After his sweeping electoral victory on Sunday, Hungary’s soon-to-be prime minister, Peter Magyar, met with the Hungarian president on Wednesday.
Following the meeting with President Tamas Sulyok, Magyar said Hungary’s new parliament would likely meet on May 6 or 7.
“The President has informed me that he will ask me at the inaugural session of the new parliament to be Prime Minister and form a government, as the leader of the party that got the most votes,” Magyar said.
His center-right TISZA party brought an end to 16 years of FIDESZ government under outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Magyar goes after Orban-aligned president, state-run media
Sunday’s election winner has already made clear that he wants to move quickly to roll back the policies that exemplified what Orban called Hungary’s “illiberal” democracy.
Magyar said he had called on President Sulyok, an Orban ally, to voluntarily step down.
“I repeated to him that, in my eyes and in the eyes of the Hungarian people, he is unworthy of embodying the unity of the Hungarian nation, incapable of ensuring respect for the law,” the TISZA leader said.
He also said on Wednesday that he would be shutting down state-run news media, seen by many as a propaganda tool for FIDESZ.
“One of the first steps after forming the new government will be to suspend the news programs of these propaganda outlets,” Magyar said in an interview with state-run Kossuth Radio.
He made similar comments on the TV channel M1. Both M1 and Kossuth Radio belong to the broadcasting holding company MTVA.
“We will need a little time to pass a new media law, a new media authority and setting up the professional conditions for state media to actually do what it is meant to do,” Magyar said.
Although Hungary’s 2010 media law requires objective and balanced reporting, the state-run outlets gave Orban preferential coverage while giving the TISZA party almost exclusively negative coverage.
During the election campaign, state-run media ran with a false TISZA manifesto that promised drastically higher taxes while not giving Magyar the opportunity to comment.
TISZA’s landslide victory gave the party the two-thirds majority needed to overturn many of the reforms brought in during FIDESZ’s decade and a half in power.
Edited by: Rana Taha
