Part I — Situation overview

At its plenary session of 17 August 2026 the Constitutional Court decided on three motions submitted by fifty members of parliament of Fidesz–KDNP against the seventeenth amendment of the Fundamental Law adopted this summer. The motions challenged the termination of the President of the Republic’s mandate, the twelve-year limit on the eligibility of members of parliament — tied alternatively to three mandates obtained — and the seventy-year age limit for constitutional judges together with its transitional rule. The panel rejected all three, and with identical reasoning: according to the Fundamental Law the Constitutional Court may review an amendment of the Fundamental Law exclusively from the point of view of the procedural requirements relating to its adoption and promulgation, not its content. As the reasoning of the decision puts it: “there is no possibility for the Constitutional Court to compare the amendments in substance with other provisions of the Fundamental Law”. Portfolio’s report highlights separately what follows from this: the panel did not state that the three contested provisions are constitutional in substance — only that it has no competence to decide the question.

This limit on competence has a history of its own, and that history is one of the most important elements of today’s debate. The earlier practice of the Constitutional Court was also that it may not annul a provision of the constitution; the itemised limit set out in the text, however, was fixed by the fourth amendment of the Fundamental Law in 2013 — in the parliamentary term whose two-thirds was supplied by the very people who submitted the present motions from the opposition benches. The Hungarian public-law order therefore currently works in such a way that the constitution-amending majority remains without control in the substantive sense as long as it keeps to the procedural rules. The constitutional lawyer Zoltán Lomnici Jr. summed it up in exactly this way in his assessment given to Magyar Nemzet, and he also recalled the position of the former constitutional judge István Stumpf, according to which the panel would have a duty to watch over the internal unity of the Fundamental Law even if the contested decision was taken by a two-thirds majority. The panel was not united: the rejection was contested in all three cases by Tünde Handó, Attila Horváth and Péter Polt, and in the matter of the head of state’s mandate Mária Haszonicsné Ádám and Miklós Juhász joined them as well — there, therefore, five constitutional judges disagreed with the majority. One of the dissenting opinions recalled the concept of “doublethink” from George Orwell’s novel 1984. Another argued that the provision terminating the President of the Republic’s mandate was, by its function, an individual exercise of public power tailored to a single identifiable person, which the form of a constitutional amendment does not in itself turn into a general rule.

MIAK’s reading is that present-day Hungarian public law reveals a clearly delimited structural gap, and this gap is party-neutral. János Bóka, the leader of the Fidesz parliamentary group, said after the decision: if the President of the Republic can be removed by legislation tailored to a person, then this can be done with anybody else too. This argument stands even if it comes from the opposition, and even if the limit into whose wall it has now run was erected thirteen years ago by the same political side. The character of the problem is not which side won on 17 August. It is that in Hungary today not a single legal institution stands between the two-thirds of the day and the text of the Fundamental Law — and in such a system the question of the guarantee cannot be settled by pointing to who happens to be exercising power.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

The framework of principle of yesterday’s decision is older than the Hungarian constitutional debate. Montesquieu (French jurist and political thinker, one of the founders of modern constitutional law) formulated in his work The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 the proposition that freedom depends not on the goodwill of power but on the separation of the branches of power. If the same body makes and executes the rule, nothing prevents it from making a tyrannical law and applying it in a tyrannical manner. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (political philosopher born in Geneva, author of the modern theory of popular sovereignty) states almost the reverse of this in the second book of The Social Contract: the sovereign people cannot, conceptually, impose on itself a fundamental law that it could not break. This is precisely the proposition of principle at which the majority of the Constitutional Court arrived. The tension between the two propositions gives today’s question: if legal self-binding is impossible in principle, then the restriction has to take not a legal but a procedural and temporal form. The political scientist Mihály Bihari, a former constitutional judge, recalls in his study on the constitutional reform of the Hungarian transition that constitutional adjudication here was not a self-evident given but the product of one of the six bills annexed to the September 1989 agreement of the National Round Table — that is, it was created by a political bargain, and a political majority can narrow it. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in the 6.4 Literature in detail section.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. What all three have in common is that they do not ask more of the Constitutional Court, but build into the legislative procedure slowing and publicity-creating elements that require no extension of competence, and that bind the present two-thirds just as much as any later one.

