Part I — Situation overview

The National Assembly began its two-day extraordinary sitting on Monday at 1 p.m., having not sat the previous week because of the extreme heat and the energy saving measures. The agenda started with a pre-agenda speech by Prime Minister Péter Magyar, after which the parliamentary groups spoke, and then two new MPs — Olivér Hortay and André Palóc — took their oaths for the mandates vacated by the resignations of Péter Szijjártó and Gyula Budai. The practical task of Monday was handling the evening deadline for presidential nominations: the parliamentary groups could submit their written endorsements until 10 a.m., and the house committee reviewed them at 12.30. Under Article 11 of the Fundamental Law, the validity of a nomination requires the written endorsement of at least one fifth of the Members of Parliament — 40 MPs in the 199-member body. Every MP may endorse a single candidate, and if anyone endorses more, all of their endorsements are invalid. On Saturday the Tisza parliamentary group nominated András Baka, the former president of the Supreme Court. Fidesz–KDNP announced that it would not take part in the nomination, because it does not regard the removal of Tamás Sulyok as legitimate; Mi Hazánk proposed the energy lawyer Máté Tóth, but its six-member parliamentary group does not in itself reach the one-fifth threshold.

Public attention is understandably directed at the person, yet the weight of the present sitting lies rather in the quantity. Alongside the presidential election — which takes place on Tuesday, by secret ballot, with a two-thirds threshold, that is 133 votes, in the first round — final votes await the laws affecting the handling of health data, the public education legislative package, the public finance rules of the fiscal reform, the amendment of the 2026 central budget, the restructuring of the performance of law enforcement tasks and the incompatibility rules of the agricultural chamber. None of these is insignificant. The public education amendment abolishes the obstacles restricting teachers’ right to strike and the rule that on professional questions consultation may take place only with the National Chamber of Teachers. Under the law enforcement package the Counter-Terrorism Centre ceases from 1 October to operate as an independent law enforcement body, and, keeping its name, comes under the direction of the National Police Headquarters. At the same time the personal protection tasks of the Parliamentary Guard pass to the Counter-Terrorism Centre and its facility protection tasks to the Rapid Response Police. The budget amendment relates to the commitments of the Recovery and Resilience Plan and to the payment obligation into the Regional Development Fund, while the public finance package provides the operating resources of the Fiscal Council within the parliamentary chapter, as a separate appropriation. At the same sitting the House also takes up the draft resolution on the notice period of the Prosecutor General and the immunity cases of three MPs, and at the end the general debate on two new bills — the amendment of the VAT act and of the vocational training act — begins.

MIAK’s reading is that two separate questions of quality are being mixed up here, and public discourse regularly holds one to account in place of the other. One is the question of substance: is it good that the restrictions on teachers’ right to strike are removed, is changing the organisational classification of the Counter-Terrorism Centre justified, is the new financing arrangement of the Fiscal Council enough for its independence. These questions have to be answered separately, and the answers also depend on political preference. The other is the question of procedure: how much time passed between the tabling of the individual proposals and the final vote, was an impact assessment prepared for them, was there substantive public consultation, and how much time did the MPs have to read what they are voting on. This latter is not a matter of preference but measurable. A compressed sitting schedule is not in itself a breach of the rules — the extraordinary sitting is a legitimate instrument fixed in the Fundamental Law, and after the summer heat break the pile-up is in part technical. The problem is that in Hungary accelerated legislation has over the past decade and a half not been an exception but a habit, and MIAK criticised this when another government resorted to it as well. The yardstick of principle does not depend on who exercises power — this is the real test of the present situation.

Part II — Literature foundation

The question of how far the legitimacy of a legislative act depends on the procedure leading to it is not a new one. Mihály Bihari (political scientist, constitutional court judge, one of the chroniclers of the constitutional process of the Hungarian regime change) derives in his study Rendszerváltás Magyarországon — alkotmányreform (Regime change in Hungary — constitutional reform) that the historical legitimation of the 1989–90 transformation was given not by the end result but by the negotiated form based on agreement. The National Round Table became unquestionable precisely because it chose the compromise procedure instead of the faster, unilateral solution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (18th-century Genevan-French political philosopher, the creator of the modern concept of popular sovereignty) approaches the same question in The Social Contract from the side of voting: a majority decision expresses the general will if the people deliberate in an informed way. For him the question put at a vote is not “do I like this proposal” but “is it in conformity with the common interest”, and this can only be answered in possession of sufficient information. Finally the Fundamental Law of Hungary, as a source of law in force, gives the concrete procedural framework: Article 11 fixes in advance every step of the presidential election — the endorsement threshold, the secret ballot, the two-thirds first round and the time of taking office — that is, the constituent power itself follows the principle that the source of legitimacy is a procedure known in advance. The detailed treatment of the literature — author by author, with quotations — can be found in the 6.4 Literature in detail section.

