How Child-Abuse Scandals are Changing Hungarian Politics
Child-abuse scandals are shaking Viktor Orbán’s hold on power, yet he appears strangely unwilling to address them. Elvira Viktória Tamus explores how recent events connect with a wider pattern.
Travellers landing at Budapest’s Liszt Ferenc International Airport are greeted first by a huge, multicoloured (and multilingual) government message: “Family-friendly Hungary.” Themes related to children and families have been a cornerstone of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political narrative since he came to power in 2010. Social policy has been used as a tool to consolidate support for the ruling Fidesz party among women and rural voters.
The generous family subsidy system –including personal income tax exemption for mothers raising three or more children– has played a major role in the regime’s political identity and success. Nevertheless, the Hungarian government’s Achilles heel remains its child protection system. This problem, moreover, though newly prominent, has deep roots in Fidesz’s mis-governance since 2010.
Some background
One early major child abuse scandal emerged in 2019. An international investigation led by the United States and South Korea identified several users of a child pornography network. One of those identified was Gábor Kaleta, who had served as Hungary’s ambassador to Peru since 2017. After Hungarian authorities were informed of Kaleta’s involvement, he was quietly brought home in March 2019.
Subsequently, Kaleta was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison term and fined 540,000 HUF (approximately 1400 Euros) for possessing 19,000 indecent photographs and videos of children. The lenient punishment imposed on a user and distributor of child pornography holding a high-ranking diplomatic position sparked outrage among opposition politicians and the broader public.
This case marked Fidesz’s first attempt to transform a serious scandal involving a pro-government political figure into a homophobic and transphobic campaign. In 2020, the party’s parliamentary representatives introduced a legislative amendment, known as Lex Kaleta, aimed at tightening penalties for paedophiles. Debate surrounding the proposal, however, increasingly focused on the alleged ‘threat’ to children posed by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. In June 2021, Parliament finally passed a law introducing harsher sanctions for sexual abuse against minors. During the year-long legislative process, however, the bill was significantly altered to include provisions banning the ‘promotion and portrayal’ of non-heterosexual activity.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen publicly criticised the law, stating in a tweet that “it discriminates peoples [sic] on the basis of their sexual orientation & goes against the EU’s fundamental values.” Importantly, the one thing the Hungarian government has failed to do is to raise the age of consent from 14 (and in some circumstances 12).
The pardon scandal
The rise of Katalin Novák, Hungary’s youngest (and first female) president, was also closely linked to Orbán’s ‘child protection’ agenda. Before assuming the presidency in May 2022, Novák served briefly as Minister for Family Affairs. Thereby, she became the face of government campaigns promoting higher fertility; encouraging women to have more children and expanding nursery and kindergarten infrastructure. Against this backdrop, it is both tragic and ironic that Novák’s downfall was triggered by a scandal involving vulnerable children.
In February 2024, Novak became embroiled in controversy over her April 2023 decision to grant a presidential pardon to Endre Kónya, the former deputy director of a children’s home in Bicske. Kónya was imprisoned for helping to cover up acts of harassment and molestation committed by the home’s director, János Vásárhelyi. In 2016, one of Vásárhelyi’s victims died by suicide. That same year, Vásárhelyi was awarded the Bronze Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit (the country’s fifth-highest state decoration). This was despite the fact that investigations into sexual abuse allegations at the Bicske children’s home were already under way.
The public learned of the pardon through a report published on 2 February 2024 by Balázs Kaufmann of 444.hu. Acting on a tip from an anonymous source, Kaufmann identified a hitherto overlooked entry in the judicial gazette which confirmed that Novák had granted a presidential pardon to Kónya on 27th April 2023. Novák’s issue of several pardons at that time was ostensibly in honour of Pope Francis’s apostolic visit to Hungary.
Public outrage over the pardon forced Novák to resign on 10th February 2024. Her resignation, however, did little to ease social tensions. Protesters soon turned their attention to another prominent figure, Zoltán Balog, a Reformed Church bishop and former Fidesz cabinet minister.
