The Hungarian parliament has voted to adopt a monumental constitutional amendment that introduces a strict eight-year cap on the prime minister's tenure, the BBC reported.
The legislative overhaul directly fulfills a foundational campaign pledge made by the newly elected Prime Minister, Peter Magyar, to ensure that his predecessor, Viktor Orban, is permanently blocked from reclaiming the nation's highest office.
Orban concluded an uninterrupted 16-year run as Prime Minister when Magyar’s center-right Tisza party secured a landslide victory in April's election. That ballot handed Tisza a decisive two-thirds supermajority, granting the incoming administration the unilateral legislative power required to overhaul the constitution.
Under the parameters of the fresh amendment, any individual who has held the office of prime minister for a cumulative total of eight years at any point since 1990 is barred from re-election, regardless of whether those terms were consecutive.
Orban's significantly reduced Fidesz party voted uniformly against the measure. The former leader, who preserved his position at the helm of Fidesz over the weekend, expressed deep disapproval of the change.
"The Orban law has just been voted through. That was the most pressing issue. If I'm needed, I'll be here," Orban posted on Facebook.
He additionally chided the fledgling administration, arguing that because Tisza has only held office for a single month, it was presumptuous to be engineering laws targeting structural realities eight years into the future.
Supported by Tisza's legislative block, the amendment easily cleared the chamber floor in a 135 to 50 vote, leaving it dependent only on a formal signature from President Tamas Sulyok to be codified into law.
Detractors of the shift strongly condemned the move, with Orbán's former political director, Balazs Orban, accusing Magyar of "using political power to exclude a political opponent from democratic competition". While a future governing coalition with an identical supermajority could theoretically strike down the text, the baseline clause imposes an identical expiration date on the current leader, restricting Magyar's own prime ministerial eligibility to 2034.
Magyar took office last month on a platform focused on dismantling the controversial state network implemented during Fidesz's 16-year governance.