When French President Emmanuel Macron was the new kid on the European block, the then Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán offered him some advice. Macron had spent his first weeks in office taking aim at the governments of Central Europe, and Orbán was not impressed. “This is not the way we do things around here,” Orbán said. “But I am sure that he, too, will learn the ropes.”
It was vintage Orbán: the self-proclaimed freedom fighter explaining the rules of the game to the leader of the bloc’s second-biggest country. Nearly a decade on, Hungary has a prime minister who really did learn the ropes. The difference is that Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar, a man who worked for Orbán’s party in Brussels for eight years, also learned from his predecessor’s mistakes.
Orbán knows the political Brussels. Having gained a seat at the top table of Hungarian politics in the late 1980s, including for regime-change negotiations, Orbán became one of the European Council’s most experienced operators after Hungary’s EU accession in 2004. By the end of 2024, Orbán had attended 117 European Council meetings, the third-highest total among EU leaders, after Jean-Claude Juncker and Angela Merkel. He learned the EU’s pressure points, when to wield a veto, and tested the limits of its institutional patience.
Magyar benefits from an insider’s knowledge on the EU machinery
For his part, Magyar learned how Brussels operates from inside. “He understands the internal logic of the European institutions, and he understands the political rhythm of Brussels,” Daniel Hegedüs, deputy director of the Institute for European Politics, told The Parliament Magazine. Magyar first worked on transport policy during Hungary’s 2011 rotating EU presidency, then from 2012-15 as a Mertens attaché in Coreper I, the committee where member states hammer out compromises, and finally as Hungary’s liaison to the European Parliament. This was the floor below the political stage: the place where national positions are traded, softened and assembled, before ministers ever announce them.
He was no mere observer: Magyar was embedded in the Orbán government. In 2011, Olivér Várhelyi, then Hungary’s deputy permanent representative in Brussels, appointed him as his chief of staff. Magyar has seen up close the inner workings of the European Commission, Council, and Parliament alike. A contemporary described Magyar as “tough”, with an “incredibly sharp mind” and “charisma when he wants to deploy it”.
Magyar was also in the room in 2018, when Dutch MEP Judith Sargentini presented the report that would form the basis of the EU’s unprecedented Article 7 procedure against Hungary. The procedure was triggered by concerns about the rule of law, democracy and other fundamental EU values. It can ultimately lead to the suspension of a member state’s voting rights.
Sargentini recalled Hungary’s Permanent Representation at that time: “They, of course, were lobbying. They wanted to stay close to the topic and wanted to make it clear to members sympathetic with them, or not, that they were having a close watch.”
Hegedüs added that Magyar learned this while Hungary was trying to “safeguard the domestic autocratization process of the Orbán government”. Eight years later, Magyar is using the institutional knowledge that once helped defend the Orbán government to try to cancel the Article 7 procedure. “The Fidesz we see today is very, very different from the Fidesz I joined in 2002,” Magyar told BBC.
Selective compliance: while he dropped Hungary’s opposition to some EU demands and policies, like the ones on Ukraine, Magyar is holding Orbán’s line regarding others
The Magyar government’s relationship with Brussels is not simple compliance: it is selective compliance. On migration, for example, Magyar has largely kept Orbán’s line, refusing to accept the EU’s mandatory asylum procedures.
Magyar has secured wins domestically by abolishing Orbán’s Sovereignty Protection Office and joining the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) in August, the 25th EU member to do so. He has been more cautious in other areas. Hungary is holding the line on border policy, on the EUR 1mn-a-day migration fine, and even on the 2021 Child Protection Law, widely criticised as anti-LGBTI+, which breached EU law, Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and several fundamental rights. Magyar has not committed to repealing it.
But the harder question is what counts as mending the damage. The European Commission’s July rule-of-law report identified problems around lobbying, political party financing, the integrity of public officials and judicial independence. Tineke Strik, the Dutch MEP now leading Parliament’s Article 7 file, has stressed that the procedure is based on a list of substantive changes, not simply a change of political tone. “There is a whole checklist with criteria which we will assess,” she said. “One of the elements is the withdrawal of the anti LGBTI+ law,” she added.
In other areas Magyar has gone further than Brussels may have anticipated. In July, Tisza used a constitutional amendment to end Orbán-appointed President Tamás Sulyok’s term and pushed through 12-year parliamentary term limits that prevent Orbán and other long-serving Fidesz figures from standing again. Later that month, Hungarian prosecutors raided Fidesz’s party servers. None of these was a condition of the EU’s rule-of-law demands, but Magyar is using instruments blunter than the ones he deploys in Brussels. He is not simply making concessions to Brussels in exchange for political rehabilitation; he is using the machinery of the state to dismantle parts of the system he inherited.
Magyar has also kept the Brussels relationship unusually close to himself, refusing to appoint a Europe minister and personally overseeing much of the EU portfolio. What he wants is an end to the Article 7 procedure, relief from the migration fine – which has racked up costs of around EUR 910mn since the 2024 ruling – and the release of frozen EU funds. Before the election, Magyar had already made the calculation explicit. “I very much hope that we will be able to sign a deal quickly,” he said of the frozen EU funds, adding that “perhaps even before the legislation is approved, they can start disbursing the funds”.
