A Country Looking for its Crown by Count Miklós Cseszneky 

Hungary has removed a president whom almost nobody will miss.

Tamás Sulyok was elected in 2024 by Viktor Orbán’s parliamentary majority. He occupied the office with the discreet correctness of a provincial notary who notices that the house is burning but does not wish to interrupt the signing of documents. His constitutional courage was expressed mainly through silence, and silence, though sometimes dignified, may also be consent with good manners.

After Orbán’s defeat, Péter Magyar’s new majority ended Sulyok’s term by altering the constitution. Sulyok signed the amendment that removed him. There was something recognisably Hungarian in the scene: legality observed to the final moment while legality itself was being rearranged.

Few will mourn him. That is why the episode matters.

Constitutions are not chiefly needed for admirable men. The test comes with the weak president, the compromised judge, the official whose courage failed at the useful hour. Only then does a country discover whether an office is larger than its occupant. Magyar inherited no innocent republic. Orbán had governed for sixteen years, long enough for a political family to begin mistaking the family album for national history. His Fidesz party filled offices, extended mandates and altered constitutional rules with the confidence of men who had ceased to distinguish duration from permanence. It did not abolish the institutions of the state. It taught them, gradually, to face in the same direction.

Yet Orbán cannot be understood merely as a Central European autocrat who happened to win elections. He recognised something many of his opponents had forgotten: nations do not live by efficient administration and foreign approval alone. Hungary was not simply a market, a legal jurisdiction or a troublesome department of enlightened Europe. It possessed memories, loyalties and humiliations that could not be dissolved by calling them outdated.

Orbán restored this language to public life. He also placed it in government service. He spoke of historical continuity while governing through the immediate arithmetic of Parliament. The Holy Crown of Saint Stephen returned to constitutional language, but a two-thirds majority acquired the practical habits of sovereignty. Ancient scenery concealed a thoroughly modern appetite.

Magyar defeated this order. He did not design its traps, and he cannot reasonably be asked to preserve them as objects of constitutional interest. The danger begins when destruction acquires the moral dignity of renovation.

Every reformer inherits an emergency. The old rulers abused the constitution to protect themselves; therefore, he reasons, the constitution must be used to remove what they protected. The argument is not absurd. That is what makes it dangerous. Power seldom tempts us by appearing wholly unreasonable.

Orbán and Magyar do not carry equal historical responsibility. One constructed a system over sixteen years; the other has only begun to govern. But the constitutional rule must remain the same when the government changes.

At this point the Hungarian president ought to become important.

In theory, he represents the unity of the nation and guards the constitutional order. In practice, Parliament elects him. One political majority places him in office, after which the country is invited to discover in him an authority above political majorities.

It is an arrangement requiring unusual character and a generous national memory. Hungary has seldom enjoyed both at once.

The British know the opposite arrangement. Their sovereign does not receive the Crown from the government, which is one reason ministers may serve beneath it without quite imagining that they invented the state that morning. The institution is irrational, certainly.

Political order consists partly in discovering which irrationalities restrain more destructive ones.

Here lies the modest argument for monarchy.

It is not that kings are wiser. Heredity excludes neither vanity nor stupidity; it merely excludes the election campaign. A monarch may resist his ministers, or may find their advice wonderfully convenient.

Nor is hereditary office morally innocent. It transmits a burden as well as a privilege. A politician volunteers to become a public spectacle. A royal child does not choose to have his education, marriage and private grief treated as national property. A palace may be a gilded obligation, but gilding does not make the obligation voluntary.

Monarchy’s limited constitutional advantage is simpler: the head of state does not owe his office to the parliamentary majority he may one day have to restrain.

Switzerland shows that even this advantage is not indispensable. Its republic possesses what many monarchies have lost: local loyalty, civic memory and a deep suspicion of politicians offering national salvation. It does not need a crown because political custom
already performs much of the crown’s work.

