On Tuesday, after weeks of attacking Orbán online and in public, Magyar released a tape of his ex-wife Varga apparently incriminating members of Orbán’s inner circle in a corruption scandal.
Magyar claims the two-minute recording, taped last year, proves that Orbán’s powerful Cabinet chief Antal Rogán tampered with documents related to a sprawling corruption dispute involving Pál Völner, a former state secretary in the justice ministry when Varga was minister. Völner resigned in 2021 after prosecutors accused him of taking bribes.
The sensational release of the tape — which Magyar presented to the prosecutor’s office in Budapest before a sea of cameras Tuesday — is the latest twist in a drama that has transfixed Hungary and provided a rare moment of dissent against Orbán’s iron grip on the country’s political system.
To add some quick context to this, because I imagine most people aren’t following internal Hungarian politics day-to-day:
Last year there was a scandal that had Pál Völner, the Secretary of State for Justice and György Schadl, the president of the Hungarian Court Bailiffs Chamber under investigation for a scheme where Schadl would bribe Völner to only appoint bailiffs loyal to him, and providing kickbacks for him. This happened under the purview of Minister of Justice Judit Varga, though she was not implicated. However, Minister of Government Communication Antal Rogán, his wife and aide were named by their given names in some evidence as the people ultimately responsible for masterminding the scheme. They were never investigated or even questioned, causing much outrage but not much else.
There was a separate, more recent, scandal that had President Katalin Novák and Minister of Justice Judit Varga resign over it getting out that they pardoned someone who was enabling the systematic sexual abuse of orphaned children in government care. They were most likely just the “signatures”, so they became sacrificial lambs when it got out. The person pardoned is a personal friend of the Orbán family. The whole thing got out because they made a mistake that made the case appear in some procedural jurispondence, which has been spotted by a random low-profile lawyer.
The ex-husband (divorced two years ago) of Judit Varga, Péter Magyar, came out in an interview to the biggest non-government owned media outlets in protest of the presumed forced resignation over something that was ultimately Rogán’s fault by his account. He recounts that even back in the Völner case, Rogán went over Varga’s head, and they took control away from her in her own Ministry when she started asking questions. He blames Rogán for Varga’s resignation since he is responsible for propaganda, so he made the call to sacrifice Varga to secure the “inner circle’s” reputation. His gripes seem to be that while he was in a privileged position as part of the Orbán system, he was still fucked over when it counted for the “inner circle”.
And this is where we get to today, where Magyar has revealed recordings having Varga telling him that Rogán and his circle are falsifying investigative material and evidence by removing their names from them.