Hungary's president signs a constitutional amendment ending his term

So the new government in Budapest didn't just win an election. It went and rewrote the constitution to shove a sitting president out the door because he had the wrong guy's fingerprints on his appointment. That's the story here, and it's worth sitting with for a second before anyone calls this "reform."

Orban built a governing coalition that outlasted plenty of critics who predicted his collapse for over a decade. Now that he's out, or at least sidelined, the people who replaced him are moving fast to scrub the state of everyone he touched. A president signing his own removal isn't a graceful transition. It's a man being handed a pen and told the alternative is worse. Calling that a "dispute" that got "resolved" is generous language for what looks a lot like a political purge dressed up in legal paperwork.

We've heard this tune before. Every time a populist government in Europe gets knocked out, the replacement promises to restore "normalcy" and "institutions," and what that tends to mean in practice is stacking the courts, the civil service, and now apparently the presidency with people loyal to the new crowd instead. Hungary's voters deserve a government that governs, not one whose first order of business is settling scores with the last one.

There's a lesson in this for anyone paying attention outside Hungary too. Political power that gets used to erase the last administration rather than simply outperform it is a tell. It says the new government isn't confident it can win the argument, so it's changing the rules instead.