Péter Magyar

Péter Magyar (born March 16, 1981, Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian politician, the leader of Hungary’s center-right Tisza Party. Though he spent much of his career working closely with Viktor Orbán’s party, Fidesz, he broke with the party in 2024 and rapidly built up a coalition to oppose the prime minister. In April 2026 he led Tisza to a decisive victory and took up the post of prime minister the following month.

Early life

Magyar was born in Budapest in 1981. With his mother working as a senior official on the Supreme Court and his father as a lawyer, Magyar grew up in the heart of Hungary’s political establishment and intelligentsia.

After high school Magyar studied law at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest and also studied at Humboldt University in Berlin under the Erasmus Program. An admirer of Orbán since childhood, he joined Fidesz and became close with some of the party’s future leaders. He graduated in 2003 and started a career in corporate law. In 2005 he met Judit Varga, a young legal associate; they started dating and married in 2006. For the next several years they both worked as attorneys with close ties to Fidesz.

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Political career

In 2009 a fellow party member, János Áder, won election to the European Parliament, and Varga joined Áder’s office as a policy adviser. She and Magyar moved to Brussels. In 2010 Fidesz assumed power in Hungary, with Orbán becoming prime minister, and Magyar received a position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The following year he joined Hungary’s representation to the European Union.

In 2018 the family returned to Hungary, and Magyar was appointed to the board of directors of a state-owned roads company. He also led the agency that provided student loans. In 2019 Varga became Orbán’s justice minister.

The couple divorced in 2023. Varga has said Magyar physically and mentally abused her for several years, and she ultimately decided to end the relationship. Later in 2023 Varga resigned from her post to lead Fidesz’s campaign in the 2024 European Parliament elections. However, in February 2024 she was caught up in a scandal, when the press revealed that Hungary’s former president, Katalin Novák, had pardoned a man convicted of helping to cover up a sex abuse case in a children’s home. Varga, as the justice minister, had signed his pardon. Varga soon resigned from her seat in the Hungarian parliament.

In March 2024 Magyar revealed in a Facebook post that he had surreptitiously recorded a conversation between himself and Varga shortly before their divorce in which she described an effort by Orbán’s allies to interfere in the prosecution of a corruption case. In response, thousands of Hungarians took to the streets of Budapest, demanding Orbán’s resignation.

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The incident catapulted Magyar to political fame. That same spring, he announced he was leaving Fidesz and joining Tisza, a center-right party that favored friendly relations with the EU’s leadership and its other member countries—a stark contrast with Orbán’s approach. Magyar presented himself as a longtime insider of Orbán’s world who was now exposing the misdeeds of his former friends and colleagues.

He began campaigning across Hungary, giving as many as six speeches a day—often in small towns and villages—and preparing to run against Orbán in 2026. Soon he was being greeted by big, energetic crowds. “He has built an opposition movement at amazing speed,” Gábor Győri, a political consultant, told The Guardian in 2026. “Never, since the history of this post-transition Hungary, have we seen a party rise this quickly.”

People who know Magyar have praised his discipline but have also described him as impatient, short-tempered, and sometimes abrasive. In June 2024 he was filmed having a heated exchange with some partygoers at a Budapest nightclub. He grabbed the phone of a man who was filming him and threw it into the Danube. A former girlfriend, Evelin Vogel, has also accused Magyar of domestic abuse.

In his campaign Magyar promised to restore democratic checks and balances, restore ties with the EU, and root out corruption. He also announced plans to end Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy by 2035. At the same time, he said he would carry on Orbán’s opposition to sending weapons to Ukraine and fast-tracking Ukraine’s bid for EU membership.

On matters of immigration Magyar ran to Orbán’s right, saying he would end the country’s guest worker program. He mostly avoided talking about LGBTQ issues, though many observers perceived him as more liberal on these matters than Orbán, who helped bring in a constitutional amendment that allows the government to ban public events by LGBTQ groups.

In the April 2026 election Magyar’s party won 70 percent of the seats, with 80 percent voter turnout. European leaders, including Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, praised the outcome. After the election Magyar demanded the resignations of the president, the head of the court, and the top figures in state media. He was sworn in as prime minister in May 2026.