Absolute power …
Developments
- Hungary’s reformers hold the unaccountable state their predecessor built—and are remaking it on their terms. So are they tearing it down, or moving in?
- The UN and the EU rush to shield an international court the Americans want to dismantle. … In Venezuela, a government that owes everyone an election keeps finding reasons to wait. … & A pit someone found while planning a camping trip in Canada turns out to be the mark of a massive, ancient meteor strike.
From the files
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+ Weather report
- Heavy monsoon rains bear down on the eastern Himalayas …
Developments
The keys
On July 13, Hungary’s parliament voted to strip the country’s head of state of his office. The count was 139 to six. Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, the party that had governed Hungary for 16 years until this spring, boycotted the vote rather than take part in it.
The parliament belongs now to Péter Magyar, whose Tisza party won a two-thirds supermajority in April’s election and ended Orbán’s run. Magyar had campaigned against the apparatus Orbán spent those years building—the loyalist courts, the Fundamental Law rewritten to fit the government of the day, and the two-thirds majority wielded to change the rules at will. In April, Hungarians handed Magyar that same two-thirds majority. On July 13, he began to use it.
The seventeenth amendment to Orbán’s constitution removes President Tamás Sulyok, a former head of the Constitutional Court and an Orbán ally the government accuses of standing ready to block its legislation. It sets a retirement age of 70 for constitutional judges. It caps service in parliament at three terms. And it points toward a wholly new constitution, which Tisza says it will start drafting in September and put to a referendum.
Every aspect of this can be read two ways. Removing a partisan president and clearing loyalists off a captured court is what restoring a democracy looks like. Rewriting the constitution by a single party’s supermajority, with the opposition having walked out of the chamber—that’s what Orbán’s Hungary looked like for 16 years.
Well. Is Magyar taking Orbán’s authoritarian machine apart?
Or is he just taking it over?
- The same two-thirds. Orbán governed by rewriting Hungary’s constitution to suit himself, whenever he held the two-thirds of parliament it took to do so. Magyar’s amendment passed the same way: a two-thirds vote, no referendum, the opposition uninvolved. Fidesz—the party that had spent 16 years amending the same constitution for purpose—boycotted, and its parliamentary leader, Gergely Gulyás, called the removal of a head of state “unprecedented” before resigning.
- The rules clearing the field. Two provisions do more than remove officials. A retirement age of 70 takes Orbán’s oldest appointees off the constitutional bench. A three-term cap on serving in parliament ends the careers of its longest-serving members—who, with Tisza barely two years old, are almost all in Fidesz. The government can defend both as fair: Orbán did pack the court, and the people losing their seats are Orbán functionaries. But a winner bent on consolidating power would do exactly this, too: clear rivals off the bench—and off the ballot.
- The next constitution. The amendment is essentially a bridge. Tisza says it will begin drafting an entirely new constitution in September, with public consultation, and put it to a referendum—conspicuously, something Orbán never did with the constitution he imposed in 2011. That is a big difference, and it favors legitimacy. But a constitution written by one party’s supermajority is one party’s constitution, even with a referendum. The Venice Commission—the Council of Europe’s panel of constitutional-law authorities—is already examining the president’s removal. The test is whether the new document restores the limits the old one removed, or just refounds the Orbánian state with better manners.
Orbán didn’t break Hungary’s constitution. He rewrote it, legally, and then governed through the institutions the new rules produced—a Constitutional Court stocked with friendly judges, prosecutors who never bothered with his allies, and an election commission and a media authority loyal to him. The system worked because all of it was legal. To capture the state, all Orbán had to do was to hold two-thirds of parliament long enough to make it the law.
That system is still there, very much intact. In April, it only changed hands. The amendment of July 13 is the first evidence of what Magyar means to do with a machine built for unaccountable power, and it points both ways at the same time: Some of it, he seems to be dismantling; and some of it, he seems to be keeping ready.
A loyalist president is gone, and Orbán's oldest judges are going. But the machine itself is still there. The low bar to rewriting the constitution is still there; so is the absence of any check a determined supermajority can’t override. A president loyal to Magyar could obstruct as little as Sulyok could obstruct Orbán. A court emptied of Orbán’s appointees, you can fill with Magyar’s. The term limit that ends Fidesz careers, you can end Tisza’s with it, too—but not before Magyar’s first bench has had its run.
The question the amendment leaves open is what the new constitution does when it comes: whether it puts the weapons back in the drawer—an independent court, a higher bar to amendment, and protections a later government can’t strip in an afternoon—or whether it respawns the same powers under a new name. A structure built to concentrate power doesn’t really care who created it, or why. It runs the same for whoever holds it. Hungarians spent 16 years learning that. Now they’re going to find out how the lesson took.
Meanwhile
- Friends in high places. The first answer to the U.S. campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court came not from the member governments Washington is trying to peel away, but from the United Nations, which called the court “a critical cog” in international justice—and the European Union, which called the threats against its officials “unacceptable.” Washington has yet to lean on the governments who fund the court and enforce its warrants—and who are already split over the warrant for Israel’s prime minister. … See “No diplomatic option.
- Grounds for delay. The 180 days Venezuela’s constitution allows for a president’s absence ran out on July 3, which should have forced an election. The country’s highest court had already recast Nicolás Maduro—swept off to a New York cell by U.S. forces in January—as a “forced absence,” a category the constitution doesn’t actually specify. Now the government has a newer reason to wait: After the June 24 earthquakes killed at least 4,500 people, the ruling assembly’s leader, Jorge Rodríguez, called it “disrespectful” to the dead to discuss an election. The two sides meet on August 1. … See “Stuck with it.
- Right there on the map. In 2024, an amateur astronomer named Joël Lapointe was planning a camping trip on Google Maps when he noticed a circular basin in Quebec’s Côte-Nord. This month, scientists confirmed what it is: a crater about 25 kilometers across, blasted out when a meteorite struck 390 million years ago—and never recorded since. A team from Western University in Ontario reached it last autumn and found the kind of shattered rock that only a meteorite leaves. All that time, the whole thing had remained unseen—where anyone could pan across it on a laptop.
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From the files
Off the hook
More and more countries are banning kids from social media. Will it work? Sara Robin on the flaw in the plan—and what’s working instead.
