The questions, submitted in April by Momentum, were as follows:

• Do you agree that an individual that was earlier elected at least twice as prime minister by the National Assembly should not be able to be nominated for prime minister again?

• Do you agree that the XLIII. law of 2010 regarding central administrative bodies and the legal status of government members and state secretaries should be amended so that no individual can be nominated or elected prime minister who was earlier elected at least twice as prime minister by the National Assembly?

The National Election Commission rejected both questions, arguing that a referendum cannot aim, explicitly or covertly, to make changes to the constitution. While the constitution does not specifically mention limits to the re-election of prime ministers, the NVB ruled that imposing such limits would affect the sovereignty of the National Assembly in its decision making, and would therefore require an amendment to Hungary’s Fundamental Law.

The NVB added that such a limit would also “disrupt the rules of the people’s representative body that is based on the Fundamental Law.”

The Curia, Hungary’s highest court, upheld the NVB decision, arguing that limiting both the terms of the head of state and head of government would be “foreign to parliamentary systems.”

According to the Curia’s opinion, such a measure would “rearrange the exercise of executive power, rearrange the relationship between the legislature, the head of the state and the government – that is, the functional principle of the parliamentary form of government. It is certain, however, that a possible restriction of this type, as it affects the operational form of the government, belongs among the constitutional rules in the Fundamental Law.”

The Curia’s decision is final and closes any future possibility of creating legislative amendments to limit the terms of a prime minister.

Source: The Budapest Beacon

Republished with permission

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