Hungary, the prosecutor general's office passes to an acting head: it falls to Baka to name the successor

The term of Hungarian prosecutor general Nagy Gábor Bálint ended on 25 August 2026. Since that day the prosecutor’s office has been led by deputy prosecutor general Lajtár István, whom President of the Republic András Baka received at Sándor Palace. We wrote about Baka — the judge whose early removal in 2011 reached the European Court of Human Rights — on 19 August, when he took up the presidency.

The departure did not come as a surprise: Nagy had submitted his resignation on 22 July, asking that his term end precisely on 25 August. He had been elected for nine years in the summer of 2025 by the two-thirds majority then led by Fidesz, following the resignation of Polt Péter. His term, then, closed just over a year after it began, and well before its natural expiry.

The replacement procedure places the President of the Republic at the center of a decision that, under the Hungarian legal system, is anything but ceremonial: the prosecutor general is proposed by the head of state and elected by Parliament with a two-thirds majority. Baka cannot appoint, but he can indicate: without a proposal from him Parliament does not vote, and without two-thirds of the votes the proposal does not pass. It is this mechanism that makes this passage the first major choice of his presidency, and at the same time the first test of relations between Sándor Palace and the parliamentary forces.

On the method, the president’s office made known that the name will be indicated after a thorough evaluation, focused on professional requirements and the aptitude to lead the office. Tisza’s parliamentary group, for its part, stated that it did not consider prior consultation with the president on the appointment necessary.

The sharpest political comment came from Péter Magyar, who on the resignation of the prosecutor general stated that “the country has rid itself of another Orbán puppet” (transl. from Hungarian). This is a partisan assessment, not a fact: the material available does not contain elements on the reasons given by Nagy for his resignation, which remain undocumented in today’s sources.

Two unknowns remain open, regarding both timing and arithmetic. The first: it is not known by when Baka intends to formulate the proposal, and none of the sources consulted indicates a deadline. The second: the two-thirds threshold requires an agreement that goes beyond a simple majority, and at present no name appears to be publicly circulating. Until then, the Hungarian prosecutor’s office remains led by an acting head, Lajtár István, with the office’s powers but without the full mandate that only a parliamentary vote can confer.

Sources: Telex; Index; HVG; Economx. Three independent sources: the Sándor Palace statement (Telex, HVG), the MTI agency (Index), RTL Híradó (Economx).