Hungary is a unitary parliamentary republic governed under the Fundamental Law, a constitution adopted on 18 April 2011 and in force since 1 January 2012. The head of state is the President of the Republic, currently András Baka, a former chief justice elected by parliament in August 2026; the head of government is Prime Minister Péter Magyar of the Tisza Party, in office since 9 May 2026. Laws are made by the National Assembly (Országgyűlés), a single chamber of 199 members elected every four years, and a 15-member Constitutional Court reviews whether those laws fit the constitution. Below the national level the country is divided into 19 counties plus the capital, Budapest.
Much of this changed in 2026. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, which wrote the constitution, lost power after sixteen years, and the Tisza Party began rewriting the same text with its own two-thirds majority.
The Fundamental Law of 2011 and Its Seventeen Amendments
Before 2012 Hungary ran on the 1949 constitution of the communist People’s Republic, heavily amended on 23 October 1989 to purge its communist character, which left Hungary the only former Eastern Bloc state still without an entirely new post-communist constitution. The Fidesz government elected in 2010 mailed a consultation questionnaire to every citizen (about 917,000, roughly 11%, came back) and passed the new Fundamental Law (Magyarország alaptörvénye) on 18 April 2011 by 262 votes to 44. The Socialists and LMP boycotted both the drafting and the vote, and Jobbik voted against.
The document renamed the state from “Hungarian Republic” to simply “Hungary”, while keeping it a republic. Its preamble refers to God, Christianity and the Holy Crown. It defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman, enshrines the forint as legal tender, and lists policy areas such as taxation, pensions and family policy that can only be changed through “cardinal acts” passed by two-thirds of MPs. That two-thirds rule shapes Hungarian politics: in a 199-seat chamber, 133 seats are enough to change the constitution itself.
The text has rarely stayed still. The Fourth Amendment of March 2013, passed 265 to 11, annulled Constitutional Court rulings made before 2012, kept their legal effects, and limited the court to procedural review of the constitution itself. A 2020 amendment defined the family as a father who is a man and a mother who is a woman, and the fifteenth, in 2025, declared that every person is either male or female and allowed dual nationals to be stripped of Hungarian citizenship. After the change of government, the sixteenth amendment of 15 June 2026 limited prime ministers to eight years in office, counted from 1990, and removed the clause that underpinned the Sovereignty Protection Office. The seventeenth, adopted on 13 July 2026 by 139 votes to 6 with Fidesz–KDNP boycotting, ended the president’s mandate, capped MPs at three terms and restored an age limit of 70 for constitutional judges.
From Sulyok to András Baka: The Presidency in Sándor Palace
The president is elected by the National Assembly, not by voters, for a five-year term and may serve two terms. Any citizen aged 35 or over can stand if at least one-fifth of MPs (40) nominate them in writing. A two-thirds vote of all MPs elects the president in the first round; if no one reaches it, a second round between the top two is decided by a simple majority of votes cast.
The office is largely ceremonial but not empty. The president is commander-in-chief of the Hungarian Defence Forces, sets election dates, proposes the prime minister, the president of the Curia, the Prosecutor General and the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights, and may return a bill to parliament or send it to the Constitutional Court for review. If the office falls vacant, the Speaker of the National Assembly acts as president.
Recent holders show how political the post has become. Katalin Novák resigned on 10 February 2024 over a pardon she had granted in a child-abuse cover-up case. Parliament replaced her with Tamás Sulyok, then president of the Constitutional Court, who was formally independent but backed only by Fidesz and KDNP. After the 2026 election Magyar asked Sulyok to step down; when he did not, the seventeenth amendment ended his term. Sulyok signed it and left office on 20 July 2026, and Speaker Ágnes Forsthoffer served as acting president. On 11 August 2026 parliament elected András Baka, who had been removed as head of the Supreme Court in 2011 when Fidesz recast it as the Curia; the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2014 that his removal violated his rights. Baka, an independent, took office on 19 August 2026 as Hungary’s eighth president.
Péter Magyar’s Cabinet and the Prime Minister’s Powers
Executive power sits with the government, led by the prime minister. The president nominates the leader of the party holding a majority, or, failing that, the person most likely to command one, and the National Assembly elects that person by a simple majority. Much as the chancellor does in the government of Germany, the prime minister picks the ministers and alone can dismiss them, while each nominee is heard by parliamentary committees before being appointed by the president.
Orbán held the office in 1998–2002 and 2010–2026. Péter Magyar, born in Budapest in 1981 and a former Fidesz insider, launched the Tisza Party’s challenge in 2024 after the Novák scandal. Parliament elected him on 9 May 2026, and his single-party government of sixteen ministers was formed on 12 May. Magyar gave the health, justice, education and finance ministers a veto over government decisions. Under the sixteenth amendment, no future prime minister may serve more than eight years in total.
