The Rule of Law’s Test: Can a President Be Removed for Failing to Defend the Rule of Law?

It is a peculiar and telling moment in Hungarian politics that President Tamás Sulyok has turned to the Venice Commission for constitutional protection. According to the head of state, it has become questionable what tools a new political majority may use to alter the functioning of the constitutional system, and how it may treat officeholders who were appointed under the previous political order.

The irony of constitutional protection

There is a certain historical irony in this situation.

Because it is precisely the head of state now invoking European constitutional norms and rule-of-law guarantees who, in recent years, has been accused by many of remaining silent when he should have spoken up in defense of those very norms.

From the outset, public perceptions of Tamás Sulyok in Hungarian society were closely intertwined with the Orbán era. Many did not see him as an independent president of the republic, but rather as a constitutional officeholder who rarely, if ever, used the moral and constitutional means available to a head of state.

According to his critics, over the past two years there were several issues in which the president’s silence was at least as telling as an open political statement would have been.

Many blame him for not taking a firmer stand on the shortcomings of the child protection system, and for failing to play a visible role in cases that raised fundamental questions about the rule of law.

The essence of the accusation was the same in every case: the president of the republic did not use the moral weight of his office to constrain power when it would have been necessary.

When legitimacy survives credibility

The current debate, however, is not merely about Tamás Sulyok.

In reality, it poses a much deeper question for Hungary.

What happens when a significant social majority feels that a public officeholder has lost his moral credibility, while legally he still holds his office in a legitimate manner?

This dilemma has become especially acute after Prime Minister Péter Magyar and several figures on the government side called on the president to resign. Sulyok, however, has made it clear that he has no intention of stepping down, because in his view there is neither a legal nor a constitutional reason for him to do so.

The limits of political will

And this is where the real rule-of-law problem begins.

Because the fact that someone is politically unpopular, morally questionable, or even widely rejected does not necessarily mean that they can be removed by constitutional means.

Hungary’s Fundamental Law clearly regulates the termination of the president’s mandate. The impeachment procedure is subject to extremely strict conditions, and it is not designed to allow a new political majority simply to replace officeholders from a previous era. Several constitutional lawyers have warned that even a two-thirds parliamentary majority does not make the removal of the head of state straightforward, since the Constitutional Court also plays a decisive role in the process.

That is why the Sulyok case has become one of the first serious constitutional tests of the new political era.

After all, one of the new government’s most important promises was precisely to restore the rule of law and to break with the political logic according to which institutions serve only the immediate interests of those in power.

If, however, a public officeholder were removed purely on the basis of political will, that could easily evoke the very methods of the system that many now wish to move beyond.

Resignation as a moral question

This, of course, does not mean that Tamás Sulyok’s position is morally unproblematic.

Quite the opposite.

Many see the fact that he is clinging to his office despite an obvious loss of public trust as the strongest evidence that he is unfit for the role. According to his critics, a president’s legitimacy is not merely legal in nature. In principle, the head of state is supposed to embody the unity of the nation, and if the social foundation of that role is seriously shaken, then resignation becomes not necessarily a legal question, but a moral one.

That, however, is no longer a constitutional-law category.

It is a personal decision.

Tamás Sulyok has so far made it clear that he does not intend to take that option.

Thus, the debate is no longer about whether many people are dissatisfied with him. It is about whether a democratic transition is capable of respecting legal limits even when doing so is politically inconvenient.

Rule of law or revenge?

That is why the Sulyok case goes far beyond the political fate of a single individual.

It is about whether the rebuilding of the rule of law in Hungary begins with revenge — or with self-restraint.