Change of the President of Hungary: Causes and Consequences

In February 2024, Hungarian President Katalin Novak resigned after only 20 months in office. The formal reason, according to her own admission, was an insufficiently thought-out decision related to the release from responsiveness of one of the defendants in the pedophile scandal in an orphanage. Although the decision was made in the spring of 2023, its details have been raised on the billboard by the opposition only now. Hungarian society reacted to the situation in different ways. Some were outraged by the «unacceptable frivolity» on the part of the country’s president, others felt that K. Novak should still have found an explanation for her action and not give up as easily as she did. Although not more popular than her predecessors, the current head of state nevertheless successfully fit into the European mainstream for gender equality, becoming the first woman in this post in Hungarian history, as well as the youngest president of the country. And although the post of president has rather decorative significance due to the Hungarian constitution, there were still moments in Hungarian history when political contradictions between the president and the Prime Minister raised important discussions in Hungarian society. In this case, K. Novak could not rise to such a level, on the contrary, casting a shadow on the moral principles that Prime Minister Orban puts at the forefront of his policy. However, the search for a new contender for the Alexander Palace, where the residence of the Hungarian president is located, did not take long. According to the constitution, this takes a month. At the moment, the parliament has been invited to vote for the candidacy of the head of the Constitutional Court of Hungary, Tamas Sulyok.