Budapest, Hungary
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Sept. 29, 2026, 4:02 p.m. ET
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7 min read
Just 40 minutes outside Budapest lies the Hungarian village of Felcsút. While its roads are pristinely paved, they are largely empty.
A commuter rail line cuts through verdant fields, but the vintage locomotive meant to run the route gathers dust behind a fence. Dominating the north end of the village is a monumental slate-and-timber soccer stadium. It can hold almost 4,000 people, more than twice the town’s population, but it is rarely open.
These exemplify the Hungary built by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who grew up in Felcsút and still has a family mansion there. They are also indicative of how Mr. Orbán’s government – which was voted out of office in April – spent funds disbursed by the European Union and intended for public projects, earning Hungary its ranking from Transparency International as Europe’s most corrupt country.
Now, Péter Magyar, the new prime minister, is tasked with tearing down the corrupt system that Mr. Orbán left behind and building a freer, more transparent Hungary in its stead – including projects built for regular Hungarians, not as indulgences or kickbacks for the rich and powerful. Mr. Magyar’s government has already fast-tracked a raft of legal reforms through the summer to satisfy EU demands that Hungary clean up its act, unlocking some €10 billion in EU grants and loans that had been on hold because of concerns about graft.
Denes Erdos/AP
Péter Magyar speaks to the media in Budapest, Hungary, April 13, 2026, after defeating Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in parliamentary elections.
But that was just the first step. Now comes the hard part: rooting out the corruption still threaded within Hungarian businesses and institutions, and clawing back any recoverable EU funds.
“One of the key premises in the campaign of the current government was to stop corruption and to recover assets,” says Ferenc Biró, president of Hungary’s Integrity Authority, which was created in 2022 under pressure from EU headquarters in Brussels. “There’s a genuine expectation towards assets being recovered, people who have stolen from the public to be brought to justice.”
But for Mr. Biró, the stakes go beyond the money. “In this coming short period, the country will for sure teach something to the next generations,” he says. “Either that actions have consequences and that if you have done something unlawful, then that will have consequences. Or a new generation will learn that, as in the past, if you do it on a scale large enough, then you will be free to go.”
Who cleans up the cleaners?
The watchdog group Mr. Biró leads sits in an elegant Budapest office building overlooking the Danube near the Chain Bridge. It exists to address EU concerns over corruption, conflicts of interest, and fraud involving EU funds.
Yet the office highlights how hard it is to fight graft in Hungary.
The Integrity Authority was created in 2022 under pressure from the EU, but from the start, its independence was hampered by Mr. Orbán’s government, including by preventing it from conducting its own prosecutions. And when Mr. Biró butted heads with allies of Mr. Orbán over apparent corruption, federal prosecutors in 2025 launched an investigation of Mr. Biró over alleged abuse of office, document forgery, and financial misconduct.
That investigation hasn’t gone away with Mr. Orbán’s ouster. The public prosecutor’s office, which is itself now undergoing a shake-up, is still pursuing it. Mr. Biró says the charges are politically motivated and follow a “Russian playbook” of using prosecutors to pressure or discredit anti-corruption officials.
“It creates a very bizarre state of mind where you need to be focusing on your anti-corruption work and at the same time you need to be mindful of being criminally charged,” he says. “Personally, I feel it is humiliating.”
Denes Erdos/AP
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán speaks at the closing rally of the Fidesz electoral campaign, in Budapest, Hungary, April 11, 2026.
Mr. Biró takes some comfort in broader signs of institutional and cultural change. The Integrity Authority no longer is struggling to obtain information from other state bodies, he says. He points to police, tax officials, and prosecutors reviving and pursuing reports that his agency submitted as “a change that can be observed.”
In addition, the public is starting to provide tips that have more teeth – and, critically, supporting documentation – thus enabling the authority to better do its job.
“Nobody should be above the law”
Hungary’s corruption problem, as the EU sees it, is not just about individual scandals or the excesses of the Orbán government. The deeper concern is that state institutions are too weak to prevent public money from flowing to politically connected businesses, especially through public procurement.
EU officials have repeatedly pointed to tenders with limited competition, conflicts of interest, opaque spending, weak asset-declaration rules, and doubts about whether prosecutors and other watchdogs are sufficiently independent or effective when politically sensitive cases arise. In Brussels’ view, those weaknesses create a direct risk that EU funds can be misused without such abuse being properly detected or punished.