3.1 A compulsory waiting period and a two-stage vote (by amending the standing orders, by the fourth quarter of 2026)

By amending the act on the National Assembly and the standing orders, the National Assembly should prescribe that no final vote may be held on a bill amending the Fundamental Law earlier than sixty days from its submission, and that the bill go through two votes separated from each other by at least thirty days. This is not a substantive veto and not external control: the two-thirds can adopt everything it can today. The difference is time. One of the most important lessons of the decisions of 17 August is that keeping to the formal rules is in itself sufficient for validity — if, however, a compulsory public cycle enters among the formal rules, then professional and social objections can appear before the vote. The structured feedback platform under the I9 popular-sovereignty audit is an already existing MIAK proposal for this: constitutional amendment is the strongest reason for the use of the platform not to be optional. The yardstick at this point is simple: the shorter the time between submission and vote, the less chance there is of any control — legal and professional alike.

3.2 A public statement of who is affected for every bill amending the Fundamental Law (from the first half of 2027)

The submitter of the bill should be obliged to attach to the reasoning an itemised statement on whether any provision of the amendment affects an objectively identifiable circle of persons on the day of entry into force — and if so, whom, in what legal relationship, with what legal effect. This is not a prohibition: the National Assembly can adopt the bill afterwards as well. It only excludes the possibility that the personal consequence remains invisible behind the normative form. This was precisely the recurring element of the dissenting opinions to today’s decisions: according to one of them the rule terminating the President of the Republic’s mandate directly closed the legal relationship of a single, precisely identifiable person. Magyar Nemzet’s report brings the same consideration in the case of the term limit as well, where because of the counting in of earlier mandates it can already be established at the entry into force of the rule whom it extends to — including the future candidacy of the former prime minister. In MIAK’s position this is a valid point, irrespective of whom it comes from, and the answer to it is not silence but the compulsory statement. The proposal carries over the measurement logic of the A6 checks and balances programme point into the legislative stage.

3.3 Public expert deliberation on restoring substantive control, with deferred entry into force (by the end of 2027)

The third proposal is the most sensitive, and therefore comes with the strictest condition. The National Assembly should set up a public, cross-party and professionally composed body for the question of whether it is justified to give back to the Constitutional Court the right of limited substantive examination of amendments of the Fundamental Law — and if so, along what narrow, itemised yardstick. The minutes of every session and every expert opinion of the body are public. MIAK’s condition is that if the deliberation decides in favour of restoring the competence, the new rule should enter into force only from the beginning of the next parliamentary term. It is this deferral that makes the step credible: a guarantee that would immediately turn to the advantage or disadvantage of the present majority looks like a political instrument; one whose beneficiary nobody knows today looks like a constitutional guarantee. The annual report of the I10 constitutional stress test can supply the factual basis of the body, and the I4 protection of judicial independence the yardstick against which the proposals are to be measured.

The three proposals are bound together by a single principle, and that principle is not legal but temporal. According to Rousseau’s proposition the sovereign cannot impose on itself a rule that it could not release itself from. Later entry into force and the compulsory waiting period, however, do not bind the sovereign but that momentary majority which happens to be voting — and which cannot know on whom its own rule will rebound. This is the only self-restraint that works by experience: not because it is stronger, but because one does not know whom it favours.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Public law A substantive public stage is added to formal validity; the political cost of amending the constitution rises The sixty-day wait may delay a justified amendment in a genuine emergency; an exception rule is needed, but every exception can also be abused
Public administration The statement of who is affected is a new but small administrative burden on the submitter It may hollow out into formal box-ticking if there is no quality expectation and public criticism attached to it
Political competition Deferred entry into force takes the competence debate out of the logic of day-to-day gain The majority of the next term can revoke it with its first step — the self-binding is of political, not legal force

The most important question of judgement in the package of proposals is the relation between speed and deliberation. The price of the sixty-day wait is real: in an extraordinary situation — for example a constitutional adjustment with a deadline arising from an international obligation — it may delay a step that everybody considers justified. The rule therefore has to have a narrow, itemised circle of exceptions attached to it, one that the standing orders themselves have to fix, not a case-by-case decision. The second question of judgement arises at point 3.3: any giving back of substantive control carries the risk that the panel becomes a political actor in cases for which there is no legal yardstick. That is exactly why MIAK proposes a narrow, itemised yardstick and not a general authorisation — and exactly why it ties it to deferred entry into force. The package works if all three elements go together: the wait on its own slows down but does not inform; the statement on its own informs but does not give time to react; and the deliberation on competence, without the first two, easily becomes the object of day-to-day political struggle.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (proposed KPIs)

MIAK proposes the public following of the following performance indicators (KPIs — Key Performance Indicator):

  • The number of days between submission and the final vote for every bill amending the Fundamental Law — proposed target value: from 2027 not a single amendment passes in less than sixty days, outside the itemised circle of exceptions.
  • The proportion of bills amending the Fundamental Law submitted with a statement of who is affected — proposed target value: 100 per cent from the second half of 2027.
  • The proportion of indicators classified as “at risk” in the I10 stress test — proposed target value: the level below 30 per cent within five years under the programme point, shown separately in the separation-of-powers sub-index.
  • The number of publicly published sessions and expert opinions of the body deliberating on substantive control — proposed target value: the minutes of every session available within fifteen days.