📖 Source: Mihály Bihari: Rendszerváltás Magyarországon — alkotmányreform; Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract; The Fundamental Law of Hungary (text in force) — Article 11

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. All three can be launched during the present session as well, none of them requires a constitutional amendment, and all three apply in the same way to any future government.

3.1 A public legislative lead time table (first publication by 30 September 2026)

The cheapest instrument, and the one that can be introduced fastest, is a public, continuously updated table which for every adopted law states four data: the date of tabling, the date of the final vote, the number of calendar days between the two, and whether a prior impact assessment and public consultation were carried out. The data exist today — the register of parliamentary papers is public — but in a scattered form, to be searched out proposal by proposal, which practically rules out comparison. The essence of the proposal is therefore not new data collection but the arrangement of existing data into a single, downloadable format, retrospectively by parliamentary term as well. This is the direct putting into practice of the I3 legislative impact assessment programme point, and from the side of data publication the basic infrastructure of the I9 popular-sovereignty audit. The producer of the table is the Office of the National Assembly, and the format of publication has to be machine-readable. Bihari’s argument (see 6.4.1) is directly applicable here: if it is the quality of the procedure that gives legitimation, then it has to be possible to measure the quality of the procedure, otherwise only claims stand against one another.

3.2 A compulsory budgetary impact estimate for every budget amendment (from the present session)

The amendment of the 2026 budget is the largest financial item of the present package, yet it is the element on which the least public calculation is available. MIAK proposes that a public impact estimate of at most two pages be compulsorily attached to every submission amending a budget act: which appropriations change and by how much, what the effect of the amendment is on the annual deficit and on the debt path, and what commitment justifies it. The brevity of the document is deliberate — the aim is not a further layer of administration but that the MP and the reader alike should see on one page what is changing. This is the intersection of the G1 data-driven budget and G19 radical transparency, and from the after-the-fact side it is an input to the G20 impact assessment system: if the estimate is prepared in advance, in a year’s time it can be compared with the actual figure. It is worth noting separately that the present package raises the resources of the Fiscal Council into an independent, separate appropriation — this is a favourable direction from the point of view of independence, and precisely for that reason the impact estimate obligation should go with it, so that the body has something to give an opinion on.

3.3 Publication of the presidential nomination endorsements before the vote (immediately, by a decision on the House Rules)

The Fundamental Law prescribes a one-fifth written endorsement for a nomination, and states that anyone endorsing more than one candidate has all of their endorsements invalidated. This rule is significant in public law terms: the validity of a nomination can be disputed after the fact if it is not clear how many valid endorsements stood behind it. MIAK proposes that after reviewing the nominations, and still before the vote, the house committee publish the number of endorsements received per candidate, together with the reason for any invalidation. Publishing the list of names of individual MPs is not necessary — because of the protection of the secret ballot, the figure and the fact of validity are also enough. The measure turns the A6 checks and balances programme point into procedural small change, and it matters because in the present situation — where one of the largest parliamentary groups is stated to be staying out of the process — the numerical basis of the nomination may later become a subject of dispute. Rousseau’s argument (see 6.4.2) applies here literally: a vote expresses the general will if the voter knows what they are deciding on.

The three proposals are bound together by a single principle: procedural quality is not a question of mood but of data. The lead time table shows how much time there was to think; the impact estimate shows what the decision costs; the publication of the endorsement figure shows on what basis the nomination stands. None of them restricts the majority’s right to decide — all three merely make visible what the majority decided on the basis of.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Public administration The publicity of the lead time data has a disciplining effect on the preparation of legislation; the ministries can plan ahead with the estimated debating time The datum is not in itself an indicator of quality: a long-prepared bad law performs well in the table, a quickly adopted technical amendment badly
Economy The budgetary impact estimate reduces the unpredictability of mid-year amendments for market and municipal actors The compulsory estimate may hollow out into a formality if there is no subsequent comparison with the actual figure behind it
Rule of law Publication of the endorsement figure removes one basis of an after-the-fact legitimation dispute Publication before the vote may also be used to exert political pressure on MPs who have not yet declared themselves
Society On the basis of the data the voter can compare the legislative practice of governments, not only their rhetoric The figures may become a political weapon: comparison easily narrows to cherry-picked pairs of data

