How Hungary’s Child Sex Abuse Scandal Contributed To Orban’s Downfall
Topline
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party’s 16-year rule came to a crashing end on Sunday after an electoral drubbing by former ally Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, which rapidly gained prominence after Magyar’s split with Orban following a high-profile 2024 presidential pardon scandal in a child sex abuse case.
Key Facts
The scandal erupted in February 2024, when the names of 25 people who had received presidential pardons from then-Hungarian President Katalin Novak—a close ally of Orban—a year earlier were made public.
The pardons were granted to mark the occasion of a visit by Pope Francis in 2023, and the list revealed that one of the recipients was a man convicted of covering up the sexual abuse of minors residing in a children’s home in the town of Bicske.
The scandal triggered widespread protests and led to the resignations of Novak and Judit Varga, who served as justice minister in the Orban government at the time and countersigned the clemency documents.
Magyar, who is Varga’s ex-husband and had close ties to the Fidesz party, then announced he was resigning from the position he held at two state-run companies and a state-owned bank, in a Facebook post where he accused the party’s leadership of hiding “behind women’s skirts.”
In an interview with the independent news outlet Partizan, Magyar expanded his attack on the government and said, “a few families own half the country.”
The scandal was a major blow to Orban’s ultra-conservative party, which had positioned itself as the protector of traditional family values and children.
How Did The Scandal Shape The Tisza Party?
The Tisza (Respect and Freedom) party was formed in 2020 and it positioned itself as a conservative alternative to Fidesz that is pro-European. In April 2024, shortly after severing ties with Fidesz, Magyar announced he would join Tisza rather than form a new opposition party. A few months after Magyar joined, Tisza scored its first major electoral victories, winning 7 of Hungary’s 21 seats in the European Parliament and securing nearly 30% of the vote. Magyar and Tisza continued to surge in the polls over the next two years, as they focused their political message on tackling corruption and other domestic issues. This contrasted with Orban, who touted his relationships with foreign leaders such as President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the last few days of the election, Orban even got Vice President JD Vance to stump for him at a campaign rally.
Tangent
The pardon that triggered the scandal was granted to Endre Konya, the deputy director of a state-run orphanage. Konya had been jailed for coercing children to withdraw their testimonies, where they detailed the sexual abuse they faced from the orphanage’s director. In an interview with Hungarian news outlet 444, Magyar claimed that even though Fidesz tried to pin the blame on his ex-wife and Novak, “it was clear from the beginning that a member of Orbán’s family was behind the pardon and was pushing for it.”
Key Background
In a result that several news outlets described as an electoral earthquake, the Magyar-led Tisza won Hungary’s general election by a landslide, ending the far-right authoritarian Orban’s 16-year grip on power. According to the official results, Tisza has secured 138 of the Hungarian parliament’s 199 seats, with nearly 99% of the votes counted. This means voters have given Magyar’s party a two-thirds supermajority that will allow him to undo several major constitutional changes enacted by Orban while in power. Magyar has already signaled he will go after Orban’s loyalists, including the country’s figurehead President Tamás Sulyok, to resign immediately, along with other “puppets” of the previous regime after asking him to form a government.
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