These are proposed indicators, not government commitments; MIAK as a shadow government considers it worth following what will make it visible a year from now whether a rule has come out of the present situation.

5.2 Summary

According to MIAK a single sentence follows from yesterday’s decisions, and it is not about the direction of the decision: in Hungary there is currently no institution that could review the content of a constitutional amendment, so the guarantee has to be put where there is still a way to do it — before the vote. MIAK therefore does not criticise the Constitutional Court’s decision, nor does it probe the intentions of the present two-thirds: it asks the decision-maker for a compulsory waiting period, a compulsory statement of who is affected, and a public settlement of the competence question with deferred effect. And it asks of the public that it should not judge the question on the basis of whom it favours today.

Two MIAK foundational values are in play here. Accountability, because an act that no forum may examine afterwards can be called to account only if it was visible beforehand: the sixty days and the statement of who is affected create precisely this visibility. And being ideology-free, because the substantive element of the proposal — the statement of personal effect — takes up a point originating from an opposition motion and the report of a conservative paper, while the rule would bind the present governing majority first. MIAK’s yardstick is worth something only if the one who proposes it applies it to itself first.

Part VI — Reasoning and further sources

6.1 The press framing by spectrum

The liberal-left band framed the decision above all as a political turn. Telex and 444.hu both highlighted the point that the submissions were scythed down by a panel elected at the time of the earlier two-thirds, and both papers quoted the dissenting opinions in detail, including the passage referring to Orwell. Beyond this 444.hu emphasised the moment that the petitioners invoked the Venice Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union — forums whose decisions they did not consider binding on themselves while in government. HVG carried the same thread further by publishing Fidesz’s reaction.

The general public-affairs band was more factual: 24.hu concentrated on the absence of substantive examination and on the origin of the limit on competence, and separately highlighted the ground of the majority position, according to which the panel cannot be a “co-constitution-maker” alongside the National Assembly. ATV followed the personal consequences for the panel.

The economic band brought the distinction most important from the point of view of the present analysis: Portfolio’s report recorded in a separate paragraph that the rejection does not mean a statement of the substantive constitutionality of the provisions, and it also recalled the antecedent of the limit on competence.

The conservative band on this day carried not the political-defeat character of the decision but the legal structure: both of Magyar Nemzet’s articles — the report and the interview with Zoltán Lomnici Jr. — put the omission of substantive examination and its consequences of principle at the centre, and set out in detail the retroactive counting logic of the term limit. Mandiner gave the same in shorter, fact-reporting form. From MIAK’s point of view the conservative band’s point — the danger of principle in legislation tailored to a person — is a substantive consideration to be built in, not merely an opposition complaint; proposal 3.2 above is built directly out of it.

6.2 Facts and data

Datum Value
Serial number of the challenged amendment of the Fundamental Law 17th
Number of petitioning members of parliament 50 (Fidesz–KDNP)
Number of cases adjudicated at the plenary session of 17 August 3
Outcome of the cases rejection for lack of competence in all three cases
Constitutional judges formulating a dissenting opinion — head of state case 5
Constitutional judges formulating a dissenting opinion — term limit and age limit 3–3
The amendment of the Fundamental Law fixing the limit on competence in the text fourth (2013)
The extent of the eligibility limit on members of parliament 12 years, or 3 mandates obtained
The age limit for constitutional judges 70 years
The two-thirds threshold in the 199-member National Assembly 133 mandates (66.83%) — source: calculation under Act CCIII of 2011
The result of the 2026 election Tisza 141, Fidesz–KDNP 52, Mi Hazánk 6 — source: National Election Office (NVI), finalisation of 19 April 2026

The mandate proportion belongs here because it shows what is at stake in the proposals: the present 141 mandates exceed by eight the threshold needed for amending the constitution. A reserve of eight is enough for the text of the Fundamental Law to be amendable at any time — and this same reserve of eight is what makes the self-restraining rule revocable at any time as well. This is why MIAK proposes deferred entry into force: it is temporal distance that can make political self-binding credible, not the text of the rule.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Justice (programme points) — the competence framework of constitutional adjudication, judicial independence and the popular-sovereignty audit; this is the centre of gravity of the topic.
  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — the measurement of checks and balances, public indicators of institutional independence.
  • Public administration and e-government (programme points) — the legislative procedure and the operation of the public consultation platform; the implementation side of proposals 3.1 and 3.2 belongs here.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws

The core of Montesquieu’s argument is not that the legislator is ill-intentioned, but that the fusion of the branches of power is in itself sufficient to abolish freedom — independently of intention:

“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.”

