Hungarian election background: Magyar started in opposition because of a child abuse pardon

[muriel_volestrangler]

Hungary was in the midst of a scandal in which President Katalin Novák had granted a pardon to a man who had helped cover up sexual abuse in a Hungarian state-run children's home.

She resigned, and so did Magyar's ex-wife. Varga had been justice minister and had co-signed the pardon. Two leading Fidesz women were left to carry the can. Varga had been destined for big things in Fidesz, having left her job as minister to spearhead Fidesz European election campaign. That career was over.

Now she was no longer part of the Fidesz machine, Péter Magyar sensed this was his moment.

"I do not want to be part of a system in which the real people in charge hide behind women's skirts," he wrote on Facebook.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78l7vyylgqo

Magyar and Varga rose through the ranks of Hungary’s ruling party and raised three children together, but their marriage did not last, and in 2023 they were on their way to divorce. Also in 2023, Hungary’s Fidesz-appointed president Katalin Novak decided to grant a presidential pardon to Endre Kónya, who had been the deputy director of a state-run orphanage. Kónya had been convicted of helping to cover up the sexual abuse of children at the orphanage at the hands of his boss, the director of the orphanage. Kónya’s conviction rested on the testimony of abused children, whom he had strongarmed and threatened into recanting their testimony. The conviction hinged on one particular where he had blackmailed one child into recanting his testimony by threatening to relocate his cousin, who had also been at the same orphanage, so another, apparently disfavored facility far from Budapest. At the ime of his pardon, Kónya had already been released to home confinement and had nine months left on his sentence. Novak issued 22 pardons, including Kónya’s on the April 27, 2023, stating that she had been moved to clemency by the words of Pope Francis during a recent papal visit.

The power to pardon in Hungary starts with the president, but it doesn’t end there. For a pardon to take effect, a cabinet minister, typically the Minister of Justice, must sign off on it as well. Varga did so. There are some suggestions that Varga and Novak took steps to keep this pardon out of the public eye, although I don’t have confidence that actually happened. At any rate, no one noticed until February of 2024, when an independent media outlet reported the story, implying that Novak had been unduly influenced by Zoltan Balog, a politically connected Bishop in the Hungarian Reformed Church who had played a role in getting both the child-abusing director and abuse-covering up deputy director into their roles. To a degree that seems almost quaint just a couple years later, this immediately became a major scandal. Varga was widely rumored to be Orban’s top choice to head the party list for EU parliament elections later that year, but within just over a week of the story breaking, Novak and Varga had resigned in disgrace and Orban was talking about a constitutional amendment making child abusers and their enablers ineligible for clemency.

The launching of what would become the campaign that may well end Orban’s and Fidesz’ sixteen year run in Hungary took place just hours after Varga’s election. On his Facebook page, Maygar announced his resignation from any and all public positions in government, and launched a broadside against his now-former party, arguing that they had ceased to believe in much of anything other than their own corrupt self-enrichment. In an ethically dubious but apparently effective move, he released tapes of his wife effectively admitting Fidesz was a self-enriching racket, and their ideological commitments were little more than tools to that end. Days later he was leading large rallies with anti-Fidesz celebrities. Overnight, he went from minor Fidesz power-broker to the most successful and promising opposition politician Hungary had seen since Fidesz had first taken power in 2010. A few months later, he essentially hermit crabbed his way into Tisza, a minor center-right pro-Europe party that had formed officially in 2020, but had been largely inactive since. (Tisza is both a portmanteau of the Hungarian words for ‘respect’ and ‘freedom’ and Hungary’s second largest river; “The Tisza is flooding” has become a popular chant at his rallies.) Just months after the party formed, his hastily thrown together list for the EU parliamentary elections was the second largest party behind Fidesz, winning 30% of the votes to Fidesz’ 45% (down from 53%) and taking 7 of the 21 seats. This was a pretty big upset for such a new, largely unorganized party and political movement, and set aside any doubt about who would lead the opposition against Orban and Fidesz two years later.

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/election-of-the-weekend-iv-hungary

So basically their Epstein files.