Viktor Orban suddenly looks vulnerable

An obscure Hungarian official has come from nowhere to upend his country’s politics, threatening to bring down its once unassailable leader.

Peter Magyar stole the show during a speech in Budapest on Hungary’s national holiday last month. Picture: Getty Images

An obscure Hungarian official has come from nowhere to upend his country’s politics, threatening to bring down its once unassailable leader, Viktor Orban.

Known most widely for running the country’s student loans authority and for being the former spouse of Judit Varga, the high-flying justice minister, Peter Magyar, whose surname means “Hungarian”, has become a political superstar.

He is the first of Mr Orban’s closest allies in the Fidesz party to publicly break with him, promising to oust the nationalist Prime Minister after a torrid few days of corruption allegations and bitter fighting with his former wife, who remains loyal to the government.

With many television and radio appearances since accusing Mr Orban and cabinet chief Antal Rogan of corruption, Mr Magyar, 43, has become one of the most popular figures in Hungary, with polling putting him on a theoretical 13 per cent of the vote.

“Until a few weeks ago, Magyar was virtually unknown. Now he is dominating conversations and headlines in Hungary, causing discomfort for Orban and the government,” said Anna Donath, a liberal member of the European parliament and a leader of the Hungarian opposition.

His revolt is the first significant crack in Mr Orban’s famously loyal inner circle, of which Mr Magyar was once a key part.

One veteran Hungarian conservative, who has known Mr Orban since they were young dissidents under the communist regime in the 1980s, believes dissent among ruling figures of Fidesz will lead to the government’s downfall.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been acused of corruption. Picture: AFP

“Viktor has always managed to keep his circle loyal or under control,” he said. “When that loyalty breaks, that is what will bring him down, not the opposition, who are useless.”

The son of a lawyer, Mr Magyar joined Fidesz in 2002, before the party was the dominant force in Hungarian politics, which separates him from opposition socialists and liberals who are tainted in voters’ minds by close links with “progressive” American and EU funding.

Hungary’s marginalised opposition hopes Mr Magyar can turn around its fortunes. “We will only be able to overthrow the Orban system with one or more ex-­Orbanist groups and cadres,” Sandor Revesz wrote in opposition newspaper Heti Vilaggazdasag.

Not long ago, Mr Orban, ­Europe’s longest-serving prime minister, was predicting an earthquake for populists and nationalists in European elections, where Ms Varga, 43, would be the party’s multilingual, pan-European face. On February 10, everything went wrong. Katalin Novak, an Orban protege and the country’s president, was forced to resign for giving a presidential pardon to a care-home official who had helped to cover up a pedophile scandal.

The pardon came at the request of Zoltan Balog, a bishop and head of the Hungarian Reformed Church, who is close to Mr Orban and Fidesz.

Ms Varga, who signed the pardon as justice minister, was also forced to resign. Mr Magyar, the ­father of her three children, leapt to her defence, accusing Mr Orban of hiding “behind women’s skirts”.

Former justice minister Judit Varga was caught on tape talking to her husband as their marriage collapsed. Picture: AFP

Mr Magyar has proved his worth in political combat with a vendetta against Mr Rogan, 52, a key cabinet minister in charge of nat­ional ­security and seen as a potential heir to Orban, 60. On March 15, a national holiday, Mr Magyar stole the show by launching a “Stand Up for Hungarians” movement in front of a huge crowd in Budapest.

He then threw a political grenade last week with the publication of a recording of him talking to his wife in January last year, when she was justice minister. She appeared to admit interfering in a major corruption case, and the recording appeared to suggest that Mr Rogan had pressured prosecutors.

It was made last year in the Magyar-Varga family home as their marriage collapsed into acrimony and allegations against him of domestic violence. Under pressure from her husband, Ms Varga says Mr Rogan “recommended to the prosecutors what should be removed” from case files in a major corruption scandal that goes to trial this spring.

Katalin Cseh, another opposition MEP, said: “The regime is rotten to its core. We’ve known this for long; now insiders corroborate it too.”

Whether Mr Magyar can rally the opposition remains to be seen, but as political scientist Gabor Torok notes, “Fidesz has lost control of the public discourse”.

The Times