Hungarian opposition picks top business executives to dismantle Orbán’s rule

Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar is recruiting top business leaders to form his Cabinet if he wins next month’s election — calculating they will bring the skills needed to break Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ubiquitous grip on state institutions.

Magyar is running about 10 percentage points ahead of Orbán in polls before the April 12 vote, but a victory in the election would not give him an immediate free hand to rule. Magyar would still face a battle to dismantle Orbán’s influence across the judiciary, media and public companies — some of it exercised through complex webs of Orbán-linked shareholdings.

Magyar’s Tisza party is promising a “true regime change” from what it sees as the crony networks through which Orbán, an anti-EU leader close to the Kremlin, controls much of public life in the country of 9.5 million people.

Zoltán Tarr, the No. 2 in Tisza, said the priority was to find “good managers” who could implement that change. He explained that another advantage of recruiting from corporate boardrooms — rather than hiring political veterans — was that the new ministers would not be tainted by previous government experience that would compromise their ability to slash back Orbán’s role in the state.

“We mostly go to the business world to find names because we have certain rules. We cannot deal with people with certain government ‘baggage.’ And that really limits the possibilities for us,” he told POLITICO in an interview.

Tarr added that trying to regain access to Hungary’s currently frozen EU funds would also require skills familiar to executives. “There will be a pragmatic relation with Ursula von der Leyen and Brussels … it’s like business, but mutually beneficial, for Hungary and the EU, and a keeping-your-word kind of business,” he said.

So far, only five names for a potential Cabinet have been confirmed, apart from leader Magyar, who would be prime minister.

Anita Orbán, who until January was public affairs director for Vodafone group and board chair of Czech chemical giant Draslovka, has been tapped to be the country’s new foreign minister, having been a high-level civil servant in the ministry between 2010 and 2015.

To lead the energy portfolio Tisza has picked Shell’s Global Executive Vice President István Kapitány, while for fiscal policy and budget it has picked András Kármán, a top manager at Erste, a Central and Eastern European banking group. The proposed future minister for agriculture, Szabolcs Bóna, is a top entrepreneur in the cattle industry. From outside the realm of big business, the planned minister of health, Zsolt Hegedus, is an orthopedic surgeon.

This strategy has served Tisza well in the past. For its list of candidates for the 2024 European elections, the party used public online forms to recruit apolitical figures such as doctors, lawyers, professors and Hungarians with Brussels experience, while avoiding career politicians associated with Orbán’s Fidesz party.

Complex structures

A classic example of the complexity of Orbán’s hold on state entities is MOL, Hungary’s main energy company.

It is 10 percent owned by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Foundation (MCC) — a Fidesz-aligned academic institution controlled by Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán. In 2022, the MCC founded a think tank in Brussels to lobby EU institutions.

A classic example of the complexity of Viktor Orbán’s hold on state entities is MOL, Hungary’s main energy company. | Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Tarr said Tisza has “a special task force” that has drawn up “a plan” on how to tackle MOL. “The whole leadership structure and ownership structure is something which needs to be dealt with,” he said.

“There are certain things which will be easier to work around, there will be other things which won’t be that easy to work with, which is MCC for example,” Tarr continued.

While the ownership structure will be difficult to change without a two-thirds majority, the company’s strategy will be easier to alter, Tarr said. Tisza plans to halt MOL’s imports of Russian oil by 2035.

No supermajority

The biggest problem for Tisza, however, is that many of the changes it is most determined to implement in Hungary will be constitutionally impossible without a two-thirds supermajority, which looks like a remote prospect.

Miklós Ligeti, legal director at Transparency International Hungary, said a supermajority would be required “to redesign the basics of how Hungary is working.”

The judiciary, the constitutional court, the general prosecutor, the media board and the ombudsman are among the key institutions whose heads can only be appointed with the support of two-thirds of MPs in the Hungarian parliament. These bodies “at the moment are captured [by Orbán’s allies] and may exhibit a potential to block a non-Fidesz government,” Ligeti said.

Tarr admitted that a Tisza government needs to be prepared for both scenarios: a simple majority and a two-thirds majority.

“We do have a list of actions, legal actions we would like to do,” Tarr said. “We have one scenario when we have a constitutional majority, we have another scenario when we just have a simple majority … that’s how we prepare.”

If it attains a supermajority, Tisza also plans to open a debate on the future of the constitution, which was rewritten by Orbán in 2011, along with subsequent amendments, which critics say have limited the power of the constitutional court, civil liberties and media freedom.

“We think it’s not right how [the Constitution is] at the moment, but it is up to a wider dialogue on how it should be,” Tarr said.