Published in Newsroom.co.nz (Wellington), 28 July 2026
Ask a well-informed European to name the Council of Europe’s constitutional advisory body, and you will usually get a pause. I had to look it up myself last week, which is awkward for a Europe columnist, and worse for one with a doctorate in law.
It is called the Venice Commission, created in May 1990, six months after the Berlin Wall came down. Its founding resolution gave it the job of providing emergency constitutional aid to states in transition.
Sixty-one countries send it constitutional lawyers, and it meets four times a year in Venice, hence the name. Its opinions bind nobody and carry no legal force. Hungary in 1990 was precisely the kind of country it was invented for, and so is Hungary now.
In April, Hungarians ended 16 years of Viktor Orbán. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party took 141 of the 199 seats in parliament, achieving the two-thirds majority required to rewrite the constitution as it pleases.
Magyar first used that power to close the Sovereignty Protection Office, which investigated journalists and civic groups for foreign funding and named them threats to sovereignty. He has also suspended the news service of a state broadcaster that served for years as an organ of Fidesz.
Both moves were right. Neither had any business existing in a democracy.
Magyar knows the machine from inside, having been a Fidesz man married to Orbán’s justice minister until he broke with both in 2024.
But then came an amendment to Hungary’s constitution. Parliament passed it on July 13, ending the term of President Tamás Sulyok, an Orbán appointee, the following day. It also capped parliamentary service at 12 years, counting terms already served, which strikes half of Orbán’s Fidesz members off the 2030 ballot.
Tisza had not campaigned on rewriting the constitution, and Magyar raised it only at his closing rally. Orbán’s own 2011 constitution, the Fundamental Law, was similarly drafted after an election rather than during one.
Magyar won this year’s election, of course, and not narrowly. And sure, Orbán’s machine deserved dismantling. Most Hungarians wanted it gone.
But, like Orbán’s constitution, the new 12-year cap has no electoral mandate. It bars many of the politicians who would have run against its authors from the 2030 ballot.
A government may do a great deal with a supermajority. But setting the terms of the next contest is not a legitimate use of that power.
In a democracy, losers have a right to contest the next election on the same terms as the last, unless the opposition agrees to change them. The two-thirds requirement normally protects that right.
Tisza will be out of power one day. It may then regret its heavy-handedness.
Sulyok had seen it coming in May. As a former head of the Constitutional Court, he knew what a two-thirds majority could do. On May 29, he asked the Venice Commission whether removing a sitting president by amendment met European standards.
The commission took the question seriously, and its president brought a delegation to Budapest on July 2. It then declined to hurry the decision and listed the matter for its October session.
Parliament voted 11 days after the delegation flew home, 139 to six. Fidesz had walked out, so the chamber removed the president in front of empty opposition benches and an empty presidential chair.
Sulyok had asked the Constitutional Court to intervene as well, but seven of its judges recused themselves because of a conflict of interest. Orbán had packed that bench so thoroughly that it lacked enough untainted judges to rule on his system. The court’s president then took the matter off the agenda.
Hungary’s constitutional safeguards have always been fragile. The Constitutional Court can strike down laws, and constitutional amendments require two-thirds of parliament. But nothing at all is beyond amendment.
Germany’s Basic Law is different. Written in 1949 in the shadow of National Socialism, it drew the obvious lesson from Weimar, whose constitution could be set aside by a two-thirds majority, and was, in March 1933. So it put human dignity and the democratic order beyond the reach of any majority.
To be fair to Magyar, he has done one thing Orbán never did. His 16th amendment, in May, limited the office of prime minister to eight years, and the 12-year cap will one day clear his own benches too.
Still, he could have given his constitutional policy more legitimacy if he had shown a bit more patience. Another six weeks would have yielded an opinion from Venice, and it might well have blessed the removal as a justified exception.
But Magyar did not wait. And so, the opinion from the Venice Commission will still be handed down in October, even though it will now refer to a question that Magyar has already settled.
The Venice Commission belongs to the Council of Europe, which is not an EU institution. The council is older and larger than the EU. It deals in human rights and the rule of law, and it has no money to give anybody.
The EU, meanwhile, is preparing to pay more funds to Hungary. Up to €17 billion, some 8 percent of Hungarian GDP, depends on 27 milestones due next month. One requires public participation in law-making.
Brussels fought Orbán for a decade over constitutional procedure and froze this money to show it meant business. The money now arrives in the same month Hungary amended its constitution without waiting for the opinion its own president requested.
Nobody in the EU wants to slow Magyar’s constitutional revolution. Magyar is the prime minister they had hoped for. The money rewards a democratic restoration Brussels helped bring about, no matter how rushed.
Even so, the European Commission might ask how a government that amended the constitution without consulting anyone has met a milestone about public participation.
The harder job is still to come. Magyar must decide when the emergency is over and Hungary is to be governed normally again.
And a future government, perhaps led by Fidesz again, may not accept the new rules at all.
Orbán spent 16 years removing every restraint on his majority. But once out of power, his own president wrote to Venice, begging for one back.
