The Suspendable Citizen: Citizenship and Political Membership in Hungary’s Fifteenth Amendment

Picture two people of Hungarian descent. The first lives in Romania; they have never resided within Hungary’s current territorial boundaries, yet they speak Hungarian, identify culturally as Hungarian, and apply for citizenship under the 2010 “simplified naturalization” regime. The provision allows them to secure citizenship on the basis of ethnic identification and states, “a non-Hungarian citizen whose ascendant was a Hungarian citizen or who can substantiate being of Hungarian origin may be naturalized on preferential terms, if they prove that they are sufficiently proficient in the Hungarian language.” [1] The Hungarian state welcomes her into the political community. 

The second lives in Budapest, is a Hungarian citizen by birth, and operates within the territorial state; yet, if they acquire citizenship in a non-EU state, Hungary’s April 2025 Fifteenth Amendment creates the possibility that their Hungarian citizenship may be suspended pursuant to a cardinal act: “The citizenship of a Hungarian citizen who is also a citizen of another state may be suspended for a definite period of time, as established by a cardinal Act.” [2]

Cardinal acts, created and mandated by the 2011 Fundamental Laws, are bound by supermajoritarian thresholds such that fundamental aspects of democratic processes and political community membership are safeguarded by the government that pre-committed on their behalf. [3] 

These provisions demonstrate that Hungary’s Fifteenth Amendment’s citizenship regime advances a conception of political membership in which the state’s authority to define and discipline its political community takes precedence over the individual’s entitlement to citizenship as a stable legal status. Therefore, it places the regime in tension with United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU) legal principles prohibiting arbitrary deprivation of nationality and requiring necessity and proportionality–that is, that restrictions pursue a legitimate aim and impair rights no more than needed to achieve it. 

Fifteenth Amendment Study

The Fifteenth Amendment to Hungary’s Fundamental Law, passed as a socially conservative omnibus package primarily concerning questions of family politics and political membership, is best understood in relation to the nationalist and populist framing of the 2011 Fundamental Law.

Hungary’s 1949 constitution, which formalized a Soviet-influenced communist state, was replaced in 2011 by the Fundamental Law, adopted under the Fidesz government’s two-thirds parliamentary majority and framed as an opportunity to reassert constitutional independence from that legal past. [4] 

It is worth noting that Fidesz, a national-conservative party formerly led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, was founded as a liberal activist movement opposing the Marxist-Leninist regime, but shifted in the early 2000s toward populist nationalism, a reorientation aimed at consolidating popular support, reflected in its 2011 constitutional project and further centralization by 2025.

In this respect, this act of constitutional pre-commitment to populist nationalism may be understood as a means of ideological consolidation. Just as the 1949 constitution formalized and codified a centralized socialist regime, the 2011 Fundamental Law reconstituted the Hungarian state in a manner aligned with Orbán’s political project, demonstrating historical continuity in the construction of Hungarian national identity. In light of Péter Maygyar, the current Prime Minister of Hungary, winning the recent election, it is worth examining the foundations this codification establishes for governance and the modes through which it is enforced. 

Recall that the 2011 Fundamental Law’s structure is marked by the extensive use of "cardinal acts”. Within this framework, the Fifteenth Amendment serves to codify a particular vision of Hungary's political community. By introducing the possibility of suspending citizenship in cases involving the acquisition of non-EU nationality, the amendment invokes implicit concerns about external allegiance and security, while tacitly avoiding direct conflict with EU legal constraints on intra-European mobility.

Simultaneously, the broader context of Hungarian naturalization policy, particularly the extension of citizenship to ethnically Hungarian populations abroad, renders salient an enduring tension between formal legal membership and substantive nation-state integration, as applicants frequently pursue citizenship primarily to access the benefits of EU membership without the intent to integrate into Hungary’s domestic political community.

Two Concepts of Liberty

Political theorist and philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” provides a useful barometer to interpret the constitutional logics of liberty, offering a potential framework for assessing whether a legal system conceives of freedom primarily in terms of protection against state interference or as an expression of collective self-definition. [5] As such, patterns of liberty framing within Hungary’s constitutional design may function as a diagnostic tool, reflecting how Orbán’s regime conceptualizes sovereignty and whether its provisions stimulate the preservation of individual protections or the consolidation of authority through the legal construction of the body politic. 

In importing this logic onto a constitutional frame, negative liberty, understood as freedom from interference, would manifest in a legal construct that delimits the reach of state power vis-à-vis prohibitive and rights-protective language, securing citizenship as a stable status against arbitrary deprivation. Positive liberty, by contrast, is understood as the capacity for collective self-definition, which would be reflected in structures that emphasized the authority of the political community to define the terms of membership and to regulate the conditions under which that membership is maintained. 

In this view, the directional framing of the relationship between the individual and the state, whether citizenship operates as a domain of insulation from state authority or as a construct subject to its ongoing definition and revision, becomes paramount.

Reading the Fifteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Provision Through Berlin

Reading through Berlin’s framework, the language of the prefatory remarks and Article I of the Fifteenth Amendment initially appears to adopt a rights-protective grammar. However, closer examination reveals a competing and ultimately dominant logic of conditionality. 

In the preface, which states that “the [...] citizenship of Hungarian citizens who are also citizens of another state [...] is suspended in accordance with the provisions of a cardinal act,” citizenship is framed as an object subject to suspension, defined through the state’s capacity to regulate allegiance and delimit the boundaries of membership. [6] The exclusion of citizens of states with rights of free movement situates the provision within a broader concern with external attachment and ethnocentric geopolitical alignment.  

