When Péter Magyar's Tisza party swept Hungary's April election with a two-thirds parliamentary majority, veteran observers of Central European politics noted what that supermajority actually means in practical terms: it is the exact threshold Viktor Orbán used, repeatedly, to reshape the Hungarian state in his own image. Magyar now holds the same lever. He is pulling it.

The immediate target is President Tamás Sulyok — a jurist appointed to the largely ceremonial but symbolically significant presidency under Orbán's tenure, and a man who has made clear he has no intention of resigning on Magyar's say-so. Sulyok's public pushback was blunt: he does not believe the new government has the legal standing to demand his early departure, and he has said so on the record. Magyar's response was to escalate directly, first threatening legal action, then announcing the government will amend the Constitution itself to create a removal mechanism that does not currently exist.

That is not a subtle move. Hungary's Constitution — formally the Fundamental Law, overhauled by Orbán in 2011 — does not provide a straightforward parliamentary path to remove a sitting president outside of impeachment for criminal conduct. Magyar's team is essentially proposing to write the exit door into the document, then walk Sulyok through it. Critics of Orbán spent years warning that a governing party with a two-thirds majority could weaponize constitutional amendment powers against independent institutions. They were right. They should be careful what they wished for in reverse.

Magyar has framed the push in the language of democratic restoration — clearing out officials whose appointments were engineered to outlast Orbán's rule and insulate the old system from electoral accountability. That framing has genuine merit. Orbán's late-term institutional maneuvers, including packing judicial bodies and installing loyalists in nominally independent posts with long fixed terms, were widely documented and drew repeated censure from the European Parliament and the European Commission. The strategy was deliberate: create a deep state of Fidesz-aligned placeholders that any successor government would have to govern around or fight through.

But the constitutional amendment route opens a debate Magyar cannot afford to lose on the merits. The rule-of-law argument cuts both ways. Using a parliamentary supermajority to remove an official mid-term by rewriting the rules mid-game is precisely the kind of action that — when Orbán did it — triggered years of Brussels sanctions proceedings and domestic protests. Magyar's supporters argue the situations are not equivalent: Orbán dismantled checks and balances to entrench one-party dominance, while Magyar is attempting to restore them. That argument is coherent. It will be tested by how the process actually unfolds — transparently, with genuine legal debate in parliament, or fast and hard with the votes already counted.

Sulyok, for his part, is not a neutral figure. His appointment trajectory ran through institutions Orbán systematically brought to heel, and his refusal to resign tracks with a broader pattern of Fidesz-aligned officials treating their posts as fortresses rather than public trusts. His legal objection to the removal demand may be technically defensible; it is not politically clean.

What happens next will define Magyar's governing character more than the election victory did. Winning against Orbán's exhausted machine was the easier part. Dismantling the constitutional architecture Orbán spent 16 years building — without becoming a mirror image of the man in the process — is the actual test. The Constitutional Court, itself stacked with Orbán-era appointees, will almost certainly be invoked at some stage. That institution's response, and Magyar's response to its response, will tell observers everything about whether Hungary is genuinely transitioning or simply cycling its dominant party.

For now, Magyar holds the votes, and he is using them. Whether historians record this moment as democratic surgery or as the next chapter in Hungary's long experiment with constitutional hardball will depend on details still being written.