Something that only a year ago seemed unthinkable is happening in Budapest: Viktor Orban is no longer in power. After 16 years of uninterrupted rule, his party lost the parliamentary elections in April, and now it is he who takes to the street - this time as an opposition organizing protests.

The winner is Peter Magyar and his party "Tisza," which won a two-thirds majority in parliament. With that power, the new government submitted a constitutional amendment that would remove President Tamas Sulyok from office - the man Orban himself appointed. The amendment, which will likely pass next week, also foresees an age limit of 70 for Constitutional Court judges, and a cap on parliamentary terms of no more than 12 years.

Sulyok refuses to leave voluntarily. "The question is whether this force will erase the internationally recognized principles of the rule of law," he said. Magyar hit back sharply: "Viktor Orban betrayed the Hungarian people, and Tamas Sulyok, whom he appointed, betrayed the Hungarian Republic."

The irony is almost perfect. For years Orban was the main example of "illiberal democracy" in Europe - the man who reshaped institutions, courts and media to his own measure, and now the same mechanisms are being used by the new government against him. The one who tailored the tools for concentrating power now watches someone else hold them. In the Balkans this is painfully familiar - every government that builds a system to its own measure forgets that the system remains even when it leaves.

The question now being asked by both the Venice Commission and the European Commission is whether Hungary is leaving the Orban era toward something more democratic, or just changing who holds the same levers. Because if the new government with a two-thirds majority does exactly what it accused the old one of, then only the driver has changed, not the direction. And that, for the Hungarian citizen, may be no change at all.