The constitutional amendment Viktor Orban never expected his supermajority to pass. On June 15, 2026, Hungary’s parliament approved the 16th amendment to the constitution, barring any person from serving more than eight years as prime minister. The provision is retroactive to May 2, 1990. Viktor Orban has served more than 16 years cumulatively since 1998, and 16 consecutive years from 2010 to 2026. He can never be prime minister again.
The vote was 135 in favor. That is exactly a two-thirds constitutional supermajority. It is the same supermajority Orban used for 12 years to rewrite Hungary’s courts, media, and electoral system. It is the same supermajority he assumed would never fall into opposition hands. It fell on April 3, 2026, when Peter Magyar’s Tisza Party swept the general election. The amendment was the opposition’s first major legislative act.
The amendment does three things. First, it limits prime ministers to a maximum of eight years in office, retroactive to the fall of communism. This disqualifies Orban immediately. Second, it dissolves the Sovereignty Protection Office, an Orban-era agency that targeted opposition figures, journalists, and civil society organizations. Third, it returns control of public-interest asset-management foundations to the state. Over his final years in power, Orban had transferred hundreds of billions of forints in state assets to these foundations, effectively privatizing public wealth to loyalist boards. The new parliament is taking it back.
How did this happen? The answer is the electoral system Orban himself built.
Hungary uses a mixed-member majoritarian system: 93 seats elected by proportional representation and 106 single-seat districts decided by winner-take-all. In 2011, Orban’s Fidesz government passed Act CCIII, a sweeping electoral reform that redrew district boundaries. A 2024 revision doubled down on the manipulation. The result was extreme gerrymandering. Malapportionment between districts reached 35% population variance. In the United States, the legal limit is 5%. Orban’s map packed opposition voters into fewer, denser urban districts while spreading Fidesz supporters across more, smaller rural ones.
The system worked exactly as designed. In 2010, Fidesz won 53% of the vote and took 98% of single-seat districts, translating to 68% of all seats. In 2014, with less than 45% of the vote, Fidesz won 91% of districts and another two-thirds supermajority. In 2018, 49% of the vote yielded 86% of districts. In 2022, 54% of the vote yielded 82% of districts. Orban never needed a popular majority. His gerrymander gave him a supermajority every time.
Orban’s team believed the system was impenetrable. They assumed the institutional advantages, media control, and distorted electoral map would keep Fidesz in power indefinitely. Even as the Tisza Party surged in 2025 and early 2026, there was confidence in Budapest that the district map would blunt the opposition’s momentum. Fidesz had built the machine. They thought they knew how it worked.
They were wrong.
On April 3, 2026, Hungarians turned out at record levels. Turnout hit 80%. Fidesz collapsed to 39% of the popular vote and just 56 seats. The Tisza Party won 52.4% of the vote. Under the proportional tier, that gave them a solid majority. Under the single-seat districts, it gave them everything. The same winner-take-all distortion that had inflated Fidesz’s power for 16 years now inflated the opposition’s. Tisza won 92 of 106 single-seat districts. That is 87%. Combined with the proportional seats, they reached exactly 68% of the total. A two-thirds constitutional supermajority. The same number Orban always held. The same number needed to amend the constitution.
Peter Magyar, the new prime minister, said after the vote: “I was not elected simply to change the government, but to change the regime.”
The irony could not be more complete. Orban spent 16 years rigging Hungary’s electoral arithmetic so that a winning party would always be over-rewarded. He believed Fidesz would always be the winner. When the winner changed, the over-reward went with it. The trap was built for his opponents. It closed on him instead.
There are limits to what a constitutional amendment can undo. Orban’s allies still control the Constitutional Court, much of the judiciary, and a network of loyalist media. The rule of law in Hungary will take years to rebuild. But the amendment is a start, and it is a start made possible by Orban’s own engineering. The same gerrymander that let a minority govern for 12 years is the gerrymander that let a majority lock him out for good.