Hungary's Magyar says new government could take power at beginning of May

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungarian opposition leader and election winner Péter Magyar said Wednesday that the country's president had assured him in a meeting that his new government could take power in the first week of May, an accelerated timeline for the end of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's 16-year reign.

Following Magyar and his center-right Tisza party's landslide victory in Sunday's election in which it won a two-thirds parliamentary majority, the opposition leader has pushed for the transfer of power to occur as quickly as possible. Under Hungarian law, the inaugural session of the new parliament, which must elect a new prime minister, must occur no later than May 12.

Following a private consultation with President Tamás Sulyok on Wednesday, Magyar told reporters outside the presidential palace in Budapest that Sulyok had assured him that Magyar would be his nominee for the next prime minister, and that the inaugural session would likely be scheduled for the 6th or 7th of May.

“(The president) thinks, and I think everyone thinks, that it’s in the interests of the Hungarian nation that after such an overwhelming mandate from the voters, a change in government and a change of regime should happen as quickly as possible,” Magyar said.

Magyar has vowed to conduct a major overhaul of much of Hungary's governmental structure, and to create separate ministries for health, environmental protection and education that did not exist under Orbán.

In his first appearance on Hungary's public broadcaster in nearly two years on Wednesday morning, Magyar said his new government would suspend the service's news programming — which has functioned for years as a mouthpiece for Orbán's Fidesz party — until “conditions are established that are independent, objective, and impartial.”

“One of the key elements of our program is that this factory of lies will come to an end once the Tisza government is formed,” he told the host.

Magyar has called on Orbán's government to act as a caretaker in its final weeks, and not to make any decisions that could threaten Hungary's interests or impede the incoming government's work.

He said he had asked the president, who was elected by Orbán's majority in parliament, to resign after the formation of the new government, something Sulyok said he would “consider.”

“I repeated to him that he is unworthy of embodying the unity of the Hungarian nation, and unfit to be the guardian of the law,” Magyar said, adding that if Sulyok does not resign, his new government will make constitutional changes to remove him “along with all the other puppets that the Orbán system has installed.”

Because Tisza secured a supermajority of two-thirds of seats in parliament, the new government will have the power to change the constitution and roll back many of Orbán's policies.