The most sensitive point of judgement is the relationship between lead time and the government’s capacity to act. There are situations — a natural disaster, an energy crisis, a security threat — in which fast legislation is not a fault but a duty, and a mechanically applied “the longer the better” yardstick would punish precisely good governance. This is why MIAK’s proposal is deliberately not a threshold value but publication: it does not say how many days a debate has to last, it makes visible how many days it lasted. The exception can thus remain an exception, it merely does not remain unnoticed. The second sensitive point is timing: such a system is credible to introduce when the given government applies it to itself from day one. If the table shows only the previous term, it turns from an instrument of accountability into a campaign instrument, and at the next change of government it will disappear as fast as it appeared.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth tracking? (proposed KPIs)

Four proposed performance indicators (KPIs, Key Performance Indicators) from which, in a year’s time, it will be visible whether the procedural quality of legislation has improved:

  • The average number of calendar days between tabling and the final vote by session, together with the median and the standard deviation. The median matters because a few long-debated proposals may conceal routine accelerations.
  • The share of bills tabled with a prior impact assessment compared with all bills tabled. This indicator can be calculated today as well, so it has an immediate baseline.
  • The number of extraordinary sittings and the share of the laws adopted at them compared with all laws adopted in the year. If this share is persistently high, that indicates not the frequency of emergencies but the weakness of agenda planning.
  • The number of laws amending the budget and the share of public impact estimates attached to them. An indicator starting from zero, so any movement is measurable.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s message is simple: the extraordinary sitting is not the trouble, the absence of measurement is. Concretely, it asks the National Assembly that the Office of the National Assembly publish the legislative lead time data in machine-readable form, the government that it attach a two-page public impact estimate to every budget amendment, and the house committee that it make the number of presidential nomination endorsements public before the vote. Of the public it asks that it hold to account not the fact of the extraordinary sitting but the lead time data — these are verifiable, whereas “steamrollering” and “effective governance” are alike merely labels.

Two MIAK foundational values move in this matter. Accountability, because in a democracy a majority mandate confers the right to decide, not a presumption of the quality of the decision: the extent of the mandate — 141 seats out of 199 at the 2026 election — is enough for a valid decision, but it does not remove the need for after-the-fact scrutiny. And being ideology-free, because none of the yardsticks proposed here contains any claim about whether the present package is good or bad in substance. The same table would show the practice of a National Assembly of a different composition too, and MIAK held the accelerated legislation of the previous term to account in exactly the same way. A yardstick is worth something if it is not known in advance whom it favours.

Part VI — Justifications and further sources

6.1 The press framing by spectrum

On this day the conservative band gave the most detailed procedural description, and almost exclusively that. Magyar Nemzet’s article set out step by step the course of the vote — the forty minutes available for the secret ballot, the differing assessment time in the case of one or of several candidates, the rule for the second round — and then listed item by item the further agenda points, from the draft resolution on the notice period of the Prosecutor General to the immunity cases. The article contained no political assessment; in the paper’s opinion section, however, sharp pieces directed at the person of the candidate appeared on the same day. Mandiner likewise published a detailed agenda summary, and this was the only piece in the day’s selection that unfolded in substance the content of the law enforcement reorganisation — the restructuring of the Counter-Terrorism Centre and of the Parliamentary Guard — and it also quoted the parliamentary state secretary of the justice ministry on the independent budgetary chapter of the National Asset Recovery and Asset Protection Office.

The economic band placed the sitting in the context of the weekend’s government announcements. Portfolio carried the parliamentary agenda as part of a wider weekend balance sheet: the launch of the railway development programme, support for regional airports, the planned zeroing of VAT on prescription medicines and the education proposal package all featured in the same article. This framing — “what the government did at the weekend, and what part of that comes before the House” — was the least conflict-centred reading in the day’s selection.

The liberal-left and public-affairs band concentrated, instead of on the procedure, on the person of the candidate and on the legal contestedness of the process. 444.hu quoted from an earlier radio interview the candidate’s own position on the limits of a two-thirds majority, while ATV, with a legal scholar as spokesperson, carried the question of how far the ongoing legal remedy procedures may later burden the position of the new head of state. HVG carried the topic in a short news format. The most striking difference between the bands is therefore not the judgement of the facts but which agenda point they regard as news: the conservative and economic bands the whole sitting schedule, the liberal-left band almost exclusively the presidential election. No substantive analysis of the eleven other decisions appeared in any of the bands — this is the most important gap in the present day’s selection.

