The judge removed by Orbán in 2011 becomes Hungary's president today

Hungary has a new president of the Republic, and his biography coincides with one of the most contested chapters of the last fifteen years of Hungarian politics. András Baka, 73, officially takes office on August 19, 2026.

The process was swift. Parliament elected him on August 11 with 140 votes in favor and six against, in a secret ballot and as the sole candidate. He was nominated by the governing Tisza party, which holds the two-thirds majority required to elect the head of state. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz boycotted the vote: a choice that explains both the small number of dissenting votes and the fact that no other names were in the running.

The reason this election carries symbolic weight beyond the ordinary lies in the new president’s résumé. For seventeen years, from 1991 to 2008, Baka worked in Strasbourg as a judge of the European Court of Human Rights. He returned home in 2009, elected president of the Hungarian Supreme Court: a post cut short at the end of 2011, when judicial reforms enacted by Orbán’s government terminated his mandate. Fifteen years later, the man whose position was eliminated by that institutional overhaul now holds the highest office in the state, elected by the majority that replaced the one in power at the time.

It is worth recalling what that office actually entails. The Hungarian presidency has a five-year term and largely ceremonial powers. The head of state does, however, have two tools of some significance: he can send a law back to Parliament for further review, or refer it to the Constitutional Court. In a system where legislative power rests firmly with whoever holds two-thirds of the seats, a presidential referral back to Parliament is more of a political signal than an obstacle; recourse to the Constitutional Court, by contrast, opens a judicial process the government does not directly control.

The succession comes after a period of interim leadership. Baka takes over from Tamás Sulyok, whose term ended on July 20 following the signing of the seventeenth constitutional amendment. In the meantime, the duties were carried out by Parliament Speaker Ágnes Forsthoffer: nearly a month of institutional stewardship, now concluded with the inauguration.

In his speech following the election, the new president stressed one point: a country cannot build a shared future as long as its citizens continue to see one another as enemies. It is a formula that names, without naming it directly, the divide the new head of state believes must be addressed — one that the main opposition party’s boycott of his election made immediately measurable.

A note on sources, owed for the sake of transparency. The story rests on three origins: an Associated Press dispatch carried by ABC News, coverage of the National Assembly vote published by Al Jazeera, and a report from Xinhua (Chinese state news agency), the latter used only as an attribution check and not as an independent source of facts.

What remains is a picture of a full transfer of power carried out entirely through formal channels: whoever won the parliamentary elections used its qualified majority to elect the head of state, and whoever lost them responded by staying away from the chamber. The first practical test will come with the first law the president decides to send back to Parliament or refer to the Constitutional Court: these are the only two acts through which the Hungarian presidency affects the legislative process, and both are public and dated.