Péter Magyar's government is made up of a mix of independent experts, critics of Viktor Orbán, and former collaborators. The criterion that mattered most in choosing ministers seems to have been competence, which is a change from the Orbán era, when political connections and loyalty to the boss mattered.
From a boy who loved trams to transportation experts to Magyar’s cabinet
When he was ten, Hungary's new transport minister would study bus timetables and beg his parents to let him ride a full circuit on the last service of the day. Soon he knew every driver on the line and by fifteen had co-founded a civic transport association. At twenty-one he was on the supervisory board of the city's transit authority BKK, and from twenty-five was running it. This was a man who holidayed in Korea to check out its tram system. The nation's trainspotter. For Budapest's transport obsessives and much of the political class, Dávid Vitézy was the obvious man to run the system.
As BKK head, Vitézy launched a new metro line and a bike-share system (among other things), but he clashed with the era’s Fidesz-supported Budapest mayor István Tarlós and was fired. Two years later Tarlós made some off-colour remarks about Vitézy's personal life that suggested bigotry had been behind their personality clash.
Vitézy did not go quietly. For the next decade, he documented the deterioration of the system he had been removed from – cancelled rail lines, broken procurement, rolling stock left to rot – and held a long-running public Facebook spat with Lázár János, a close collaborator of Viktor Orbán, and Hungary’s construction and transport minister from 2022 to 2026. Lázár was, in fact, an example of a common Hungarian phenomenon: someone in the wrong job. The minister – known for being chauffeured to and from Budapest to Hódmezővásárhely daily – was charged with managing public transport despite lacking the experience in the field.
Vitézy occupies unusual territory in Hungarian public life: respected across ideological lines, with a level of public esteem usually reserved for figures like Ferenc Puskás and Katalin Karikó, the Nobel laureate whose mRNA research underpinned the Covid vaccines. Fidesz threw its weight behind Vitézy when he narrowly lost the Budapest mayoral election in 2024.
Magyar's answer to 16 years of the wrong people in the wrong jobs is an idea that sounds radical only in context: competence. If Orbánism built an increasingly exhausted patronage state, Magyar is attempting a meritocratic correction. At an election rally in February 2025, he put forward his working theory: "There is no left and right, only Hungarians." And now, 12 years on from his sacking, Vitézy is minister of transport and investment, sitting in the chair of his vanquished nemesis, Lázár.
Hungary's new revolution
Hungary has had revolutions before. They rarely end well. The 20th century took in monarchy, communism, fascism, communism again, then liberal democracy. The upheaval drove out many of Hungary's most talented: László Bíró invented the ballpoint pen in exile; Francesco Illy, born Ferenc Illés in Subotica, built the modern espresso industry from Trieste. Nearly all of Hungary's Nobel laureates did their prize-winning work abroad.
The "ballot box revolution" Orbán proclaimed in 2010 merely amounted to nationalist clientelism. Tisza's election programme was blunt about what those 16 years meant in practice: "The basis for advancement is not merit, diligence or efficiency, but loyalty and unconditional service to the power elite."
Orbán's System of National Cooperation (NER) was in reality a system of national exclusion. In the first 14 years of the NER over 600,000 Hungarians - a disproportionate number of them doctors, engineers, and researchers - left, most of them permanently. Narrowing power to a loyalist inner circle while losing 6% of the national population created a competence trap. Competent ministers were viewed as a threat, and given tough portfolios or banished to Brussels.
Magyar's new ministers variously spent the Orbán years watching from Shell offices in London, NHS wards in Crumpsall, north Manchester, and zoos in Nyíregyháza, east Hungary. The pattern runs through the entire administrative layer: of the 55 state secretaries appointed last weekend, a third are women and roughly a third hold PhDs, a notable shift in a country where women held around 12% of parliamentary seats under Orbán. At least six spent significant parts of their careers abroad before being called home. Another cabinet member spent years on the independent political platform Partizán explaining why the opposition kept losing. He is now running the Prime Minister's Office.