199 Seats: How the National Assembly in the Országház Is Elected
The National Assembly was long described in the constitution as the highest organ of state power, a designation the Fundamental Law dropped in 2012. It passes laws and the budget, elects the president, prime minister and constitutional judges. Since 1902 it has met in the neo-Gothic Parliament Building on Kossuth Square, on the Pest bank of the Danube, designed by Imre Steindl and still the largest building in Hungary. You can see how it shapes the riverfront in our guide to Budapest, the capital.
Its 199 members are chosen by a mixed system, held in a single round. Voters living in Hungary cast two ballots. The first elects a member in one of 106 single-member constituencies by first-past-the-post, with no runoff. The second goes to a closed national party list, and the 93 list seats are shared by the D’Hondt method among lists that clear 5% of the vote (10% for a joint list of two parties and 15% for three or more). Votes for losing constituency candidates, and the winner’s surplus over the runner-up, are added to each party’s list total, which tends to reward the largest party. Citizens abroad without a Hungarian address vote for a list only.
The 12 April 2026 election had a turnout of 79.6%, a record for any free election since 1990. Tisza won 53.2% of the list vote and 141 seats, enough for a two-thirds majority. Fidesz–KDNP fell to 38.6% and 52 seats, and the far-right Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazánk) kept 6 seats. No minority list reached its quota of 26,712 votes, so Hungary’s national minorities lost parliamentary representation.
The Constitutional Court, the Curia and Other Checks
The Constitutional Court (Alkotmánybíróság) began work on 1 January 1990, a product of the 1989 roundtable negotiations that ended one-party rule. It has had 15 judges since 1 September 2011, up from 11, each elected by two-thirds of MPs for a twelve-year term; judges may not belong to a party. It reviews bills before publication and hears constitutional complaints. Under the 2011 text its power over budget and tax laws is limited while public debt stays above half of GDP, a restriction the seventeenth amendment eased in 2026.
The court’s independence has been argued over for years. Critics such as the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said Fidesz-appointed judges mostly upheld government policy. The 2026 amendments forced out its president, Péter Polt, a former Prosecutor General, on 31 August 2026; Ágnes Czine has served as acting president since 1 September. Under the seventeenth amendment the court, like the Curia, now elects its own president.
Ordinary justice is headed by the Curia (Kúria), the historic name restored in 2012 for the Supreme Court. The Hungarian National Bank, the central bank, issues the forint; our post on the currency of Hungary covers why the Fundamental Law names it.
19 Counties, Budapest and About 3,150 Municipalities
Hungary is a unitary state, so the counties exercise only the powers that national law gives them. There are 19 counties: Bács-Kiskun, Baranya, Békés, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, Csongrád-Csanád, Fejér, Győr-Moson-Sopron, Hajdú-Bihar, Heves, Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok, Komárom-Esztergom, Nógrád, Pest, Somogy, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, Tolna, Vas, Veszprém and Zala. Budapest is a separate capital city (főváros) and belongs to none of them.
Even the word for county is political. Between 2023 and 2026 the counties officially used the historic name vármegye before reverting to megye under the new government. At the bottom are about 3,150 municipalities (3,152 in 2013: 346 towns and 2,806 villages), each with a local government elected every five years.
Article 7 and the Frozen EU Funds, 2018–2026
In a referendum on 12 April 2003, 84% of Hungarian voters backed EU membership, and the country joined on 1 May 2004. Under Orbán, relations with Brussels turned into a running dispute over the rule of law. On 12 September 2018 the European Parliament voted to trigger the Article 7 procedure against Hungary for a “clear risk of a serious breach” of the EU’s founding values, based on a report by MEP Judith Sargentini. Before voting rights can be suspended, the other governments must unanimously find a serious and persistent breach.
Money proved a stronger lever. In December 2020 the EU tied budget payments to rule-of-law conditions, over objections from Hungary and Poland. On 15 December 2022 the Council froze €6.3 billion after the Commission concluded that Hungary’s remedial measures still fell short. The same month the Commission said it would hold back all €22 billion of cohesion funds until conditions on judicial independence, academic freedom, LGBTQI rights and asylum were met.
After the change of government, Magyar secured a deal with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in May 2026 to unlock €16.4 billion, subject to anti-corruption reforms. In September 2026 the Commission proposed releasing a further €4.2 billion in cohesion funding, saying it considered that Hungary had addressed the rule-of-law breaches affecting the EU budget. The Article 7 procedure opened in 2018 is still pending, and it will test that settlement in the Országház as much as in Hungary’s dealings with Brussels and the countries that border Hungary, Ukraine among them.