That is why the European bloc’s demands focus on structural safeguards that will hold the legal and ethical line regardless of who is in power. This means stronger and more independent anti-corruption bodies, more transparent and competitive public tenders, tighter conflict-of-interest rules, better access to public information, and stronger judicial oversight when prosecutors decline to pursue corruption cases. Recovery funding has also been tied to broader judicial-independence reforms.
Hungary’s future economic well-being might hinge on whether it can lawfully unwind wealth accumulated through unlawful means. The government has already sent a clear message, says Krisztián Orbán, a Hungarian public intellectual and economist. (He is not related to the former prime minister.)
“Everybody, including the business community, understands that if you were involved in these shenanigans, then you are running the risk of facing investigations, and that should be the case,” says Mr. Orbán. “Nobody should be above the law.”
Denes Erdos/AP
People gather in front of the Hungarian parliament building after Prime Minister Péter Magyar took his oath of office, in Budapest, Hungary, May 9, 2026.
That has created a new mix of optimism and unease among Hungarian businesses, particularly those that expanded rapidly under the previous regime. Mr. Orbán argues that the scrutiny is not without justification and believes that many corrupt businesses will go bust once they lose privileged terms such as preferential loans.
“Most of the large companies who were able to grow were indeed affiliated with the regime,” he says. “I think this kind of preconceived notion has some solid grounding in reality.”
The challenge is to recover assets and prosecute wrongdoing, but do so in a way that survives legal challenges. He argues that authorities should resist trying to pursue every questionable case at once and instead identify a limited number of high-profile cases in which the evidence is strongest.
“It’s important that you win your first few dozen cases and get them watertight,” says Mr. Orbán.
Those early victories, he argues, would send a powerful signal that the new asset-recovery drive is serious and legally durable. This, in turn, would also encourage cooperation from midlevel insiders who might hold crucial evidence that could help build new cases.
Scrutiny? Or a vicious circle?
The mood of public and institutional reckoning is unsettling to some in the ranks of the former ruling party, Fidesz.
After so many years in power with little meaningful opposition, the party is having to adjust to life in the minority. Former ministers and officials face growing scrutiny over their wealth. Party members are already wondering who will hold the new enforcers accountable.
“They are formulating political expectations toward the police, toward the prosecutor’s service and the courts: What kind of procedures should be opened against whom, and what is the desired outcome of these investigations?” says János Bóka, head of the Fidesz parliamentary group. “So I believe, in this political climate, it is very difficult to talk of independent and impartial processes.”
Mr. Bóka is also skeptical of the benefits of joining the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, calling its track record “mixed at best.” And he worries that the new Assets Recovery Office in Hungary could be used to keep “certain designated political opponents” under investigation for years without proper judicial review, while paving the way for companies disfavored by the government to be taken over or pushed out of the market.
Yet he stops short of opposing investigations outright. “If there is a probable cause and if there are lawful, legal procedures being undertaken against individuals, then of course everybody must face the consequences of [their] actions, including legal and criminal consequences,” he says.
Orsolya Ferencz, a former Fidesz politician and government official who is recasting herself as a crucial centrist, accepts that some of the concerns raised by the EU over Hungary’s system were legitimate.
“Some of [EU] milestones were valid and important for [Fidesz] as well,” she says. “Transparency in the economic system is absolutely a valid issue. If it is not transparent, corruption will appear.”
But she, too, draws a line between greater scrutiny and what she sees as the creation of new politically directed authorities.
“We already have prosecutors, a legal system, and all the necessary tools. We just have to use them,” she says. “But now, we are creating a parallel political institution. This could become an inquisition, a witch hunt. And that would be dangerous because it could destabilize the whole democratic system.”
“The whole regime should be changed”
Indeed, Hungary already boasts multiple bodies tasked with reporting, policing, and investigating wrongdoing. But these historically let politically sensitive cases slip through the cracks. Fidesz had both the power and incentives to reform but failed to do so.
“Hungary has always had a wealth of institutions that were supposed to fight corruption,” says Mr. Biró. “What truly has been lacking is the actual cooperation between these bodies.”
József Péter Martin, the director of Transparency International Hungary, says the system’s failings took multiple forms, which is why meeting the EU’s conditions is necessary but not sufficient. “Under the [Viktor] Orbán regime, corruption was systemic and the state was captured,” he says. “It is not only corruption that should be dismantled, but the whole regime should be changed.”
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Mr. Martin puts the risk that Tisza repeats the mistakes of the past and simply re-creates the old system at “below 5%.” The challenge now is dismantling corruption that was embedded in the legal and economic architecture of the state.
“The whole process should be in the atmosphere of the rule of law,” he says, “and not in the atmosphere of political revenge. Political revenge is very dangerous.”