Draft:Péter Magyar

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The native form of this personal name is Magyar Péter. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Péter Magyar is a Hungarian lawyer and politician. He rose to considerable fame in February 2024 after publicly breaking with the government of Viktor Orbán during the Katalin Novák presidential pardon scandal, in which his ex-wife, Judit Varga was implicated and as a result of which she abruptly decided to withdraw from public life.

Personal life

Several members of Magyar's family are or have been public figures. His grandfather, Pál Erőss, was a judge who hosted a popular television program about legal matters. His mother also worked in the judicial branch.

Magyar met Judit Varga on April 1, 2005 at a party. He proposed to her in August 2006. They have three sons; their first child, a son named Levente, was born in 2008. The family lived in Brussels for several years before returning to Budapest when Varga was tapped for a position in the Justice Ministry.

Magyar and Varga publicly announced their divorce in March 2023.

Political career

On February 10, 2024, hours after his ex-wife's announcement of her withdrawal from politics, Magyar published a Facebook post declaring that he would be resigning from his positions in two state-owned enterprises and relinquishing his seat on the board of a third, MBH Bank. He wrote that the past few years had made him realize that the idea of a "national, sovereign, bourgeois Hungary" promulgated by the Orbán government was in fact a "political product" serving to obscure massive corruption and transfers of wealth to those with the right connections.

In the following weeks, Magyar conducted a number of interviews with Hungary's most-read independent news organizations including Partizán, Telex.hu, and 444.hu, in which he extensively criticized the government, particularly Minister of the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office Antal Rogán. He claimed that during his tenure at the head of the national student loan provider, he had been forced to favor those close to Orbán in public invitations to tender and pressured on aspects of his divorce. His first interview, in which he claimed that "a few families own half the country," had been viewed more than two million times as of March 2024.

Magyar continued publishing posts critical of figures associated with the government in the subsequent weeks, claiming that people friendly with or related to the prime minister, like his son-in-law István Tiborcz, had amassed enormous wealth hidden behind domestic private equity funds. On March 15, 2024, he held a rally in Budapest at which he announced the formation of a new political party. According to polling conducted that month, around 13 percent of voters claimed they were "certain or highly likely" to vote for Magyar if he ran for office.

On March 20, 2024, Magyar testified for several hours at the Metropolitan Prosecutor's Office regarding the corruption case involving former Secretary of State for Justice Pál Völner. Shortly after his testimony, he announced in front of the press that he had proof in the form of audio recordings that Antal Rogán or his associates had manipulated documents in the case in order to hide evidence that would have incriminated Rogán. In a Facebook post a few days later, he promised to make the recordings public at 9 AM on March 26, 2024, the date of his next appointment to testify and present the evidence to the prosecutors. He stated that once this happened, Chief Prosecutor Péter Polt as well as the entire Orbán Government would have no choice but to resign.