6.2 Facts and data

Item Value Source
Start of the extraordinary sitting 10 August 2026, 1 p.m. Portfolio, 10 August 2026; Mandiner, 10 August 2026
Length of the sitting two days (10–11 August) Magyar Nemzet, 10 August 2026
Deadline for submitting presidential nomination endorsements Monday 10 a.m.; house committee review 12.30 Mandiner, 10 August 2026
Endorsements needed for a valid nomination at least one fifth of the MPs — 40 out of 199 Fundamental Law, Article 11(2)
Threshold for election in the first round two thirds of the MPs — 133 votes Fundamental Law, Article 11(3); MIAK calculation for the 199-member body
Maximum length of the voting procedure at most two consecutive days Fundamental Law, Article 11(5)
Taking office in the case of premature termination the eighth day following the announcement of the result of the election Fundamental Law, Article 11(6)
Size of the Mi Hazánk parliamentary group 6 members — below the one-fifth threshold Portfolio, 10 August 2026
Tisza’s number of mandates after the 2026 election 141 out of 199 (70.85%) National Election Office (NVI), finalisation of 19 April 2026
Oath-taking of new MPs Olivér Hortay and André Palóc (in place of Péter Szijjártó and Gyula Budai) Mandiner, 10 August 2026
Entry into force of the restructuring of the Counter-Terrorism Centre 1 October 2026 Mandiner, 10 August 2026

Two pairs of figures deserve separate attention. The first is the relationship between the one-fifth endorsement threshold and the six-member parliamentary group: the threshold of 40 means that in the present composition only the largest parliamentary group is able to make a valid nomination on its own, and the second largest — with 52 mandates — would likewise be able to, but has stated that it will not avail itself of the possibility. The field of candidates thus narrowed to a single name as the result not of a legal but of a political decision; it is worth seeing this difference precisely, because the public-law consequence of the two claims differs. The second is the relationship between the two-thirds threshold and the share of mandates: 141 mandates is above the threshold of 133, so the first round may mathematically be successful — but the vote is secret, and therefore the result cannot be derived from the number of mandates. Secrecy is not a formality: this is precisely the point at which the Fundamental Law deliberately separates parliamentary group discipline from the MP’s decision.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Justice (programme points) — making legislative impact assessment compulsory and citizen feedback on law-making (programme point ID: I3, I9, I10);
  • Economy (programme points) — the data basis of budget amendments and their after-the-fact impact assessment (programme point ID: G1, G19, G20);
  • Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points) — procedural strengthening of checks and balances, the publicity of nomination data (programme point ID: A6);
  • Public administration and e-government (programme points) — the measurable simplification of legislative administration and machine-readable publication (programme point ID: KI3).

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 Mihály Bihari: Rendszerváltás Magyarországon

The central claim of Bihari’s study is that the legitimation of the 1989–90 transformation derived not from the result but from the form. Assessing the role of the National Round Table he puts it that its participants “secured the historical legitimation of the regime change, making unquestionable and justifying the form and content of a regime change based on political agreement and compromise”. Elsewhere he adds that the process “was realised with mass support, but through the negotiations of organised political forces” — that is, social authorisation and the negotiated procedure together gave the legitimation; neither on its own would have been enough. This structure is relevant now because the present situation is formally similar: an extraordinary mandate, rapid institutional restructuring, and the argument that a transitional state requires extraordinary instruments. On Bihari’s reading transitoriness is not in itself an argument for acceleration — quite the contrary: it is precisely transitional periods in which the quality of the procedure is most expensive, because the forms created now will live for a long time. The lead time table proposed by MIAK in point 3.1 is therefore not an instrument against the government but a document of its own legitimation — by the lesson of the regime change, it is exactly such documents that make decisions unquestionable after the fact.

📖 Source: Mihály Bihari: Rendszerváltás Magyarországon — alkotmányreform

6.4.2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

Rousseau distinguishes “the will of all” from “the general will”: the former is the sum of private interests, the latter is what is directed at the common interest. From this he derives that the point of voting is not the expression of liking. When a bill is put before the assembly, he writes, the question put to the voters is not whether they “approve or reject the proposal” but whether the proposal “is in conformity with the general will” — and every vote is an answer to that question. He also separately fixes the precondition of the operation: the people arrive at a good decision if they deliberate in possession of adequate information; the multitude, in his view, “is never corrupted, but is often deceived”. This line of reasoning can be translated directly to the present situation. If an MP receives the amending motions to a complex legislative package a few days before the final vote — for example the restructuring of the law enforcement organisational system, which rearranges the tasks of three organisations — then formally they can vote, but in Rousseau’s sense they cannot answer the question put, because they are not in possession of the information needed for the answer. MIAK’s proposals in points 3.2 and 3.3 target precisely this gap: they do not restrict the right to decide, they secure the information for it.