As head of the Ministry of Human Resources (2012–2018) he had overseen the government body then responsible for education, health, social and labour affairs. Balog admitted that he had supported the pardon because of Kónya’s well-known Reformed family background. Many observers believe that Balog exerted pressure on his former mentee, Katalin Novák – earlier a state secretary in his department – to grant clemency. Although Balog resigned as the Reformed Church’s national synodal president, he remained bishop of the Dunamelléki (Budapest) church district.
Alongside Novák, another prominent woman from Orbán’s circle also stepped down: Judit Varga (Minister of Justice, 2019-23), Fidesz’s lead candidate in the forthcoming European parliament election. Varga had also signed the pardon, as required by law, and withdrew from political life once her involvement became public. The government described the resignations of its two most prominent female politicians as a ‘great loss’ for Hungarian society and praised their ‘respectability’ in taking responsibility for their ‘mistake’. Since then, Orbán and pro-government figures have repeatedly referred to this presidential pardon as a ‘mistake’.
As the pardon scandal unfolded, it began to cast a long shadow over Orbán – who, true to pattern, allowed key figures to fall in order to distance himself from the affair and contain public uproar. Within the current regime, anyone can be removed if it serves to protect Orbán’s image. The system is centred on him alone, and a core function of the propaganda apparatus is to shield the leader from any potential controversy. Moreover, the occasional removal of scapegoats is used to demonstrate – at least rhetorically – that in Orbán’s political community, misconduct always carries serious consequences.
The scandal not only prompted resignations and widespread public outrage, but also sparked open dissent within Fidesz political circles. Péter Magyar, the former husband of Judit Varga, and himself once connected to Fidesz, publicly criticised the government and launched his own political movement in direct response to the case. His party, Tisza, has since emerged as the country’s leading opposition force, with Magyar widely regarded as Orbán’s principal challenger. The rise of Magyar and Tisza has reshaped Hungarian politics. Former opposition parties have largely been marginalised, left with little option but to support Tisza in pursuit of regime change.
One important area in which the ‘old opposition’ can helpfully distinguish itself from Tisza, however, is in response to Orbán’s recurring attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. In the spring of 2025, the government effectively banned Budapest Pride, Hungary’s largest annual LGBTQ+ event. In response, Gergely Karácsony, the mayor of Budapest and leader of Párbeszéd, a small Green opposition party, assumed responsibility for organising the event, now reframed as an official civic occasion (and therefore not one requiring police authorisation).
Péter Magyar publicly supported the initiative but did not attend. It seemed that Magyar sought thereby to keep his movement appealing to conservatives disillusioned with Fidesz, hoping they might increasingly view Tisza as a viable political alternative. Whether or not Hungarians seeking change fully unite behind Magyar, the stark discrepancy between Orbán’s smear campaigns against LGBTQ+ people and his apparent indifference to actual sexual predators abusing vulnerable children is increasingly troubling to the Hungarian public.
New revelations in 2025
In addition to sexual abuse, both physical violence and negligence remain pressing issues in Hungarian child protection. In early December 2025, videos surfaced showing Károly Kovács-Buna, acting director of a juvenile correctional facility on Szőlő Street in Budapest, physically assaulting the young people in his care. Kovács-Buna has acknowledged that he appears in the recordings and has resigned, adding that a defamatory campaign has been launched against him. The images convey a chilling message: the most vulnerable members of society, often already burdened by difficult backgrounds, can be harmed with impunity.
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In fact the Szőlő Street case has been a running sore for the government since May when other allegations of criminal misconduct emerged into the public sphere. Károly Kovács-Buna became acting director after the former director, Péter Pál Juhász, and his partner were arrested on charges of human trafficking, forced labour, and abuse of public trust. Juhász has since also come under suspicion for sexual abuse. As of 21 December 2025, nine staff members at the Szőlő Street institution are alleged to have violently abused residents. Additionally, a female employee – suspected of having reported to Juhász rather than to the authorities after a boy sought her help following an alleged rape by the director – received a Pro Caritate award in 2022 from Attila Fülöp, State Secretary for Care Policy.
The police investigation continues, the response of Mr. Juhász and his associates to the allegations is at present unknown.
Both Viktor Orbán and Gergely Gulyás, Minister of the Prime Minister’s Office, exacerbated the problem by publicly misrepresenting the situation: labelling the victims as ‘young criminals’, and inaccurately referring to a juvenile correctional facility as a juvenile prison. Lili Krámer, a criminologist at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, stated that : “Gulyás is either not telling the truth, deliberately distorting the facts, or has forgotten what he was supposed to learn for his law degree [...] By now, he would fail criminology.”
Indeed, juvenile correctional facilities are not under the administration of the penal system, but are part of the child protection system. Most importantly, Orbán and Gulyás implicitly suggested that such treatment is deserved. Once again, the government relativises violence and shifts blame onto victims. This raises broader questions: how does such victim-blaming shape public perception? To what extent does it mirror Orbán’s stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
If institutions meant to support rehabilitation instead subject young residents to abuse, humiliation, or neglect, their chances of reintegrating into society are severely diminished. Physical, sexual, and psychological mistreatment undermines trust in adults and authority, impedes development, and reinforces feelings of stigma and exclusion. Few statements illustrate the regime’s cynicism toward child protection more clearly than the response Sándor Pintér, Minister of the Interior, gave in November 2025 to a journalist’s question about the three hundred babies currently left abandoned in Hungarian hospitals: “We didn’t give birth to them, and we weren’t the ones who left them there.”
Lawyer and children’s rights activist Szilvia Gyurkó has long highlighted the myriad problems in Hungary’s child welfare and education systems under Fidesz: chronic underfunding; inadequate hygiene standards; low staff wages, and systemic neglect. In her article for wmn.hu on 10 December 2025, Gyurkó reflected on the government’s attitudes and rhetoric toward abandoned and abused children. She wrote,
“We can say about newborns that ‘we didn’t give birth to them,’ about juvenile offenders that ‘they don’t deserve anything better,’ and about children living in institutions that ‘this is still better than what they had at home’. But none of these statements will make us better people, nor will they make our society any better.”
Further, as clinical psychologist Noémi Orvos-Tóth said in reaction to the Szőlő Street case: “Abuse is not suitable for ‘training’ an individual out of behaviours that they committed precisely because they were abused.” Indeed, there are arguably different layers of abuse at work here. First, there is the abuse and neglect which drives children into a reformatory; next comes the abuse which they experience there, finally there is the abuse they experience as pawns in Fidesz’s communication strategy. Instead of implementing substantive improvements to social services, Orbán’s administration has repeatedly depicted vulnerable groups – children, refugees, LGBTQ+ people – as enemies.
Victims must come first
With the next election approaching, these cases are provoking more public anger than the long-standing allegations of corruption surrounding Orbán’s regime, or even his notably cordial relationship with Vladimir Putin. How Hungarian society responds to these scandals will reveal the extent to which it is willing to stand up for the most vulnerable. The most obvious way they can do so is by turning Fidesz out of office at the ballot box.
Despite the political focus of this piece, however, it is important to stress that, amid political argument, the most crucial actors are often overlooked: the victims. That is, those who have been hurt and exploited and whose well-being is as vital to Hungary’s future as that of their more fortunate peers.
Regardless of who takes power next April, addressing the institutional failures in child protection (and providing comprehensive support to survivors) must come first. If elected, Tisza’s own credibility in government will depend in no small part on how it addresses these questions.
Elvira Viktória Tamus is a PhD student in early modern history at the University of Cambridge.
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An excellent description of this shameful and painful situation in Hungary. The upcoming parliamentary elections, less than three months away, will certainly reflect on this issue. The majority of the voters have tolerated the corruption, the nepotism, and blatant mismanagement of the economy, but not the child abuse.
There is a parallel with the developments in the US. The myriad criminal acts and crazy economic mismanagement exemplified by the tariffs have been tolerated, but the shameful Epstein files are not.
The political and economic crimes are tolerated, but child abuse is not.
Thank you for this. The events detailed by your author were difficult for me to follow. The overview presented will, I think, be of good use ikn acquainting readers with these aspects of Hungarian dysfunction.