Hungary’s governing Tisza Party has nominated former Supreme Court president András Baka as its candidate for head of state, Prime Minister Péter Magyar announced on Saturday, three days before parliament is scheduled to elect President Tamás Sulyok’s successor.
‘The Tisza parliamentary group has just made one of its most important decisions so far by secret ballot: we are nominating Dr András Baka, former president of the Supreme Court, for President of the Republic of Hungary,’ Magyar wrote. Baka is expected to be elected on Tuesday, with Tisza holding 141 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly.
According to Magyar, the parliamentary group agreed that Baka represented the strongest guarantee that the presidency could ‘regain its true dignity’, unite the nation and act as a constitutional counterweight to the governing majority. The prime minister highlighted Baka’s decades-long legal and judicial career and his commitment to judicial independence, the separation of powers and the rule of law.
Baka served as director-general of the College of Public Administration before spending 17 years as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights. Parliament elected him president of the Supreme Court in 2009 for a six-year term, but his mandate was terminated three and a half years early on 1 January 2012 when Viktor Orbán’s government reorganized the Supreme Court as the Kúria and introduced new rules for its presidency. The ECtHR later ruled that Hungary had violated Baka’s rights to access to a court and freedom of expression in connection with his premature removal.
His nomination concludes a selection process that became unusually public after Magyar’s first preferred candidate, chess grandmaster Judit Polgár, rejected the position in July. Magyar subsequently promised a broader consultation, while he and Minister heading the Prime Minister’s Office Bálint Ruff publicly met several potential candidates, including lawyer Botond Fülöp, historian Ignác Romsics and Baka. On Friday, Magyar said the party leadership had narrowed roughly ten realistic candidates to three before leaving the final decision to Tisza’s parliamentary group.
Baka’s political symbolism is particularly strong because his own removal bears striking procedural similarities to the way Tisza ended Sulyok’s mandate. The 17th amendment, adopted by Tisza’s constitutional supermajority in July, contained provisions terminating Sulyok’s presidency before the expiry of his term after he refused Magyar’s calls to resign.
Fidesz has since repeatedly cited the move as evidence that the new government is disregarding the rule of law, while Tisza has pointed to Baka’s removal under Fidesz as its most obvious historical counterargument.
At the same time, Baka’s nomination gives that symbolism an uncomfortable second meaning. Elevating one of the best-known victims of the Orbán government’s constitutional power politics immediately after removing another officeholder through constitutional engineering undermines Tisza’s ‘regime change’ narrative and gives critics a clear line of attack: that the governing party is basically reproducing the same methods it previously condemned.
Sulyok’s mandate ended on 20 July, and parliamentary speaker Ágnes Forsthoffer has exercised presidential powers on an interim basis since then. Fidesz and KDNP have said they will boycott Tuesday’s election because they consider Sulyok’s removal illegitimate, while Our Homeland has proposed energy lawyer Máté Tóth but lacks enough MPs to nominate him independently.
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