This orientation is carried forward in the operative clause, which opens with the familiar formulation “no one shall be deprived of Hungarian citizenship established by birth or acquired in a lawful manner" and thus seems to position citizenship within a domain of non-interference. [7] This protection is immediately qualified by the subsequent provision that citizenship “may be suspended [...] as established by a cardinal Act,” introducing a second, and more expansive, conception of state authority. [8]

The first formulation tends toward the language of negative liberty, while the second operates through a more discretionary frame, in which the state retains the authority to define the conditions under which membership may be suspended.

In this respect, the provision restricts the relationship between conceptions of liberty, rendering the initial guarantee contingent upon the state’s ongoing capacity to define, and subsequently redefine, political membership. 

The prohibition on “collective suspension,” while appearing to impose a limitation, regulates the form of deprivation rather than its permissibility. [9]

International Legal Frameworks and Supranational Constraints

In a broader supranational context, this reformation of citizenship raises important questions about the extent to which such formulations comport with international legal standards governing nationality. While Hungary does not prohibit dual citizenship within the EU, and thus formally remains within the parameters of EU law governing free movement and supranational citizenship, the selective targeting of non-EU dual nationals suggests a more strategic engagement with the supranational domain. 

EU law, in this respect, operates primarily as a boundary condition; the amendment preserves those forms of dual citizenship that are insulated by supranational protections, while relocating discretionary authority to domains in which such constraints are diminished.

Most directly, Article XV of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality,” a principle further elaborated in the jurisprudence of the Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. [10; 11] While these frameworks do not prohibit the regulation of dual citizenship, they articulate a conception of nationality as a stable legal status that must be secured against forms of discretionary interference that lack sufficient justification or procedural constraint. 

Within the EU, the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly through Article VIII and its interpretation in cases such as Genovese v. Malta, in which the complainant, born out of wedlock to a non-Maltese mother, was denied citizenship, has increasingly recognized citizenship as implicating legal identity and private life, thereby subjecting its deprivation or suspension to standards of necessity and proportionality. [12; 13]

This line of reasoning is further developed by Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which the complainants were constitutionally barred from standing for political offices reserved for members of the country’s constituent peoples, and the Court held that such exclusions violated anti-discrimination principles. [14]

Both cases suggest that the legal construction of citizenship and national identity in the EU cannot be insulated from scrutiny where it produces discriminatory effects. Similarly, the European Convention on Nationality codifies the principle that loss of nationality must not be arbitrary and must be accompanied by clear legal safeguards. [15] 

With limited case studies currently available, the operation of the Fifteenth Amendment may, at this stage, be best understood through the types of cases it may anticipate. Emerging within the context of Orbán’s consolidation of Fidesz’s authority, the provision has drawn criticism from political commentators who argue that it is designed to discipline political opposition, NGOs, and civil society actors. In particular, critics suggest that the amendment creates what has been described as a legal “zone of indifference,” in which individuals may be stripped of political rights without formal denaturalization procedures. [16]

Most prominently, attention has been drawn to Péter Márki-Zay, a dual citizen of Canada and Hungary who led the opposition coalition against Fidesz in 2022, as a representative of the types of individuals who could fall within the ambit of these provisions.

An initial hypothetical case may be understood in relation to politically visible opposition figures who maintain dual citizenship outside the EU. Consider an individual similarly situated to Márki-Zay: a Hungarian citizen by birth who acquires Canadian or American citizenship through residence abroad, and subsequently engages in domestic political activity in opposition to the governing regime. 

Under the logic of the amendment, such an individual’s citizenship becomes legible as a site of competing allegiance. The relevant language, particularly the provision permitting suspension “as established by a cardinal Act,” allows for the rendering of this perceived duality into a condition in which the opposition is susceptible to reframing as misalignment with the national community. [17]

Conclusion

The Fifteenth Amendment thus demonstrates the insufficiency of existing supranational safeguards to constrain forms of ethnopopulist constitutionalism that render citizenship contingent upon discretionary assertions of sovereign identity. 

What is required, then, is a more robust supranational framework capable of disciplining the Amendment’s effects, as well as analogous regimes that subordinate stable legal status to majoritarian conceptions of political membership. Within a governing body like the EU, this may take the form of stronger infrastructure for necessity and proportionality review where national citizenship determinations implicate EU citizenship. 

At stake is not only the integrity of EU citizenship as a fundamental status, but the preservation of a supranational legal order in which political membership cannot be rendered contingent upon ethnopopulist assertions of sovereign power. 

Edited by Quinn Morris

Sources

[1] Act LV of 1993 on Hungarian Citizenship (2010 Amendment), § 4(3) (2010).

[2] The Fifteenth Amendment to the Fundamental Law of Hungary, Bill T/11152, Article 1 (2025).

[3] The Fundamental Law of Hungary, § Q.4 (2011).

[4] The Constitution of the Republic of Hungary (1949).

[5] Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, England), 1969, 118–72.

[6] Parliament of the Republic of Hungary, Fifteenth Amendment, 2.

[7] Parliament of the Republic of Hungary, Fifteenth Amendment, 2.

[8] Parliament of the Republic of Hungary, Fifteenth Amendment, 2.

[9] Parliament of the Republic of Hungary, Fifteenth Amendment, 2.

[10] Article XV of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, A/RES/3/217 A 4 (1948).

[11] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).

[12] Article VIII of the European Convention on Human Rights, 12.

[13] Genovese v. Malta, No. 53124/09 (European Court of Human Rights 2012).

[14] Sejdiċ and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, 27996/06 and 34836/06 (European Court of Human Rights 2009).

[15] European Convention on Nationality, ETS No. 166 (1997).

[16] Mészáros, Gábor. “Another Thread in the Spider Web.” Verfassungsblog on Matters Constitutional, 2025.

[17] Parliament of the Republic of Hungary, Fifteenth Amendment, 2.