Several hundred participants in Sunday’s event supported not only President Sulyok, but also the President of the Supreme Court András Varga, the Prosecutor General Bálint Nagy Gábor, the Chairman of the State Audit Office László Windisch, the National Office for Media and Communication András Koltay, the Constitutional Court Péter Polt, the Office for Economic Competition Balázs Rigó Csaba and the National Office for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information Attila Péterfalvi.
The organizers of Sunday’s protest warned on Facebook that all the appointees were legitimately elected to their positions by the Hungarian parliament and their removal would mean a serious blow to Hungarian democracy.
Prime Minister Magyar called all the above named “puppets” of the previous regime of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and called on them to resign from their positions by May 31. However, this did not happen and Magyar announced that the Tisza government party would find a way to remove them from their positions. In order to remove Sulyok from office, Tisza even wants to change the constitution.
According to the website index.hu, the arrival of several members of the opposition party Fidesz, former Prime Minister Viktor, was greeted by the participants of the event with applause and chanting “Go to it Fidesz”.
On the contrary, when one of the speakers mentioned the name of the current Prime Minister Magyar, the crowd started whistling and chanting “Traitor, traitor”.
The return of Bolshevism
In his speech, the vice-chairman of the Budapest Fidesz organization Zsolt Renge described the effort to recall the president and other state representatives as “the return of Bolshevism”. Renge emphasized that Sulyok is a duly elected president and his mandate ends in 2029. Journalist Mátyás Kohán then compared Prime Minister Magyar to Latin American dictators in his speech.
Former Prime Minister Orbán’s Fidesz party called the effort to remove President Sulyok from office by force a threat to democracy and the state system in Hungary. “In dictatorships, it is customary to remove the president from office by force, blackmail or threats. Magyar’s ultimatum is constitutionally invalid, humanly pathetic and ridiculous,” said the party, which lost power after 16 long years after elections this year.
In Hungary, the parliament elects the president. But it is not so easy to remove him from office, not even with the constitutional majority that Magyar has. The president can only be dismissed if the head of state does not comply with the so-called The basic law, i.e. the constitution, willfully violates it in connection with the performance of the function, or commits an intentional crime.
In such a case, one-fifth of the deputies can initiate proceedings for removal from office, the initiation of which requires a two-thirds majority. Here, Magyar has 141 votes in the 199-member parliament. However, the final decision does not belong to the Parliament, but to the Constitutional Court. And it is still occupied by judges appointed for Orbán.
Tisza, with her majority, could go the way of changing the law, which would shorten Sulyok’s mandate, which now formally belongs to him until 2029.
Sulyok was elected head of state in 2024, when President Katalin Nováková resigned at the beginning of the same year. She left that position after the case with the granting of a pardon for the deputy director of a children’s home in the city of Bicske, who covered up the sexual abuse of children by the director of the institution.
