Hungary's post-Orbán reckoning has moved from rhetoric to handcuffs. Two former ministers — culture minister Balázs Hankó and former national development minister Miklós Seszták — were detained Monday night, hours after parliament voted to strip their immunity. The charges are substantial: Hankó allegedly channelled €47M from Hungary's national cultural fund to Fidesz-linked artists and campaign operations; Seszták allegedly took €32.6M in bribes and kickbacks tied to inflated bus procurement contracts and public construction projects. Both deny wrongdoing. These are the first criminal proceedings against senior figures from Viktor Orbán's 16-year government, and they land with deliberate political force. Prime Minister Péter Magyar, whose Tisza party swept April's elections on an anti-corruption platform, declared that 'Hungary is no longer a country without consequences.' The timing is unmistakable: Magyar asked for his own parliamentary immunity to be lifted in the same vote, pre-empting a charge over snatching and discarding a man's phone into the Danube — a case he calls a €300 'sham.' The scale of alleged extraction is significant but likely represents only an opening salvo. Magyar has repeatedly claimed that corruption cost Hungary 8-10% of GDP annually under Orbán — a figure that, if even partially accurate, implies tens of billions of euros siphoned over a decade and a half. The two cases so far total roughly €80M in alleged misuse, a fraction of that broader claim. Institutional infrastructure is being built in parallel. Hungary's new national asset protection and recovery office announced its first four cases on the same day: residency-permit selling, local council corruption, state investment irregularities linked to real estate mogul Dániel Jellinek, and propaganda spending by Orbán's now-abolished 'sovereignty protection office.' The breadth signals intent to pursue corruption across tiers of government and the private sector. Orbán's response follows a predictable script. He has accused authorities of conducting sham investigations designed to render Fidesz 'legally unviable' — a framing that recasts accountability as political persecution. Hankó called his prosecution a 'political show trial' in a live video on Orbán's own Facebook page. The narrative war is already well underway. The structural question is whether Magyar's anti-corruption drive can survive contact with Hungary's deeply entrenched patronage networks. Orbán built a system where state funds, media, judiciary, and procurement all flowed through overlapping loyalist networks. Arresting two ex-ministers is dramatic, but dismantling the underlying architecture — shell companies, compliant courts, captured regulators — requires sustained institutional reform, not just prosecutions. The critical test comes in the next 12-18 months. If convictions follow and asset recovery produces real returns, Magyar's 'regime change' claim gains substance. If cases stall, plea deals dilute accountability, or the investigations become selectively partisan, Hungary will have traded one form of captured governance for another. The €300 phone case hanging over Magyar himself is a useful barometer: how the PM handles his own minor legal exposure will signal whether equality before the law is a principle or a slogan.
