Hungary's president, a loyal but largely impotent ally of the country's authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has resigned amid public outcry over her pardon of a man implicated in a sex abuse scandal at a children's home.
Hungarian President Katalin Novak, an outspoken advocate of traditional values and former family affairs minister, announced her resignation on television on Sunday, the latest in a series of senior figures in Orban's ruling conservative Fidesz party to be hit by sex scandals.
Hungarian President Katalin Novak resigned from his largely ceremonial position.credit: AP
She resigned as president, a mostly ceremonial position she has held since 2022, in response to widespread anger, including within the Fidesz party, after recent revelations that a man she pardoned last year was convicted of covering up sexual assaults at a state-run children's home. .
The man was among more than 20 people whom Novak pardoned last April ahead of Pope Francis' visit to Hungary.
“I issued a pardon that caused confusion and confusion among many people,” Novak said on Saturday, stressing that she believed that “the convict did not take advantage of the vulnerability of children.” She said that was a “mistake.”
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Her departure is unlikely to undermine Orbán's tight grip on power, but it does deal a blow to Fidesz's image – carefully nurtured by state and private media controlled by the ruling party – as a staunch defender of Christian values and an enemy of pedophilia, with which it is often associated. The government supports the efforts made by the European Union to protect LGBTQ rights.
Pledges to defend children from predators have become an increasingly important part of the domestic political messaging of Orban, who has won four general elections in a row and who regularly denounces his critics at home and abroad as “woke globalists” bent on undermining the traditional family.
A number of Fidesz politicians, including a powerful mayor who was caught on video engaging in an orgy with prostitutes on a yacht, have been implicated in sex scandals in recent years. The most prominent of these was Józef Szájr, a Fidesz member of the European Parliament who helped rewrite Hungary's constitution to include a ban on same-sex marriage. He resigned in 2020 after Belgian police officers arrested him for violating coronavirus restrictions by attending a male orgy in Brussels and then trying to escape through a drain pipe.
