The Hungarian parliament has voted to remove President Tamás Sulyok from office, who was widely seen as a loyalist of former prime minister Viktor Orbán who lost power in April after 16 years.
Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s Tisza party used its two thirds majority to steamroll through the 17th amendment to the constitution, ending the term of Sulyok and the head of the Constitutional Court Péter Polt.
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Orbán himself has hardly been seen in public, and refused to take his seat in parliament. On Monday, he left Hungary to watch the finals of the football World Cup in the US.
There is growing anger with Orbán within what is left of Fidesz. Many feel bewildered by his absence.
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Basically, I understand your concerns.
One reason that could justify this approach is the deliberate abuse of the political system by right-wing enemies of democracy: Even back in the Weimar Republic, and now in many Western countries, the goal of the right wing is not to eliminate democracy from the outside but to undermine it from within. This is also the case in Hungary and, for example, Poland. (In Poland, the current government’s agenda is severely constrained by the president, who is an ally of the right-wing populist PiS party. As a result, many decisions made by the previous government cannot be reversed because they do not align with the president’s ideology.)
It follows that enemies of democracy are far more dangerous when in office than when they are not, because they can use their power to hold the system hostage.
Whether Peter Magyar is truly a genuine alternative to Orbán or whether he now intends to reshape the system to his own advantage remains to be seen; however, the chance of real change will in any case be smaller if the Orbán clique retains access to various offices and positions of power even after the election.
Also they probably saw what happend in the US when Biden tried to stick to old norms and barely did anything about Trumps abuse of power during his first term.