Hungary’s parliament lifted the immunity of Prime Minister Péter Magyar and two former ministers under nationalist ex-leader Viktor Orbán on Monday, so they could be investigated in separate criminal cases.
The probes against the Orbán-era ministers, who are suspected of corruption worth millions of euros, are the first graft investigations against top government figures from the former PM’s 16 years in power.
Magyar, who is being probed separately for alleged theft, specifically asked for his immunity to be lifted so he could clear himself of “character assassination.”
Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of lifting his immunity and that of former culture minister Balázs Hankó and former development minister Miklós Seszták, who has been detained by prosecutors.
Orbán’s Fidesz party and its alley KDNP boycotted the session.
The vote was in response to a request last week from prosecutors seeking to investigate the three.
In Magyar’s case, prosecutors allege the conservative pro-EU prime minister snatched a phone from a man filming him in a nightclub in 2024 and threw it into the River Danube.
Magyar has called the case a “sham” and last week accused prosecutors of trying “to conflate” the ex-ministers’ cases “with the attempt at political character assassination…which has already failed several times.”
Hankó, a lawmaker from Orbán’s Fidesz party, is accused of embezzling more than €40 million in public funds.
Prosecutors allege the money was used to help finance the 2026 parliamentary election campaign and for the personal benefit of others.
In July, they seized the servers of Fidesz in relation to the case, prompting Orbán to accuse authorities of conducting a sham investigation to render the party “legally unviable.”
In a separate case, Seszták, a lawmaker from Fidesz ally KDNP, is under investigation over allegedly accepting bribes worth millions of dollars when he was minister of national development between 2014 and 2018.
The case concerns the purchase of second-hand buses at inflated prices.
Both Orbán-era ministers deny wrongdoing
Magyar, whose Tisza party swept to power in April promising to investigate alleged corruption and abuse of office during Orbán’s 16-year rule, has said he wants to abolish parliamentary immunity altogether for publicly prosecuted criminal offences.
Additional sources • AFP