István Balsai

István Balsai, who served as Minister of Justice from 1990 to 1993 and later worked as a Fidesz member of parliament, was elected to the Constitutional Court in 2011 by the Fidesz-KDNP two-thirds majority — the same year the governing coalition unilaterally scrapped the earlier practice of seeking cross-party consensus in judicial nominations. A 2015 joint investigation by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the Eötvös Károly Institute and TASZ, which analyzed 23 significant Constitutional Court rulings from 2011-2014, found that "Balsai István and Juhász Imre decided exclusively, or wrote dissenting opinions, in ways that served the government's interest" — meaning that in the cases examined they ruled or dissented in line with the government's position 100 percent of the time. According to the report, this pattern intensified after 2013 once the single-party-appointed majority took hold, ruling in the government's favor in 10 of 13 examined cases. Balsai's career path — moving directly from a governing-party political career into a seat on the Constitutional Court — is a documented example of Fidesz-KDNP placing its own former officials at the top of the judiciary. The findings come from a professional analysis by civil-rights organizations; no court has found him guilty of any crime.