Hide the Pain Harold and Rubik’s Cube creator among social media’s picks for Hungarian president

Original article by Lili Rutai in Budapest

Eszter Jámbor, a 46-year-old content creator who focuses on sex education, had a different kind of question for her Instagram followers last week: who did they think should be Hungary’s next president?

The suggestions ranged from reality TV stars to bodybuilders and the Victoria’s Secret model Barbara Palvin. But another anonymous online poll asking Hungarians the same question revealed the most popular candidate to be András Arató, a retired electrical engineer who found global online fame as a meme: Hide the Pain Harold. Katalin Karikó, the Nobel-winning biochemist, and Ernő Rubik, the inventor of the Rubik’s cube, were also popular choices.

“Obviously, politics are serious, but there’s also room for a bit of humour, for that sense of freedom that a part of Hungary is now feeling after the past 16 years,” said Jámbor.

Since ousting its rightwing populist leader Viktor Orbán in a milestone election earlier this year, the central European country has been living through a period of rapid political change.

The man who succeeded Orbán, Péter Magyar, has begun enacting some of the reforms he promised on the campaign trail: taking “propaganda broadcasts” on public media off air and removing Orbán’s allies from the heads of the prosecution, police and military.

Perhaps the biggest fight, however, was the one Magyar picked with the then president, Tamás Sulyok, who was forced to sign a constitutional amendment ending his own term in July. After Sulyok, who was appointed by Orbán’s Fidesz party, left his post, the new prime minister called for suggestions. “Let’s make a decision together,” he said in a Facebook video.

Lawmakers from the ruling Tisza party will elect the new president in parliament, but Magyar encouraged “public figures, NGOs and civilians” to put forward names. Less than 24 hours after opening the discussion, however, Magyar said he had nominated the chess grandmaster Judit Polgár for the role. The move prompted a popular backlash criticising his hastiness and Polgár, subject of the Netflix documentary Queen of Chess, turned him down.

Magyar apologised for the “miscommunication”, but polls in the aftermath showed his party’s popularity down by 3%. “The process is still imperfect,” says Imre Ónádi, a 55-year-old architect who created a Facebook page and group to support the candidacy of the conservative politician Péter Márki-Zay, who unsuccessfully ran against Orbán in the 2022 general election.

Ónádi welcomed Polgár’s refusal “not because she isn’t the right person, but because her nomination was announced without discussion”. He thought Magyar’s apology was a good sign. “It seems they take into account what the population says. That’s democracy, after all,” he added.

For now, emboldened by the grassroots success of the Tisza party in the April election but lacking any official channel for recommendations, that discussion is happening in social media posts, online polls and open letters. However, it is unclear whether these popular recommendations are reaching Tisza and how the administration intends to handle them.

While the government has set up an online consultation space to discuss an update on traffic regulations, there is no official channel for presidential recommendations, despite Magyar’s encouraging words.

“I have a political fever,” said Jámbor, undeterred. “I’ve been voting since I was 18. But I finally feel like I have a say in what happens in the country.”

Any Hungarian over the age of 35 with voting rights can become president, but Magyar has said his candidate must be independent of political parties. He has met two popular contenders: the well-known historian Ignác Romsics and Botond Fülöp, a lawyer who uncovered the child abuse pardon scandal that ended the presidency of Katalin Novák in 2024.

It is expected that Tisza’s 141 parliamentarians will propose and swear in a candidate before 19 August. Technically, Fidesz, which has 44 members of parliament, could nominate its own candidate, but the party has said it will not take part in the election as it believes Sulyok’s dismissal was unlawful. No other party has enough MPs to nominate someone for the position.

Amnesty International Hungary believed that the removal of Sulyok was justified, said Áron Demeter, the head of communications and campaigns in the organisation’s Budapest office. “But we could debate Tisza’s method,” he added, arguing that the government could have pursued impeachment to remove the president instead of pushing through an amendment to the constitution.

With its so-called supermajority in parliament, Tisza “shouldn’t do the same things Fidesz did, with the same tools, just because their goal is nobler”, Demeter said.