians who have spent years speaking out against Orban’s system: “Teachers fired, civilians and journalists humiliated, small churches torn apart.”
“We can finally leave this era behind us — but first, let us remember the everyday heroes and express our gratitude with a farewell to the system,” he wrote on Facebook.