Magyar meets Hungarian president as Trump says next PM 'a good man'

The man who ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years of continuous rule, Péter Magyar, is calling for a speedy transfer of power.

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The man who ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years of continuous rule, Péter Magyar, is calling for a speedy transfer of power.

The man who ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in office, Péter Magyar, is meeting Hungary’s president, seeking a speedy transfer of power after Sunday’s landslide victory.

President Tamás Sulyok, who has refused Magyar’s demand to step down, is widely expected to nominate Magyar as the next prime minister. Magyar has said he needs to be in office by about 5 May

Hungary’s next PM appeared on public radio and TV for the first time in 18 months on Wednesday and made clear his intention to suspend their news coverage, which he has condemned as propaganda.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said Magyar was a “good man”, having actively campaigned for Orbán.

“I think the new man’s going to do a good job,” Trump told ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, having previously called on Hungarians to “get out and vote” for his friend and close ally, Orbán.

Magyar arrived for the talks at the presidential palace shortly before 10:00 (08:00 GMT). The two other party leaders with MPs in parliament were also invited to the meeting with President Sulyok, including Orbán.

Magyar broke with Orbán’s party in March 2024 and over two years attracted a cross-section of public support for his Tisza party, which swept the ruling Fidesz from power on Sunday with a so-called super-majority of two-thirds of the seats in parliament.

He said 70-80% of Hungary’s media had been requisitioned by Orbán allies, insulting him and his party with 300 lies every day, not allowing him a single appearance on state TV even once.

But that changed on Wednesday, first with a half-hour broadcast on state-run Kossuth radio followed by an appearance on M1 TV, in which he confirmed his aim to suspend their news coverage and form a new broadcast authority to ensure press freedom.

“Every Hungarian deserves a public service media that broadcasts the truth,” he told Kossuth radio, explaining he was not after personal revenge, even though he and his family had been insulted “morning, noon and night”.

His interviews were at times combative as he told the TV and radio hosts that their outlets had broadcast propaganda.

Magyar is in a rush to overturn years of Orbán policies that turned Hungary into what the European Parliament termed an “electoral autocracy”. Hungarians became angered by repeated scandals involving corruption and cronyism, and Magyar has spoken of his predecessor’s administration robbing his country bare.

Billions of euros of EU funding was frozen over rule of law and other issues, and Magy

— Péter Magyar, leader of the pro-European conservative Tisza Party, speaks at a Monday press conference the day after his landslide election victory.

                Attila Kisbenedek/AFP via Getty Images
                
            
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In a stunning turn of events, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lost his bid for a fifth consecutive term on Sunday after voters turned out in numbers not seen since the fall of communism in the 1990s.

Voters — fueled largely by concerns about entrenched government corruption — overwhelmingly chose Péter Magyar, a 45-year-old lawyer and politician who until several years ago was a staunch Orbán loyalist.

He burst onto the scene as an opposition leader in 2024, rising rapidly to become the leader of the center-right Tisza Party, which won a two-thirds majority in Sunday’s parliamentary election. Orbán, who has led Hungary for 16 years, conceded and congratulated Magyar less than three hours after polls closed.

In a victory speech delivered to a sea of jubilant supporters on the banks of the Danube River, Magyar reiterated his promises to rebuild Hungary’s ties with the European Union and NATO, root out corruption and cronyism and “restore the system of checks and balances.”

The country has economic incentive to do so: Since 2022, the EU has frozen billions of dollars’ worth of funding for the country because it said Orbán was violating key democratic values. Magyar said the country will “never again allow anyone to hold free Hungary captive or to abandon it.”

“Today we won because the Hungarian people didn’t ask what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country,” he said, evoking U.S. President John F. Kennedy, as some spectators chanted “Europe, Europe.”

Magyar’s landslide victory is “truly unprecedented” for many reasons, says Abel Bojar, research director at the polling platform Europion.

“If you think about the kind of political headwinds that … Magyar had to sail against, such as the funding asymmetry that his party had against the state apparatus of Orbán, media access, the novelty of the party — I mean, he built up a whole machine at extreme levels of professionality in two years,” Bojar told NPR on Sunday. “And the list goes on.”

Magyar has made a lot of promises to redemocratize the country, and his party now has the parliamentary majority needed to make constitutional changes to that end. But, Bojar