The new ministerial appointments represent a direct response to 16 years of cronyism, ranging from progressive think-tanker to oil executive, from opera singer to livestock farmer. This is not a government of the left or the right but of the credentialed.
Three cohorts make up the cabinet: Hungarians who served the previous system and turned against it, those who spent the era building opposition infrastructure from the outside, and others recruited for domain expertise - the surgeon, farmer, zoo director, soprano. That is, depending on your temperament, either reassuring or the basis for an interesting first year.
The first cabinet meeting – 20 decisions, including on the Russia-contracted Paks II nuclear expansion, the diplomatic passport register, and Orbán's son-in-law's property portfolio – suggested the crew are ready to move fast.
The Orbán refugees: Magyar ministers that used to work for the FIDESZ leader
The cohort of ministers who served the previous system and turned against it includes Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Anita Orbán, a special envoy for energy security from 2010-15 who broke with Fidesz when it doubled down on Russian energy dependency. Her 2008 book, "Power, Energy and the New Russian Imperialism", maps out the geopolitical trap Hungary is trying to escape. She is now responsible for Paks II and for investigating NER's controversial issuing practices of diplomatic passports.
When former Fidesz colleagues attacked her last week as a traitor, she was direct: "I have not changed. The system that you are trying to defend to the end has changed. For years, I have seen from the inside how loyalty replaces professionalism, personal interest replaces the interest of the country."
Defence Minister Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi was Chief of the General Staff in the Hungarian military from 2021 until he was dismissed in 2023; his first act as minister was to sack the man who replaced him. He now faces NATO's demand to reach 5% of GDP on defence spending by 2035.
Finance Minister András Kármán, who spent a decade at Erste Bank after a stint as state secretary under Orbán, found a 286 billion forint budget hole in the first week and has until August 31 to clear twenty-seven EU reform milestones and unlock eighteen billion euros in frozen funds. Moody's, which has kept Hungary on a negative outlook since autumn 2024, left both the rating and the outlook unchanged after the election - the caution remains.
The outsider critics
Not everyone who opposed Orbán did so from inside the system. Prime Minister's Office Minister Bálint Ruff gave political analysis on the independent platform Partizán throughout the Orbán years – one of a generation of outsider critics who built opposition infrastructure from the fringes of the regime. He now coordinates a cabinet of ministers, most of whom have never held office, while managing EU affairs, government communications and strategic planning from a single desk. His senior advisor András Biró-Nagy spent those years at Policy Solutions producing rigorous research on how the NER worked and what it would take to dismantle it. He is now helping to do so as secretary of state for trade policy.
Both sit to the left of Magyar's centre-right politics. Tisza won its supermajority everywhere, across class and geography, on a conservative, pro-European, anti-corruption platform. Any visible leftward drift gives opponents a bait-and-switch narrative and risks coalition splits.
Culture Minister Zoltán Tarr must dismantle Orbán's cultural infrastructure – the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, endowed in 2020 with an estimated €1.3 billion in state assets including a ten percent stake in MOL.
The apolitical experts
Alongside the outsiders is a third minister-cohort of those recruited less for ideology than demonstrable professional achievement. Health Minister Zsolt Hegedűs left Hungary in 2005, ruing the "feudal conditions" of the Hungarian health system. He spent the following decade in the NHS - clinical lead at North Manchester General, then lead surgeon at Cirencester – before returning in 2015 to lead the "1001 doctors without gratitude payments" movement against Hungary's widespread “hálapénz system” and chair the Medical Chamber's ethics board.
He now heads a health service that lost a third of its doctors to emigration over the past decade, many of them to the NHS he just left - a fact he acknowledged on election night, when he went viral dancing on stage, air guitar included. His deputy, Dr. László Buga, also spent more than a decade there before coming home. Hegedűs's first advisory appointment was Katalin Karikó, who was standing in the dairy aisle when he called. In true Hungarian fashion, the extreme far-right parliamentary party Mi Hazánk has attacked the mRNA technology she developed, meaning Karikó's work, carried out abroad, has made her a culture war target at home.
