Hungarys opposition Tisza party ousts Orbán after 12 years: ex-Supreme Court chief elected president

Hungarian voters ended Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 12-year tenure in a landslide victory for the opposition Tisza party, defying expectations and the ruling Fidesz’s media dominance, according to an analysis published on Aug. 9 by Helmut Anheier, Edward Knudsen, and Joseph Saraceno in *HVG* .
The authors, affiliated with the Hertie School in Berlin and UCLA, noted that Orbán’s Hungary had served as a model for aspiring autocrats in the West, but his defeat demonstrated that even entrenched illiberal regimes could be unseated. They cited the Berggruen Governance Index, which classifies Hungary as a hybrid system that had recently improved its governance quality after years of democratic backsliding.
In a separate development, András Baka, a former president of Hungary’s Supreme Court, was elected by parliament on Aug. 9 to serve as the country’s new president. Baka, in a July interview with *Klubrádió*, argued that the removal of former President Tamás Sulyok was a necessary step in dismantling an authoritarian system, stating that Sulyok had lost public trust and that the state’s institutions required constitutional safeguards. Baka emphasized the need for a non-partisan president to oversee the transition, warning against the misuse of supermajority powers .
The analysis in *HVG* also contrasted Hungary’s shift with global trends, noting that the world is not uniformly moving toward liberal democracy or authoritarianism. It highlighted China’s economic growth alongside tightening political controls, and the accelerated institutional erosion under a potential second Trump administration in the U.S., where the president has systematically weakened executive branch constraints.
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