Hungarian President Tamas Sulyok signed a constitutional amendment ending his presidency at midnight on Sunday, BBC reported. He had no constitutional route to challenge the measure and faced a five-day deadline after Parliament passed it. [1] His signature advances the amendment beyond a vote. It does not complete every legal and institutional consequence attached to it.

The paper's July 14 account said Parliament's 139-6 passage still awaited signature, effect and succession. Sulyok has now completed the signature step. The recovered source does not provide an exact signing or promulgation minute, so the safer record remains BBC's report of the signature and when his term would end.

The distinction is awkward for both political camps. Prime Minister Peter Magyar's Tisza government regards Sulyok as a loyalist of Viktor Orban, whose Fidesz party lost power in April after 16 years. Sulyok accused the government of violating the rule of law and called the amendment a breaking point in constitutional democracy. [1] Removal can be both a democratic response to institutional capture and a precedent whose safeguards require scrutiny.

The amendment does more than change the person occupying the presidency. BBC reported that it also removes the head of the Constitutional Court and bars lawmakers who have served three terms from standing again, a limit affecting more than half of current Fidesz deputies. [1] Each provision has its own implementation question. A single signature does not identify a successor, staff a new office, resolve a challenge or demonstrate impartial enforcement.

That makes the effective time consequential. BBC says Sulyok's presidency ends at midnight after Sunday. It does not name the precise act that fills the office next or set out the operating authority of an interim officeholder. The constitutional sequence should therefore be reported as a sequence: parliamentary passage, presidential signature, legal effect, succession and institutional operation.

There is a temptation to call the episode democratic cleanup because Tisza is dismantling offices and rules associated with Orban's long rule. Former Supreme Court head Andras Baka told BBC that Fidesz had filled supposedly independent positions with loyalists and built an authoritarian system designed to survive electoral defeat. [1] That history explains the urgency. It cannot answer whether the replacement rules constrain today's majority as firmly as yesterday's.

Fidesz's opposite description, tyranny, also outruns the record. Sulyok said core values had been trampled for political power, while Orban called for protests. [1] Those are political judgments about a constitutional act. The useful tests are more prosaic: publication of the signed text, the named successor process, the treatment of judges and term-limited lawmakers, and any review that follows.

The composition of the vote does not remove that burden. Tisza's 141 deputies gave a standing ovation when the amendment passed, while Fidesz has struggled after its April defeat and Orban refused to take his seat. [1] A commanding electoral mandate can authorize constitutional change. Durable democratic repair still requires rules that remain credible when the current majority no longer commands them.

Sunday therefore closes one uncertainty from July 14 without closing the file. The president signed, and BBC reports a midnight termination. Hungary has not yet shown through this source who succeeds him or how the broader architecture works after he leaves. A constitutional reversal deserves the same procedural discipline as the order it seeks to undo.

-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow