After sixteen years under Viktor Orbán, Hungarians can now walk through rooms from which their country was governed for years. The former Carmelite monastery overlooking the Danube, once one of the most inaccessible symbols of the Orbán era, has become both a public attraction and a stage on which Hungary’s transfer of power is being performed.
Prime Minister Peter Magyar hoped the opening would give citizens a physical sense of the system he defeated: expensive restoration, secluded corridors, commanding views over Budapest and a government complex separated from ordinary public life. His administration turned the former prime ministerial offices into a deliberate symbol of political rupture.
But the spectacle produced an awkward surprise. There were no gold-plated bathrooms, jewel collections or flamboyant displays of personal wealth of the sort discovered after the collapse of some authoritarian rulers. The rooms are unquestionably expensive and carefully designed, but they resemble an exclusive hotel more than a dictator’s fantasy palace.
That disappointment is precisely what makes the Carmelite story more interesting. Visitors came looking for material proof of excess and instead encountered a reminder that Orbán’s political system was never primarily about gilded furniture. The mechanisms that sustained his power operated far beyond the bedroom, balcony and conference rooms now open to tourists.
According to Daycom’s analysis of the first months of the new government and the public record surrounding Hungary’s transition, the country is engaged in more than an administrative handover. Magyar is trying to define the previous sixteen years as a political system to be dismantled, while Fidesz insists Hungary has experienced an ordinary democratic change of government.
The scale of Orbán’s April defeat nevertheless made the transition exceptional. Magyar’s TISZA party won a commanding parliamentary majority after years in which Fidesz had appeared almost structurally unbeatable. The election abruptly transferred institutional power from a party that had dominated Hungarian public life for four consecutive electoral cycles.
That was more than a routine change in the largest parliamentary bloc. Magyar emerged with sufficient strength to pursue far-reaching institutional reforms, giving his government both extraordinary opportunity and unusual responsibility. Hungary moved almost overnight from the dominance of one political force to the potential dominance of another.
The Carmelite complex offered an almost perfect setting for dramatising that break. Orbán moved his office there in 2019 after an extensive renovation of the former monastery in Budapest’s Castle District. Its elevated position above the city gradually became, for his opponents, a metaphor for the distance between political power and everyday Hungarian life.
The building itself has survived far more than contemporary political rivalry. It has been a monastery and a theatre, endured wars, imperial rule and repeated reconstruction, and stands within one of Budapest’s most historically sensitive areas. Controversy over changes to the complex long predated Orbán’s eventual departure from office.
Magyar’s decision not to govern from the Carmelite was therefore meant to carry meaning. He chose a more conventional administrative building closer to Parliament on the Pest side of the river, contrasting functional government with the symbolic altitude of his predecessor’s headquarters high above the Danube.
Orbán’s former allies dismiss the move as political theatre. They note, correctly, that the former prime minister accepted his election defeat, surrendered his offices and made no attempt to remain in power outside constitutional procedures. Comparisons with dictators chased from presidential palaces would therefore distort rather than clarify Hungary’s transition.
Yet Magyar has not limited his break with the past to guided tours. The legacy of the Orbán governments has become one of the central themes of his administration’s opening months, accompanied by promises to review state contracts, public assets and institutional arrangements built during Fidesz’s long period in power.
Among the most consequential initiatives is the creation of a mechanism to identify, protect and potentially recover state assets. The government wants to investigate transactions involving public property, establish whether the state suffered losses and forward evidence of possible criminal conduct to the relevant investigative authorities.
For a country that spent years in conflict with the European Union over corruption risks, conflicts of interest and public procurement, such an agenda was hardly surprising. The difficulty for Magyar is proving that accountability will be based on evidence and judicial procedure rather than on a political assumption that everything associated with the previous government is suspect.
That distinction matters especially because of TISZA’s parliamentary strength. Magyar now possesses many of the tools required to remake institutions he spent years criticising. The very size of his mandate, however, creates the temptation to concentrate power — one of the central accusations his movement levelled against Orbán.
