Two one-time senior members of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government were taken into custody by prosecutors just hours after parliament lifted their immunity on Sept. 28.
Their cases mark the first corruption investigations targeting high-ranking members of Orban’s 16-year administration.
Prime Minister Peter Magyar said the Hungarian people are witnessing “what a true regime change and equality before the law mean.” The opposition Fidesz party called the two cases a political show trial.
Balazs Hanko, who served as culture and innovation minister from 2024 until May and is now a Fidesz lawmaker, was questioned on suspicion of misappropriation of public funds.
Prosecutors have alleged that Hanko, in his role as chair of the National Cultural Fund, ordered the allocation of 17.3 billion forints (about $53.5 million) in 1,079 grants between September 2025 and March 2026 through a grants committee he headed. That money, they say, was not in keeping with the fund’s legal remit and helped foot Fidesz’s bill for the April election.
“My conscience is clear. This is a political show trial,” Hanko said in a video published on Orban’s Facebook page.
Miklos Sesztak, who served as minister for national development between 2014 and 2018 and is now a lawmaker for Fidesz’s Christian Democrat ally, is accused of pocketing more than 12 billion forints in bribes and kickbacks related to the state purchase of buses and construction contracts.
Sesztak denies the claims. Neither man has been charged, and judges still have to decide whether they must stay in pretrial detention.
The Hungarian parliament voted 139–0 to suspend immunity for both lawmakers. Fidesz boycotted the session, describing the process as political tyranny.
Criticism of Charges
Rodrigo Ballester, director of the Center for European Studies at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest and a critic of the new government, told The Epoch Times that the arrests came after weeks in which Magyar had publicly named political opponents whom he expected to see imprisoned.
“We now live in a country where the prime minister puts the prosecution service under pressure by saying publicly who must go to prison and who must not, and where his words are followed by effect. But for Brussels, which spent years denouncing Orban’s ‘autocracy,’ all of this is now perfectly acceptable,” he said.
Ballester said he deemed detention out of proportion in a case dealing with government decisions on cultural grants, not personal enrichment.
He also pointed to an earlier dispute.
In July, prosecutors raided the data center that housed Fidesz’s servers as part of the same investigation. However, a month later, the Prosecutor General’s Office said the search itself was lawful but that seizing the party’s entire data archive constituted an illegal “fishing expedition.”
Hungarian Prosecutor General Gabor Balint Nagy had already stepped down weeks earlier after coming under pressure from Magyar, who had branded him “Orban’s puppet.”
Ballester also challenged the words used to describe Magyar’s government.
“I want to stress that this government is not center-right, but left-wing,” he said. “Just look at the background of its members.”
Ballester said the underlying dispute was over who received public support, arguing that the left cannot stand the idea of public funds going “to patriotic, conservative artists from the provinces rather than to the left-bank cultural milieu.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Magyar’s government for comment.
Constitutional Amendment
At the center of Magyar’s institutional overhaul is the 17th constitutional amendment, which parliament approved on July 13 by a vote of 139–6.
The amendment ended the mandate of President Tamas Sulyok, who signed it under protest. It also restored a retirement age of 70 for Constitutional Court judges, resulting in the departure of four judges on Sept. 1, including court president Peter Polt. In addition, it limited parliamentary service to 12 years when previous terms are included, preventing Fidesz caucus leader Gergely Gulyas from standing again.
Magyar defended the changes by pointing to what he called “a completely clear mandate” from voters.
Gulyas said the amendment “breaks up the legal system, undermines the rule of law and restricts democracy.”
On Aug. 11, parliament elected Andras Baka as president. Baka previously served as chief of Hungary’s supreme court before being removed by Orban’s government in 2011, a move that the European Court of Human Rights later found to have violated his rights.
Human Rights Watch, a frequent critic of Orban’s government, said in June that Magyar’s government “has a mandate to set right the damage done to the rule of law during 16 years of Fidesz rule.”
At the same time, the group warned that removing the president and the head of the Constitutional Court through a constitutional amendment, rather than using the constitution’s impeachment procedures, deprived them of important due process safeguards.
The organization also said the forced retirement of judges was “reminiscent” of a measure adopted by Fidesz in 2011 that was later found unlawful by the European Union’s top court.
“The ends do not justify the means,” said Benjamin Ward, Human Rights Watch’s deputy Europe director.
At the same time, Brussels has begun moving toward the release of funds previously withheld from Hungary.
On Sept. 23, the European Commission proposed unfreezing 4.2 billion euros in cohesion funding suspended in 2022. The sum forms part of 16.4 billion euros in funding pledged in May. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Hungary “has taken important steps to strengthen the rule of law.”