There is already a very real example of what institutional cooperation can deliver. In May, Brussels agreed to unlock EUR 16.4bn in previously frozen Hungarian funds after Magyar's government implemented reforms. “The Hungarian people deserve it,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, thanking Magyar for the “outstanding work that has been done”.
Magyar may secure another win through centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) leader Manfred Weber. During Weber’s visit to Budapest on 2 September, Magyar said Tisza would “gladly” fully join the EPP once Article 7 was closed. Tisza’s MEPs already sit in the EPP group; what Magyar was offering was formal membership for the European Parliament’s largest political group. It would bring Hungary’s governing party formally into the European political family from which Orbán’s Fidesz was suspended and ultimately left. Where Orbán turned his European political isolation into a badge of sovereignty, Magyar is treating integration into the centre-right mainstream as an asset. According to Magyar, Weber has also offered to help resolve the migration fine.
More broadly, what the EU wants most from Hungary is an end to its obstructing European policy on Russia, which for Orbán was an instrument of leverage. Just weeks before the April parliamentary election that he would lose, Orbán blocked both a EUR 90bn Ukraine loan and a new Russia sanctions package over a pipeline dispute, only backing down after weeks of pressure from EU capitals. It was a bargaining position: Orbán had used Hungary’s leverage over Ukraine to pressure Kyiv over the Druzhba oil pipeline. When Hungary finally lifted its veto in April, the EU approved the EUR 90bn Ukraine loan. The first tranche was then expected within weeks.
The difference between Magyar and Orbán is stark regarding EU sanctions. Hungary backed the EU’s 21st sanctions package against Russia in July, after Orbán had repeatedly blocked previous measures. Orbán said Magyar should have vetoed the package, effectively arguing that his successor should use the instrument he had already demonstrated he does not need.
Magyar has also moved to settle a longstanding dispute Orbán used against Kyiv, reaching an agreement on rights for Ukraine’s Hungarian minority that covers education, language and cultural rights, with Budapest saying it would support the opening of accession talks. However Hungary has continued to withhold support for further negotiating clusters while waiting for Kyiv to implement the agreement. Magyar is showing that he can support Ukraine's EU accession without surrendering Hungary's leverage over the process. He is not entirely uncritical of the EU either: underlining at the recent Bled Strategic Forum in Slovenia that the bloc must decide whether it wants to “survive or win”.
Magyar has also shifted Hungary’s position on Russia. In May his government signalled it would stop blocking sanctions on Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, whom Orbán had shielded since 2022, part of a wider “mini-package” that Hungary had vetoed for years. In August, Hungary’s new foreign-policy doctrine formally described Russia as a “threat” to Hungary, Europe and the international order - a sharp break with the Orbán era.
On 8 September, Hungary expelled ten Russian diplomats it accused of activities incompatible with their status under the 1961 Vienna Convention. A Russian State Duma deputy responded by threatening to cut Hungary off from Russian energy. The change has therefore moved beyond the mechanics of a Brussels veto: Hungary has gone from shielding Russian interests inside the EU to imposing a direct diplomatic cost on Moscow.
Unlike the Hungary under Orbán that obstructed Russia sanctions for concessions, Magyar’s version can generate a different kind of leverage. While Orbán monetised obstruction, his successor is attempting to monetise alignment. Magyar is not rejecting transactional politics; he is changing the currency. Magyar does not seek to defeat Brussels, because in his experience it is not a single entity to defeat.
Brussels’ dilemma: does Hungary’s compliance with some demand represent a genuine alignment with the EU?
All this leaves Brussels with a dilemma. The case for closing Article 7 is increasingly attractive: Hungary is cooperating on Russia, Ukraine and EU institutions, and Tisza has dismantled some of the most visible instruments of the Orbán state. However the Commission’s own July findings underline that political alignment is not the same thing as institutional repair. If Article 7 becomes something that can be closed once an insider learns how to satisfy the machinery, rather than once the underlying problems have been resolved, Brussels risks a precedent of technical compliance substituting structural change.
The Orbán government spent close to EUR 20mn on a communications campaign attacking Sargentini over the report that bears her name, and has said she was verbally attacked by locals on a visit to Budapest. Asked recently what she would want from Magyar, she said to create the safety she needs to travel to Hungary as an ordinary tourist.
Orbán’s achievement was to discover how much leverage a small member state could extract by making itself difficult. Magyar is trying something different. He has not abandoned the transactional logic of Orbán’s Hungary; he has changed the terms on which it operates. Orbán assumed the ropes could only be used to pull away from Brussels. In Magyar, he produced a successor who knows exactly how to pull them from the inside. The question for Brussels is whether political alignment will be enough to bring an eight-year-old procedure to an end within weeks, while the concerns that triggered it remain unresolved.