Environment Minister László Gajdos ran Nyíregyháza Zoo for thirty years. He must now rebuild a ministry that Orbán scrapped in 2010, with no staff, no budget and no institutional precedent. In his first week he filed a police complaint against BYD for suspected toxic soil dumping. BYD opened in Hungary China’s first European EV factory – a near-10,000-job investment the previous government waved through by special decree. The harder question is whether it holds while his colleague in the economy ministry watches investment confidence.
Magyar's original justice nominee was his university classmate, party legal director, and brother-in-law. Public pressure forced the withdrawal within a week; he was replaced by Márta Görög, dean of the Szeged law faculty. Orbán never faced such problems because loyalty was his acknowledged basis for appointment. Magyar claimed meritocracy on day one. His electorate enforced it by day seven.
Problems to solve
Regional precedents suggest the risks ahead. Mikuláš Dzurinda's reformist governments in Slovakia delivered EU and NATO accession and structural economic reform – competence worked. But Dacian Cioloș's technocratic government in Romania and Iveta Radičová's coalition in Slovakia both proved institutionally brittle once opponents with deeper party infrastructure applied pressure. The lesson is not that outsider competence fails at governing. It is that it tends to fail after governing.
A recent study of Austria, Canada, Czechia, Slovakia, and Sweden found that the strongest predictor of whether election promises are kept is prior ministerial experience in the same field. A pledge-tracker built by a former Fidesz campaign manager is now logging Tisza's 1,012 campaign promises against government decrees as they are issued. Three weeks in: 8 fulfilled, 67 in progress, 1 problematic, 0 failed. The electorate, it seems, is not leaving this to chance. Magyar has also tabled legislation capping prime ministers at two terms, a provision aimed squarely at ensuring no successor can do what Orbán did.
Magyar's meritocracy creates its own fault lines. Anita Orbán left government specifically over Russian energy dependency, yet Magyar himself told a Polish newspaper last week that when the war in Ukraine ends, the entire EU will return to buying Russian gas because it is cheaper - "competition and geography," he said. Gajdos is filing police complaints against Chinese investors while his colleague in the economy ministry needs them to stay. Ruff is coordinating ministers with strong independent public profiles and no institutional loyalty to him personally.
This is the most self-conscious attempt at post-ideological governance in Hungarian history. It is also the least experienced cabinet the country has ever had. Meritocracy, in this context, is not merely a choice but a necessary risk after 16 years of Viktor Orbán.
Two days before the election, a locomotive caught fire at Szajol station in central Hungary. Vitézy posted a photograph on his social media. "If it weren't infinitely sad," he wrote, "we could joke that MÁV is saying goodbye to Lázár János with a smoking locomotive. But I won't joke, because this is when you see the effect of recent years' rampage." Lázár, who alongside transport also served as Hungary's tobacco commissioner and chair of the Hungarian Tennis Association, announced his resignation from the latter post on 25 May.
Vitézy's first act as minister was to board a train on the Dombóvár-Komló line, one of ten rural routes closed by Lázár in 2023, to mark what he called "the end of the era of dismantling Hungary's railways." Within a fortnight he had sacked Lázár's loyalist deputy CEO at MÁV. On his first afternoon in office an InterCity train derailed, seriously injuring one passenger. The track was EU-funded and capable of 160km/h; however, the safety system that would have prevented the derailment existed on the line but not on the locomotive - a problem, Vitézy noted, that had been flagged by Hungary's Transport Safety Organisation to the incoming Lázár ministry in December 2022 and ignored. "This," he wrote, "is what I mean when I say the era of railway destruction must be followed by the era of railway development."
Within a fortnight, he was in Brussels negotiating the return of EU transport funds Orbán had left to expire. Magyar once called Vitézy a man without leadership qualities. He appointed him anyway. The trainspotter is now on the train.
