Orbán’s fall raises hopes for Hungary’s marginalised religious minorities, including Muslims

BUDAPEST (MNTV) — The landslide defeat of Viktor Orbán this month has opened the possibility of sweeping religious freedom reforms in Hungary, where minority faith communities — including the country’s small but historically rooted Muslim population — spent the better part of 16 years stripped of official recognition and subjected to a politicised system designed to reward the government’s allies.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won 138 of 199 parliamentary seats, securing the two-thirds supermajority needed to amend the constitution. 

Magyar has pledged to use that mandate to overhaul Hungary’s governing charter through a popular referendum, with the restoration of democratic standards at the centre of his agenda.

For Hungary’s religious minorities, the stakes are deeply personal.

How Orbán reshaped religious life

Shortly after winning power in 2010, Orbán’s Fidesz party — pushed by its coalition partner, the Christian National Democratic Party — passed a 2011 law that slashed the number of officially recognised religious groups from over 300 to just 14. 

The survivors were a select group of Christian denominations designated as “historical churches,” including the Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and various Orthodox communities. 

These groups received privileged access to public funding and the right to collect a portion of citizens’ income tax.

Among those stripped of recognition were the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship, led by the prominent Orbán critic Gábor Iványi, Buddhist groups, and the Hungarian Islamic Community (HIC) — the oldest organised Muslim body in the country.

Hungary’s Muslim community is estimated at roughly 32,000 people, concentrated primarily in Budapest. 

Though small, the community has deep roots and had operated with full legal recognition before the 2011 law reclassified it.

System built on political loyalty

The consequences of deregistration were both financial and existential. 

Groups that lost recognition were cut off from public funding and forced to either re-register as secular civil associations or cease operating altogether. 

Those that sought to regain religious status had to demonstrate they would “cooperate with the state” by providing social services — and their applications required a two-thirds parliamentary vote, effectively making official recognition a political favour rather than a legal right.

Hungary’s own Constitutional Court struck down the law in late 2011 on procedural grounds. Parliament responded by passing near-identical legislation. 

When legal challenges persisted, Orbán amended the constitution itself in 2013, giving parliament explicit and final authority over which religious groups to recognise.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2014 that the system violated multiple articles of the European Convention, including protections for religious freedom and association, and ordered Hungary to establish a new registration process and compensate affected groups. 

The Orbán government dismissed the ruling, calling it the product of a conspiracy by unnamed “international interest groups,” and left the restrictive framework largely untouched.

Muslims under Orbán: Deregistered and demonised

The HIC was eventually restored to a lower tier of legal status after international pressure, but it never regained the full privileges enjoyed by the 14 favoured “incorporated churches.” The legal marginalisation was compounded by years of hostile rhetoric from the highest levels of government. Orbán’s officials routinely invoked the defence of “Christian Europe” and criticised Muslim immigration, with the prime minister himself declaring in 2015 that Hungary did not want a large Muslim population.

In 2016, Zoltán Bolek, then president of the HIC, wrote a private letter to Orbán requesting protection against what he described as a growing number of physical and verbal attacks on Muslims, driven by inflammatory rhetoric from politicians and state media. Orbán never responded. 

Bolek publicly observed at the time that state media constantly amplified stories about anything a Muslim had done or was alleged to have done anywhere in the world.

What comes next — and its limits

Magyar’s promised constitutional reform could fundamentally reshape the legal framework governing religious life. 

Experts have called for the registration process to be removed from parliament entirely and handed to an independent body, and for the privileged tier system to be replaced with equal treatment under the law.

However, there are reasons for caution, particularly for Hungary’s Muslim community. On immigration — the issue most closely intertwined with anti-Muslim sentiment — Magyar has signalled clear continuity with Orbán’s hardline stance. He has pledged to maintain 

Hungary’s southern border fence and reject EU burden-sharing mechanisms for refugees. 

Public sentiment on Muslim migration remains deeply hostile, and Magyar has shown no appetite for challenging it.

The question for Hungary’s Muslims is therefore whether legal equality in religious governance will be accompanied by any softening of the broader political climate that made them targets in the first place — or whether the new government will restore their formal rights while leaving the hostile atmosphere largely intact.

Magyar has said he will put a revised constitution to a popular vote. 

If it includes robust protections for religious pluralism, the outcome of that referendum will determine whether Orbán’s legacy of politicised religion is truly dismantled — or merely repackaged.