Early reforms have already demonstrated that tension. Proposals to recover public assets raised concerns over the breadth of executive authority, prompting demands for stronger judicial safeguards. The episode illustrated a basic truth of democratic transition: promising to cleanse a state is considerably easier than building legal machinery capable of surviving the government that created it.
The new administration has also begun reviewing major state contracts concluded during the Fidesz era, including agreements involving companies with extensive government business. Supporters describe the process as an overdue examination of networks connecting politics and commerce. Opponents see the beginnings of selective economic retaliation.
That is why two paper shredders left inside the Carmelite became such irresistible political props. Magyar suggested they might symbolise efforts by the outgoing administration to destroy compromising documents. Yet the presence of shredders in a government office proves nothing by itself. Political imagery moves far faster than evidentiary standards.
This is one of the most important boundaries of the post-Orbán period. The election gave TISZA a mandate to reform the system, not to presume guilt by association. If political “cleansing” evolves into collective punishment, Magyar risks reproducing the governing logic he claims to have defeated rather than replacing it.
Reducing Orbán’s legacy to the price of his office furniture would miss the source of Hungary’s long confrontation with European institutions. The disputes concerned public procurement, judicial independence, media pluralism, conflicts of interest, the distribution of EU money and the concentration of political influence across formally separate institutions.
Billions of euros in European funds became entangled in those rule-of-law disputes during Orbán’s final years in office. Magyar’s government has made the restoration of Hungary’s relationship with Brussels one of its priorities, creating a test that will be far easier to measure than any symbolic tour of an abandoned office.
A willingness to work more closely with European anti-fraud and prosecutorial mechanisms is part of the same strategy. For the new government, cooperation with outside oversight institutions offers a way to show that changing Hungary means more than replacing personnel. It means changing how public money and public officials are scrutinised.
Yet Hungary did not wake up politically “after Orbán” the morning following the election. Millions of voters still backed Fidesz, and the conservative worldview developed during its years in power remains deeply rooted. Ideas about national sovereignty, migration, family policy and distrust of Brussels did not disappear when Orbán left his desk.
That makes the opened Carmelite particularly revealing. For Orbán’s opponents, the building represented secluded, self-protecting power. For his supporters, it was simply a government office. Now that the doors are open, both narratives confront an inconvenient reality: architecture alone can neither prove nor disprove the nature of the political order that surrounded it.
In that sense, the small bedroom beside the former prime minister’s office may say more than any golden bathtub that visitors failed to find. Its austerity disrupts the easiest version of the story — that Orbánism can be explained as one man’s appetite for luxury, comfort or visible personal extravagance.
The system was more sophisticated than that. Its durability came from the gradual intertwining of party, state, business and media power, reinforced by a conservative account of sovereignty that remained persuasive to millions of voters. That is why it endured for sixteen years — and why opening one set of doors cannot dismantle it.
For Peter Magyar, this is both an opportunity and a trap. He rose as someone who understood the former system from within and converted that knowledge into political capital. Now insurgency has to become administration: budgets, hospitals, schools, courts, investment, energy policy and the management of Hungary’s relationship with Europe.
With every passing month, blaming the previous government will become less effective. Recovered funds can be counted. Investigations can be judged by their evidence. Courts can be assessed for independence. Public institutions can be tested for competence. Livestreamed walks through abandoned offices will eventually lose their ability to substitute for measurable results.
The most telling object in the Carmelite may therefore be neither the shredder nor the Bible left behind, nor even the balcony commanding one of Budapest’s finest views. It is the empty office itself — a reminder that even power that appears permanent eventually leaves the room, forcing its successors to deal with something far harder than furniture.
Hungary after Orbán is only beginning that test. Opening the Carmelite allowed citizens into a place that had accumulated years of political mystery. The real judgment on the new government will take place elsewhere: in whether Hungary can replace personalised power with institutions strong enough not to require another indispensable ruler.
