Overview
- Parliament voted 140 to 6 to elect András Baka on Tuesday, August 11, and he is expected to take office about eight days later, around August 19–20.
- Baka is a former president of Hungary’s Supreme Court and a one‑time judge at the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in 2016 that his 2011 removal violated his freedom of expression.
- The presidency became vacant after Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s Tisza party used its two‑thirds majority in July to pass a constitutional amendment that ended Tamás Sulyok’s term, a move critics and some rights groups said replicated the same majority‑driven tactics used under Viktor Orbán.
- Orbán’s Fidesz party and its KDNP ally boycotted the vote and called the process illegitimate while human‑rights organisations urged proper procedure even as others, including Human Rights Watch, described Magyar’s initial steps as promising.
- Magyar says Baka will serve only until a new constitution is drafted, a process the government expects to take about one to one‑and‑a‑half years, and the outcome will shape Hungary’s domestic legitimacy and Brussels’s decisions on restoring fuller EU cooperation and funds.