Do we like them?

Do we like Katalin Novák?

Our score: 4 out of 10. one real stand for LGBTQ+ families and a resignation.

Katalin Novák was Hungary's president from 2022, the first woman in the job, serving under Viktor Orbán's long-ruling Fidesz government. For most of that time she was the smiling face of the regime's family-values pitch. Then one signature in April 2023 came back to wreck her. We couldn't open a rich biography page, so the early-life story is thin here.

The scandal: in April 2023 she pardoned a man convicted of pressuring children to withdraw abuse claims against the director of a state children's home. The director was sentenced to eight years for abusing at least 10 children. When it became public in February 2024, about a thousand people reportedly protested, and she went on TV to say “I made a mistake.” She resigned on 10 February, and her justice minister, who countersigned the pardon, quit politics too.

Who pushed her is murkier. Direkt36 and Telex reported that sources said Reformed Church leader Zoltán Balog, her long-time mentor, lobbied for the pardon. He later acknowledged his role and stepped down as church leader, and her office didn't respond to the reporters. Alleged lobbying doesn't shift the fact that she signed it.

The newest chapter is nastier. Files published in May 2026 show her legal team gave her both a pardon and a rejection draft, that both the ministry and her own lawyers recommended rejection, and that she struck out the rejection and signed the pardon the day before the pope's visit. She gave no reasons, which the law doesn't require. Nobody has been found to have broken any law over it that we could find.

On harm, the record we could open is mixed. In April 2023 she vetoed a bill that would have let people anonymously report same-sex couples raising children, warning it could increase mistrust in the community, and critics had called the bill homophobic. That counts for her. We couldn't open pages with her own words on trans people, so we don't pass or fail her there. She now runs a nonprofit on falling birth rates, a cause she has pushed publicly.

Her handling since has been poor. In June 2025 she said she'd answered the pardon question 99 times and, asked about Fidesz pressure, said only that she made a bad decision and accepted the consequences. Later reports say she gave up her state honorarium after joining her family's clinic company, which is a business move, not an explanation.