San Francisco Frontiers - Orban-critic ex-judge becomes Hungary president after predecessor ouster

The post became vacant following the contested removal last month of the previous president, an Orban ally, as pro-EU conservative Prime Minister Peter Magyar pushes to loosen his predecessor's lingering hold over state institutions.

Parliament, where the ruling Tisza party holds a two-thirds majority, approved Baka, who served 17 years as a judge on the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Baka, 73, was sworn into the largely ceremonial post right after the vote, which Orban's Fidesz party boycotted, and called for unity.

"There is one thing we certainly cannot do: we cannot build the new Hungary on revenge," he told parliament.

He vowed to "encourage public and professional debate, uphold its openness and impartiality, and consistently insist that constitution-making must never again become the exclusive project of a single political force".

- 'Commitment to rule of law' -

Tisza on Saturday nominated Baka after the previous president, Tamas Sulyok, saw his mandate cut short by a constitutional amendment, adopted as part of Magyar's reform push.

Magyar said Baka's life served "as an example of commitment to the democratic rule of law and constitutional principles" as the central European country needs to be "guided back onto the path of the rule of law and constitutional governance".

Magyar's party won April elections, ending nationalist Orban's 16 years in power and promising "system change".

Rights watchdogs criticised Sulyok's removal, comparing the tinkering to the methods Orban used himself to build his self-styled "illiberal" system.

Orban's Fidesz party said Sulyok's ouster was "tyrannical" and "illegitimate".

Baka has not been critical of Sulyok's removal, even though his tenure as a supreme court judge was terminated in 2012 by a similar legislative act.

"In a country governed by the rule of law, such extraordinary measures cannot be used, but Hungary became a captured state under Orban," he told AFP last month.

State officials like the president "were appointed not to restrain the government's power, but to ensure the political survival of the former system even after an electoral defeat", Baka added.

- 'Clearly defined path' -

Baka's installation signals a "guarantee that the restoration of liberal democracy will proceed along a clearly defined path", Bulcsu Zsiga, from the Centre for Fair Political Analysis, told AFP.

Besides a brief stint as a lawmaker, elected from the party list of the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) in 1990 after the democratic transition, Baka did not hold any political positions.

He was a judge at the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from 1991 to 2008.

In 2009, he was nominated as the head of the Supreme Court, but was dismissed after he condemned a move under Orban to reduce the age of mandatory retirement for judges from 70 to 62, calling it a judicial purge.

The European Union and the United States both called the age-limit reduction illegal, and in 2016 the ECHR ruled that Baka's removal amounted to a violation of his freedom of expression.

Last month, Magyar offered the nomination as president to chess legend Judit Polgar, but she declined after the prime minister faced mounting outrage for not consulting the public as promised.

Magyar has indicated the new president would only serve part of his term, until the completion of a process to replace the Orban-era Basic Law with a constitution drafted through wide public participation.

Magyar has estimated rewriting the constitution would take a year or 18 months, promising to launch consultations on it next month.

P.Thomas--SFF