Hungary, in any case, has no king whom the nation is silently waiting to recognise. Karl von Habsburg possesses dynastic seniority but little presence in Hungarian public life. His younger brother Archduke Georg (György) is better known through his long connection with Hungary and its diplomatic service. But neither genealogy nor familiarity amounts to constitutional legitimacy.

This uncertainty is not new.

After the First World War, Hungary remained formally a kingdom without a crowned monarch. Admiral Miklós Horthy became Regent in 1920, and the provisional arrangement acquired the durability common to provisional arrangements that have discovered comfortable offices.

Hungarian monarchists divided. The legitimists defended the rights of Charles IV and the Habsburg succession. The szabad királyválasztók—the free royal electors—believed that war, revolution and the collapse of the old order had returned the choice of sovereign to the nation.

Their dispute concerned the nature of continuity. Could history simply resume after catastrophe? Did loyalty mean restoring the interrupted line, or recognising that the interruption had itself changed the constitution?

Hungary never answered.

For a moment, gratitude produced an exotic possibility. Lord Rothermere, the British press baron who championed Hungarian territorial revision after the Treaty of Trianon, became so admired that his son was spoken of as a possible candidate for the throne. It is easy to laugh, although one should not laugh too loudly. A wounded nation may mistake foreign sympathy for Providence. When governments offer no justice, a friendly newspaper proprietor begins to resemble a statesman; from a sufficient distance, his son may acquire the outline of a dynasty.

The episode points towards the real question. The difficulty is not merely finding a head for an empty crown. It is remembering what the Crown meant.

The Holy Crown of Saint Stephen was not simply a splendid object belonging to the king. In Hungarian constitutional thought, it came to represent the country as a legal and historical being: something not exhausted by the monarch, Parliament or the electorate of one particular season.

The king wore the Crown, but he did not own it. He stood beneath it. The doctrine was never tidy. Nothing that survives for centuries remains tidy. It served resistance and exclusion, law and legend, noble purposes and ignoble ones. It cannot be lifted intact from history and applied as a modern instruction manual.

Yet it preserved one severe idea: Hungary could be governed, but not possessed.

Viktor Orbán invoked the Holy Crown while often treating constitutional continuity as the continuation of his party. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party now faces a different temptation: to suppose that liberation from the previous order permits constitutional shortcuts in dismantling it.

Historical constitutionalism refuses both claims. It does not mean that the dead govern the living, or that ancient arrangements must be preserved against experience. It means that the living are trustees rather than founders. They inherit a state which they may reform but should not treat as raw material.

This principle now needs an institutional form.

If Hungary remains a republic, it cannot continue with a president created by the governing majority and expected afterwards to restrain it. The head of state should be chosen through a broader constitutional settlement, protected against removal devised for a particular occupant, and given limited powers to delay or refer changes affecting the basic order of the state.

Delay is not romantic. It does not fill squares or inspire songs. It can nevertheless force a government to distinguish urgency from appetite.

A constitutional monarchy could embody the same principle more naturally, because a hereditary sovereign would not owe his position to Fidesz, Tisza or any later parliamentary coalition. But restoration is not an immediate cure. It would require public legitimacy, an accepted definition of the sovereign’s powers and a family willing to accept the duties and indignities of modern kingship.

The immediate task is therefore not to select a Habsburg, appoint a regent or decorate another parliamentary nominee with the title of national unity. It is to decide what sort of head of state can stand apart from the government without becoming a rival to it. Hungary needs an office capable of representing continuity, delaying constitutional improvisation and reminding successive governments that an election transfers authority but does not abolish restraint.

No title can manufacture courage, and no constitution can make men good. Institutions can do something more modest: make political wrongdoing slower, more visible and more difficult. Much of civilisation consists of such modest achievements. This is what the Holy Crown may still mean in an uncrowned Hungary. It does not command the restoration of a particular dynasty. It demands that the state be treated as an inheritance rather than the material of each new political beginning.

The king may not return. The constitutional argument for the Crown remains.

Count Miklós Cseszneky

Count Miklós Cseszneky is a Hungarian political scientist, psychotherapist, philosopher
and writer. His other writings can be found here: https://solo.to/csesznekymiklos