In the Hungarian situation this proposition holds with a twist. It is not the legislative and the executive power that have fused: in today’s debate it is the legislative and the constitution-making power that can be exercised in the same body and with the same voting button. In the same chapter Montesquieu writes that without the separation of the judicial power the judge becomes a legislator — and the majority reasoning of 17 August rejected substantive examination on precisely this ground, saying that the Constitutional Court cannot be a co-constitution-maker. MIAK accepts this argument: that is exactly why it asks not more of the Constitutional Court, but puts a limit into the legislative procedure.

📖 Source: Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois, 1748)

6.4.2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

In the second book of The Social Contract Rousseau makes the proposition of principle at which the majority of the Constitutional Court arrived — by another route, with other concepts:

“It is contrary to the nature of the body politic for the sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot break: there neither is nor can be any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people — not even the social contract itself.”

At the same time Rousseau sharply separates the “general will” (volonté générale) from the “will of all”: the former looks to the common interest, the latter is the addition of private interests. When — he writes — partial interests organise themselves at the expense of the great community, the votes no longer express the general will. In MIAK’s reading it is this distinction that makes today’s question manageable: if legal self-binding is conceptually impossible, then the protection has to make it harder for a momentary majority to dress its own, identifiable interest in the form of a general rule. The 3.2 statement of who is affected makes precisely this visible — it does not prohibit, it only makes it be stated. The I9 popular-sovereignty audit programme point is built directly on this chapter of Rousseau.

📖 Source: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract (1762)

6.4.3 Mihály Bihari: Rendszerváltás Magyarországon — alkotmányreform (The transition in Hungary — constitutional reform)

Bihari’s study belongs here because it recalls something that gets lost in the daily debate: Hungarian constitutional adjudication is not a natural concomitant of the constitutional order but the product of a negotiated political agreement. One of the six bills annexed to the National Round Table agreement of 18 September 1989 concerned the Constitutional Court; the National Assembly elected the first five members in November 1989, and the panel began its operation on 1 January 1990. In Bihari’s description the cardinal acts of the transition — among them the act on the Constitutional Court — were born in a single package because none of the parties knew which of them would be the winner of the next election.

This historical lesson can be applied directly to today’s proposal. The guarantees of 1989 became strong because they were born in a state of ignorance: nobody knew in advance whom they would favour. The deferred entry into force of MIAK’s proposal 3.3 restores this same uncertainty artificially — nobody knows today the majority of the next term.

📖 Source: Mihály Bihari: Rendszerváltás Magyarországon — alkotmányreform

6.5 International comparison

Several European orders give an answer to the question of substantive limitation, and none of them follows the logic of the extreme solutions. Article 79(3) of the German Basic Law fixes an itemised, unamendable core — the federal structure, the participation of the states in legislation, and the fundamental principles laid down in Articles 1 and 20 — and the Federal Constitutional Court’s right of substantive examination goes with this. The Italian and the Czech constitutional courts developed a similar, narrow yardstick by way of case law. At the same time there is a counter-example in our neighbourhood too: in several Central European orders — as in the Hungarian one — the review of constitutional amendments is excluded or purely procedural, and the debates there too are about which stage the guarantee should be put into.

From MIAK’s point of view the lesson of the comparison is not which model is better. It is that in those systems where there is no substantive control, the emphasis falls regularly on procedural slowing: a compulsory second reading, a vote spanning two parliamentary sessions, the double confirmation of the qualified majority. Proposal 3.1 transplants this international pattern into the Hungarian standing-orders framework — without taking competence from anybody or giving it to anybody.

Justice

  • I4 — Protection of judicial independence
  • I9 — Popular-sovereignty audit: legislation with citizen feedback
  • I10 — Constitutional “stress test”

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A6 — Strengthening checks and balances

Proposed new programme point: Procedure for amending the Fundamental Law — compulsory waiting period and statement of who is affected — for the Justice area.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 18 August 2026 — topic 1):

Knowledge base references (literature):

  • 📖 Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws
  • 📖 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract
  • 📖 Mihály Bihari: Rendszerváltás Magyarországon — alkotmányreform

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Justice (programme points; programme point ID: I4, I9, I10)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A6)
  • MIAK policy area: Foundations of law (background material)
  • MIAK press monitor, 18 August 2026 — topic 1, score: 94/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • National Election Office — the final result of the 2026 parliamentary election
  • Hungarian Official Gazette — the promulgated text of the seventeenth amendment of the Fundamental Law
  • Venice Commission — opinions on the Hungarian constitutional amendments

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