📖 Source: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

6.4.3 The Fundamental Law of Hungary

Article 11 of the constitution in force fixes the whole presidential election procedure in advance and item by item: the election is called by the Speaker of the National Assembly, the nomination requires the written endorsement of at least one fifth of the MPs, the vote is secret, on the basis of the first vote the person who received the votes of two thirds of the MPs becomes president, in the case of no result a second vote has to be held on the two candidates receiving the most votes, and — this is the most frequently disregarded provision — “the voting procedure has to be completed within at most two consecutive days”. Paragraph (6) of the Article gives the rule for taking office: in the case of the premature termination of the mandate, the elected president takes office on the eighth day following the announcement of the result of the election, and before that takes an oath before the National Assembly. This degree of detail is itself a claim: the constituent power did not leave it to the majority of the day to decide in what procedure it should elect a head of state, but fixed it in advance. On MIAK’s reading this structure also supplies the yardstick for the other agenda points: if in the case of decisions of constitutional rank the precise description of the procedure is self-evident, then in the case of those at the level of statute the procedure cannot be a purely technical question either. The eight-day transition moreover carries a practical message — the constitution itself builds in a waiting period where the decision is irreversible.

📖 Source: The Fundamental Law of Hungary (text in force on 17 April 2026), Article 11

6.5 International comparison

Publicly measuring legislative lead time is not a Hungarian innovation. The common element of the European Union’s recommendations on the quality of legislation and of member state practice is that a prior impact assessment attaches to draft legislation and a minimum period to public consultation, and that the fulfilment of both is reported numerically after the fact. Where this works, the indicator has become institutionalised not as a weapon against the government but as internal quality assurance: the ministries themselves use it to decide which submissions can be taken by an accelerated route and which are not worth it. Experience shows that the system which proves durable is the one that prescribes not a threshold value but an obligation to publish: against a threshold an exception rule can always be found, whereas publication makes the exception visible too.

The other common element of the European recommendations on legislative quality is the “slowing down” of decisions of constitutional significance: in several countries a compulsory waiting period or a double vote attaches to constitutional amendments and to filling the most important public-law offices, expressly on the ground that a buffer in time has to be left between the momentary majority and the lasting institutional order. The eight-day rule for taking office in Article 11 of the Hungarian Fundamental Law is a more modest version of the same logic. MIAK’s proposals deliberately do not extend to the introduction of new waiting periods — in the present situation the introduction of measurement is in itself a substantive step, and it meets far less political resistance.

Justice

  • I3 — Legislative impact assessment
  • I9 — Popular-sovereignty audit — law-making with citizen feedback
  • I10 — Constitutional “stress test”

Economy

  • G1 — Data-driven budget
  • G19 — Radical transparency in economic decision-making
  • G20 — Economic policy impact assessment system (Drucker audit)

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A6 — Strengthening checks and balances

Public administration and e-government

  • KI3 — Measurable reduction of bureaucracy

Proposed new programme point: A legislative lead time index — for the Justice area, with a machine-readable time series published by session on the tabling-to-final-vote lead time and on impact assessment coverage.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK press monitor, 10 August 2026 — topic 1):

Knowledge-base references (books):

  • 📖 Mihály Bihari: Rendszerváltás Magyarországon — alkotmányreform
  • 📖 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract
  • 📖 The Fundamental Law of Hungary (text in force on 17 April 2026)

Note: the local file path of the books does not appear in the visible text of the blog — only the author and the title. The file path is an internal matter of the generation process, not the reader’s.

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Justice (programme points; programme point ID: I3, I9, I10)
  • MIAK policy area: Economy (programme points; programme point ID: G1, G19, G20)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A6)
  • MIAK policy area: Public administration and e-government (programme points; programme point ID: KI3)
  • MIAK press monitor, 10 August 2026 — topic 1, score: 95/100

Additional public data sources (where used):

  • National Election Office (NVI) — the parliamentary election result finalised on 19 April 2026
  • The register of parliamentary papers of the National Assembly — the public source of tabling and voting dates

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