BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán declared on Wednesday that he and his far-right Fidesz party will lead a peaceful “resistance” movement against what he called the tyrannical exercise of power by the country’s new center-right government.

Orbán was defeated in a blowout election in April by Prime Minister Péter Magyar and his pro-European Tisza party, ending his 16 years in office. Since then, Orbán’s nationalist Fidesz party has struggled to recover.

At a news conference outside party headquarters in Budapest, Orbán said a constitutional amendment passed last week by Tisza’s majority in Parliament — which removed Hungary’s Orbán-era president and set a 12-year term limit for members of Parliament — had “dismantled the rule of law and eliminated the system of checks and balances.”

The term limit, which applies retroactively, returns Hungary to a status similar to the final years of its Communist dictatorship in the late 1980s, Orbán asserted, “when there was no democracy in Hungary, there was no rule of law.”

He said the term limit would exclude around half of his party coalition’s sitting members from running in the next national elections set for 2030.

“This new political system is not a democracy, it is tyranny,” Orbán said.

Since taking office in May, Magyar’s administration has gone to work dismantling what he calls Orbán’s “mafia” by removing numerous political appointees as well as heads of institutions viewed as having facilitated Orbán’s autocratic........

© The Times of Israel