Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar was spat on by an older man during a Facebook livestream broadcast on Wednesday morning inside Budapest’s Nyugati railway station.
Magyar was walking through the concourse with Transport and Investment Minister Dávid Vitézy before they boarded a train to Rákospalota–Újpest to present the government’s Baross Gábor Railway Development Plan. An older man stepped towards the pair, muttered something apparently including the words ‘dared to come here’, and spat in Magyar’s direction. Vitézy’s body obscured the precise moment in the footage, but the sound and the politicians’ reactions were captured by the live broadcast.
‘Wishing you good health,’ Magyar replied without stopping. Seconds later, he told viewers that they were seeing ‘the remaining faces of Fidesz’ and joked that the encounter might explain why former transport minister János Lázár had repeatedly declined his invitations to travel by train.
Magyar returned to the incident during a press conference later, asking his supporters not to become discouraged and saying that people unable to control their accumulated anger needed ‘understanding and consolation’. He blamed what he described as ‘years of publicly financed political propaganda’ by former prime minister Viktor Orbán and his governments for leaving hatred embedded in parts of Hungarian society.
The government later issued a statement saying that Magyar would not file a complaint over the incident. Magyar himself struck a much sharper tone on Facebook than he did during the press conference, describing the man as a ‘Fidesz llama’, but said he bore no anger and asked him to express his hostility ‘face to face’ next time.
A complaint nevertheless reached the Budapest police within hours. It was submitted by István Tényi, who alleged disorderly conduct and argued that the act violated human dignity. Tényi, a former Fidesz member widely nicknamed Hungary’s ‘complainant king’, has spent more than a decade filing reports prompted by media stories. By early 2017, he said he had lodged roughly 180 criminal complaints and more than 100 public-interest reports; Fidesz had expelled him the previous year after he sought an internal ethics investigation concerning Viktor Orbán.
The episode also exposed a more serious vulnerability, as security analyst Péter Tarjányi pointed out. In a Facebook post, Tarjányi called the incident a clear protection failure, noting that the man had approached Magyar from behind and displayed recognizable hostile intent. Following politically motivated assassination attempts against national leaders in recent years, he argued, security teams cannot treat such approaches as harmless.
Magyar initially refused police protection after winning the election, preserving the close public contact central to his political style. Once installed as prime minister, however, he assigned his official protection to the Rapid Response Police rather than the Counter Terrorism Centre (TEK), the tightly controlled counterterrorism service that had guarded Viktor Orbán, his home, and his movements since 2010.
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