Hungary’s Orbán declares resistance movement against Magyar government’s ‘tyranny’

Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán declared on Wednesday that he and his far-right Fidesz party will lead a peaceful “resistance” movement against what he called the tyrannical exercise of power by the country’s new center-right government.

Orbán was defeated in a blowout election in April by Prime Minister Péter Magyar and his pro-European Tisza party, ending his 16 years in office. Since then, Orbán’s nationalist Fidesz party has struggled to recover.

At a news conference outside party headquarters in Budapest, Orbán said a constitutional amendment passed last week by Tisza’s majority in Parliament — which removed Hungary’s Orbán-era president and set a 12-year term limit for members of Parliament — had “dismantled the rule of law and eliminated the system of checks and balances.”

The term limit, which applies retroactively, returns Hungary to a status similar to the final years of its Communist dictatorship in the late 1980s, Orbán asserted, “when there was no democracy in Hungary, there was