IN A NUTSHELL
Hungary’s April 12 election delivered a historic defeat to Viktor Orbán, with Péter Magyar and his coalition securing a two-thirds parliamentary majority. This is enough to amend the constitution and repeal entrenched legislation. Yet as political scientist Ambre Bruneteau argues in Le Monde, the real challenge is not political turnover but something far more structurally complex: exiting a regime. After sixteen years, Orbán’s Fidesz is said to have systematically colonised its institutions, from public broadcasters and courts to universities and local administrations, embedding networks of loyalty that a single election cannot unwind.
Bruneteau draws a sobering parallel with Poland, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk moved swiftly to reclaim state media through legally contested shortcuts: effective in the short term, but widely criticised by rule-of-law watchdogs. Magyar now faces the same temptation: to dismantle an illiberal order by wielding power in ways that mirror it.
OUR TAKE
The question Bruneteau raises is can you restore the rule of law by temporarily suspending it?
The 451 Institute believes you should not. This framing, however popular and understandable, leads into a never ending cycle, a spiral of capture, each time further eroding the rule of law.
The real task is not to seize the captured institutions and redirect them toward better ends, but to rebuild the shields around those institutions so that no future majority, of any political color, can capture them again. Public broadcasters, constitutional courts, and prosecutorial offices should not be prizes that change hands with each election: they should be structurally insulated from partisan control altogether. Magyar’s two-thirds majority is a historic opportunity not merely to replace one set of loyalists with another, but to redesign the architecture of power itself, through genuine separation of powers, reinforced independent oversight, and constitutional entrenchments that outlast any single government. For European policymakers watching closely, Hungary is a stress test of a principle central to our mission: that the attack surface of democracy shrinks not when the “right” people hold power, but when the system itself limits what any power-holder can do.
