The Orban acolyte who became his fiercest critic

All sorts of people are grateful to Peter Magyar for bounding into the arena of Hungarian public life. Journalists, chiefly. Many a grizzled, lugubrious Hungarian hack had tears of gratitude welling as Magyar demolished the tedium and predictability of Hungarian party politics: Viktor Orban trampling a feeble collection of bunglers and chisellers, known as the opposition, again and again.

Of course, the foreign correspondents were even more elated. Vilifying Orban? Step this way for your eulogy and hosannas, you smooth-talking cosmopolitan. Magyar is certainly deserving of attention; he’s fought a remarkable one-man blitzkrieg.

In February, no one outside the halls of government knew who he was, and if they did, they thought of him as the ex-husband of Judit Varga, the justice minister. He was nonexistent, politically. Then in the European parliament elections four months later, his party came second, obliterating opposition parties that had been around for decades.

Who is he and how did he do it? Magyar is 43, of patrician Budapest stock, a lawyer by training. He was a diplomat, an EU expert. He did a bit of banking, then ran the student loan organisation for a couple of years. A man that the governing party, Fidesz, felt they could trust in state concerns.

That ended in February, in the wake of the scandal caused by President Katalin Novak’s pardon of a man involved in covering up paedophile activity in a children’s home. Fidesz had pushed the family values ticket relentlessly, to the exclusion of almost everything else, and like so many political parties before them, it had blown up in their faces. Varga, who had also signed off on the pardon, was forced to resign along with Novak.

Magyar went public with a secret recording he had made of a conversation he had with Varga, in which, after some prodding, she talked about Antal Rogan, one of Orban’s lieutenants, turning up at the Prosecution Service to intervene in a corruption case.