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BUDAPEST — Hungary's Parliament voted overwhelmingly on Monday to lift the legal immunity of Prime Minister Peter Magyar and two ministers who served under his predecessor, Viktor Orban, opening the door to separate criminal investigations into each of the three politicians.
The decision came in response to a request submitted by prosecutors last week, and it produced an unusual political tableau: a sitting prime minister asking lawmakers to remove his own shield from prosecution, while the main opposition forces stayed away from the chamber entirely. Orban's Fidesz party and its smaller ally, the KDNP, boycotted the session, leaving the governing Tisza party's members to deliver a vote that drew broad support among those who did take part.
Magyar, who is under investigation over theft, said he had asked for the immunity to be lifted so that he could clear himself of what he described as "character assassination." In remarks last week, he accused prosecutors of trying to conflate his case with those of the two former ministers, saying that effort had "already failed several times."
The charge against the prime minister centres on an incident at a Budapest nightclub in June 2024. Prosecutors allege that Magyar took a mobile phone from a man who was filming him and then threw the device into the Danube River. Magyar has rejected the case as a "sham" and has denied wrongdoing.
The more consequential part of the vote concerns the two Orban-era ministers, whose cases are the first corruption investigations of their kind to reach senior figures from Orban's long tenure. Balazs Hanko, a former culture minister and a Fidesz legislator, is accused of embezzling more than 40 million euros ($46m) in public funds. According to prosecutors, the money was used to help finance the 2026 parliamentary election campaign and for the personal benefit of others.
Miklos Sesztak, a former national development minister and a KDNP lawmaker, faces separate allegations of having accepted more than $37.2m in bribes and kickbacks. Those payments are linked to vehicle procurement contracts under Hungary's state bus company, as well as to state construction projects. Both former ministers deny any wrongdoing.
The timing of the cases is significant. They come less than six months after Magyar's Tisza party ended Orban's 16 years in power with a landslide election victory. Magyar campaigned on promises to tackle corruption, restore rule-of-law safeguards and rebuild Hungary's strained relationship with the European Union, all three of which placed the previous government's record at the centre of the election.
Since taking office, his government has made the fight against alleged corruption and overpriced public procurement a central plank of its programme. Among the measures announced are plans to create a dedicated asset-recovery office aimed at uncovering and recovering assets tied to wrongdoing from the Orban years — an institution that would give prosecutors and investigators a permanent institutional home for cases that have so far been pursued one at a time.
The lifting of immunity is only the threshold step. Prosecutors still have to build and prove their cases, and each of the three suspects retains the right to contest the evidence. But the vote removes a procedural obstacle that had previously shielded all three from formal criminal process, and it signals that Hungary's new leadership is prepared to act against figures from both ends of its own political spectrum.
Analysts note the symmetry of the decision. The same vote that clears the way for a prosecution of a former culture minister accused of diverting tens of millions in public funds also subjects the prime minister himself to the criminal process — a choice that carries political risk for a leader whose anti-corruption credentials are central to his government's identity.
The Fidesz boycott is likely to shape how the episode plays out politically. The absence of the main opposition parties from the chamber did not prevent the vote, but it also ensured that the decision was made without debate from a significant bloc of legislators, a point Orban's camp is likely to emphasise as the investigations unfold.
The investigations also land amid a wider strain in Hungary's domestic politics. Earlier in 2026, Magyar announced that the country's only nuclear power plant, at Paks, would be shut down entirely for the first time since it opened in 1982, after record-low water levels in the Danube left the plant's suction pipes unable to reach the water supply. The plant provides close to half of Hungary's electricity, and Magyar warned of a possible energy crisis. The shutdown has become a visible test of the new government's ability to manage a country still absorbing the consequences of decisions made over the previous decade.
Little more than a month after that announcement, attention has shifted to the legal accountability promised on the campaign trail. With immunity lifted for all three men, investigators can now formally pursue the nightclub allegation against the prime minister while building corruption cases against two ministers whose alleged conduct — election financing, bus contracts and construction deals — reaches to the heart of the public procurement system the new government says it wants to overhaul.
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