Hungary's reckoning that must not become a purge

A regime that steals should answer for it. The hard part is answering without becoming what you replaced. On September 29, Hungary stepped further into that problem. Police detained two former ministers from Viktor Orbán's sixteen years in power. One is suspected of taking about €30 million in bribes, the other of routing €46 million in cultural money into what looks like a campaign fund. Péter Magyar, who ended Orbán's rule this spring, calls his cleanup Operation Purge, and this week it moved into a new phase.

The theft was real. In Orbán's home village of Felcsút, fewer than 1,800 people, there is a soccer stadium that seats almost 4,000. It was built with European public money, and it is rarely open. Transparency International has ranked Hungary the most corrupt country in Europe. Magyar says the graft cost the nation up to a tenth of everything it makes. A country that let theft on that scale slide would only teach its next officials that it pays.

The oldest rules for this moment sit in Deuteronomy, in a charge to Israel's judges as the people got ready to govern themselves. The command to pursue justice repeats the word: justice, and then justice again. English Bibles tend to fold the doubling into one smooth phrase. The Hebrew keeps both words, and the old rabbis refused to treat the repetition as an accident. They heard a rule inside it: pursue justice, and pursue it by just means. The line just before names what that rules out.

Deuteronomy 16:19You shall not wrest justice: you shall not respect persons; neither shall you take a bribe; for a bribe does blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous.

That list is an accurate portrait of the regime Magyar is taking apart. The same law that condemns those rulers now binds the ones replacing them. On the same day, parliament lifted Magyar's own immunity over a petty incident, and he accused prosecutors of lumping his case in with the corruption ones. Orsolya Ferencz, a former Fidesz official, warned the drive "could become an inquisition, a witch hunt." Ferenc Biró has fought corruption for years and now faces an inquiry he calls political: "Personally, I feel it is humiliating." Justice that arrives by injustice is only the old regime under a cleaner name.

When Nehemiah came home to a ruined Jerusalem, he spent his strength rebuilding the wall rather than settling scores (Nehemiah 2:17). Walls are limits. Jailing the guilty still leaves the next election free to capture the courts. Rebuilding the limits shuts that door, and limits built well outlast the hands that raise them.