{"id":7151,"date":"2026-05-08T00:50:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T22:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/?p=7151"},"modified":"2026-05-08T00:50:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T22:50:27","slug":"what-peter-magyar-will-do-with-the-eus-unlimited-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/what-peter-magyar-will-do-with-the-eus-unlimited-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"What P\u00e9ter Magyar will do with the EU’s “unlimited” trust"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly a month after the vote and on the eve of the inauguration of the government led by P\u00e9ter Magyar, Hungary is a hotbed of ideas and an emotional rollercoaster. The defeated are licking their wounds and eagerly awaiting the start of a Hungarian Tangentopoli. Among the victors, there is scarcely a corner of civil society that is not putting forward plans for the future or a cahier de dol\u00e9ances<\/em> of the discrimination endured over the past fifteen years.<\/p>\n

On a formal level, the handover is proceeding without any particular hitches. Magyar requested \u2014 and obtained \u2014 that the inauguration of the tenth democratic legislature since 1989 and the swearing-in of the new executive take place not on a weekday but on a Saturday. The incoming prime minister decided to mark the arrival of a new political season over the weekend, so as to give his voters a street celebration that falls, not coincidentally, on 9 May, Europe Day. Hungary is symbolically rejoining that European Union it had entered on 1 May 2004, at the end of a decade of effort and sacrifice, and from which Viktor Orb\u00e1n had gradually distanced it. As a Hungarian source within the Permanent Representation to the European Union recounts, in recent months Budapest’s diplomats had been excluded from numerous consultations. And it is no secret that the reason for this marginalisation was the veto Orb\u00e1n had placed on a \u20ac90 billion loan to Ukraine \u2014 in the middle of an election campaign in which his apparent opponent seemed to be Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Magyar. “If Orb\u00e1n had won, they would have suspended our voting rights,” the same source confides.<\/p>\n

The awareness of having narrowly avoided a geopolitical and economic catastrophe is fuelling relief and optimism among Hungary’s elites and financial markets. In recent weeks the forint has appreciated by nearly 10 percent against the euro. Meanwhile, the ministers of the new cabinet \u2014 in particular the Economy Minister, former Shell senior executive Istv\u00e1n Kapit\u00e1ny, and the Finance Minister, Andr\u00e1s K\u00e1rm\u00e1n \u2014 are already at work, in coordination with the Permanent Representation to the EU, to enable the new government to reach an agreement with the European Commission by the end of May to unlock more than \u20ac10 billion in development funds that have been frozen for years.<\/p>\n

P\u00e9ter Magyar knows that time is of the essence. The European Commission has extended to his government what those in the know describe as almost “unlimited” trust \u2014 trust that Brussels justifies both by the exceptional nature of Hungary’s situation and by the universal significance of a message about the possibility of reversing illiberal trends and steering an autocracy back onto a democratic path. Honeymoons do not last long, however, and Magyar must reckon with the burden of a weighty past. What happened on 12 April was not a transfer of power in an ordinary democracy. It was rather an “electoral revolution,” as Hungarian political scientists have called it \u2014 a kind of last call to arms, driven by the authoritarian drift of Orb\u00e1n’s system, which many had come to regard as irreversible.<\/p>\n

Behind what appears to be a smooth and peaceful handover lies a climate of tension running through every fibre of the state apparatus, and through those sectors of the economy dominated by oligarchs on whose payroll hundreds of thousands of Hungarians depend. The political, social, and judicial earthquake set to begin on 11 May \u2014 when the new government takes possession of the strongholds of Orb\u00e1n’s power \u2014 thus combines elements of Eastern Europe’s 1989 (an unarmed revolution in the name of freedom and dignity) with the appetite for judicial reckoning that gripped Italy in 1992\u201393. The political defeat of Orb\u00e1nism inevitably reverberates through the machinery of a kleptocracy that has siphoned tens of billions of euros from the public budget and funnelled them towards a dozen oligarchs and a multitude of hangers-on.<\/p>\n

The call of handcuffs is deafening \u2014 and not so much in Budapest as in the provinces, where the Orb\u00e1n system had constructed mechanisms of neo-feudal domination. A study just published by the doyen of Hungarian pollsters, Endre Hann, identifies corruption and the coarsening of social relations as the main factors behind Orb\u00e1n’s electoral defeat \u2014 not some abstract “hunger for democracy,” nor the government’s betrayal of Western values, but rather outrage at a kleptocratic and economically ruinous system.<\/p>\n

P\u00e9ter Magyar has won a sweeping popular mandate on a platform centred on the fight against corruption, and the ministerial appointments to key positions in the hard-power apparatus \u2014 the chancellery, the Interior, and Justice \u2014 confirm the impression that wide-ranging investigations against the leading political and economic figures of Orb\u00e1n’s system are about to be unleashed.<\/p>\n

What future, then, for the outgoing prime minister? After 36 years, Orb\u00e1n has relinquished his parliamentary seat, and rumours are circulating of an imminent temporary move to the United States to attend the football World Cup. His eldest daughter, R\u00e1hel, whose husband Istv\u00e1n Tiborcz is also one of the most reviled oligarchs of the former regime, has been living in the United States for nearly a year. Should Orb\u00e1n face criminal charges and their attendant consequences, a prolonged stay in the United States \u2014 with the backing of Trump and the Republican Party \u2014 would appear to be one scenario in store for him. As political scientist Ivan Krastev has recently argued, however, Orb\u00e1n’s electoral defeat and the collapse of his system of power represent a reputational blow and a logistical, financial, and structural blow to the entire illiberal international that has been built over the past decade, in no small part thanks to Budapest’s good offices and generous financial contributions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly a month after the vote and on the eve of the inauguration of the government led by P\u00e9ter Magyar, Hungary is a hotbed of ideas and an emotional rollercoaster. The defeated are licking their wounds and eagerly awaiting the start of a Hungarian Tangentopoli. Among the victors, there is scarcely a corner of civil […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7225,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7151"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7306,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions\/7306"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}