Hungary's Parliament voted overwhelmingly on Monday to strip immunity from Prime Minister Peter Magyar and two former ministers from Viktor Orbán's government, clearing separate criminal investigations against all three. Orbán's Fidesz party and its ally KDNP boycotted the session entirely, refusing to participate in the procedural dismantling of their former colleagues' legal shields. The cases are structurally different. Magyar faces investigation over a June 2024 incident at a Budapest nightclub — prosecutors allege he took a man's phone and threw it into the Danube. Magyar himself requested his immunity be lifted, calling the case a "sham" and framing it as "political character assassination." He has an obvious incentive to clear the charge quickly: a sitting prime minister under investigation for petty theft is a permanent opposition talking point. The two Orbán-era cases carry far more institutional weight. Former Culture Minister Balázs Hankó faces accusations of embezzling more than €40 million ($46 million) in public funds, allegedly channeled to finance the 2026 parliamentary election campaign and for personal benefit. Former National Development Minister Miklós Seszták is under investigation for allegedly accepting more than $37.2 million in bribes and kickbacks connected to state bus company vehicle procurements and construction projects. Both deny wrongdoing. These are the first corruption investigations against top Fidesz government figures in 16 years of Orbán's rule — a period during which Hungary became a textbook case of institutional capture, with prosecutors, courts, and oversight bodies systematically defanged. The absence of any high-level corruption probe for over a decade and a half was not evidence of clean governance; it was evidence of a closed system. Magyar's Tisza party ended that system less than six months ago with a landslide victory built on anti-corruption pledges, rule-of-law restoration, and EU rapprochement. His government has since made fighting alleged Orbán-era corruption a central program, including plans for a new asset-recovery office. The immunity vote is the first institutional test of whether those pledges translate into actual accountability mechanisms. Fidesz's boycott is tactically predictable but strategically revealing. By absenting itself, the party avoids creating a parliamentary record of individual members voting against accountability while simultaneously delegitimizing the proceedings in its own media ecosystem. The boycott signals that Fidesz will fight these cases in the court of public narrative, not parliamentary procedure. The critical question is whether Hungary's prosecutorial and judicial infrastructure — rebuilt under Orbán to serve his interests — can now be trusted to investigate his allies fairly and independently. Magyar's gamble is that opening himself to investigation alongside the Orbán ministers signals confidence in the system he's trying to rebuild. The risk is that a system designed for 16 years to protect power will not easily be repurposed to scrutinize it.
