Credit: Tisza party via Reuters
He was the standout act on election night in Hungary when his impromptu dance routines delighted crowds celebrating the end of Viktor Orbán’s 16-year-rule.
And Zsolt Hegedus repeated the trick at the inauguration party for Péter Magyar, who was sworn in as prime minister on Saturday, after his party Tisza’s landslide win.
Mr Hegedus, the new health minister inpost-Orbán Hungary, and a former NHS surgeon,re-enacted the dance routinethat had already turned him into an international internet hit.
To cheers from the huge crowd, he pulled out moves that included stalking across the stage playing air guitar and making waves with his hands while kicking his legs into the air.
Mr Hegedus, 56, who specialises in hip operations, lived in the UK for a decade between 2005 and 2015, working at hospitals in Manchester and Bristol.
He has showered praise on the British system, comparing it to aFormula 1car whose keys he was given and told to drive.
“In England, I feel like a Formula 1 driver who is told: ‘Mr Hegedus, here is the perfectly prepared and maintained car, we will give you all the tools you need, you just have to perform at your best, you don’t have to worry about anything else,’” he told a Hungarian newspaper last year.
Pursuing the metaphor, he said that doctors in the Hungarian system are handed a car where “the steering wheel is not yet fixed, you should also check the tyre pressure yourself and if you notice a problem, you should arrange for maintenance”.
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After returning to his homelanda decade ago, Mr Hegedus rose to prominence by spearheading a campaign against corrupt cash payments to doctors.
He has said that he wants to take what he learned during his time in England and apply it to reforming the Hungarian health system to make it more patient-oriented.
A scion of a prominent political family, Mr Hegedus’ father was a pastor who participated in the 1956 uprising against Soviet occupation, while his brother was a lawmaker for a far-right nationalist party.
‘Ordinary people can defeat the most vicious tyranny’
Mr Magyar took his oath of office on Saturdaybefore giving a speech to tens of thousands of supporters in a square outside the parliament building.
“Today, every freedom-loving person in the world would like to be Hungarian a little,” he told the crowd. “You have taught the country and the world that it is the most ordinary, flesh-and-blood people who can defeat the most vicious tyranny.”
Mr Magyar, a 45-year-old lawyer who founded Tisza in 2024, won 141 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament, pushing Mr Orbán’s populist Fidesz coalition down to just 52 seats in the chamber.
The victory has raised hopes in Brussels of a new era in relations with Budapest after Mr Orbán repeatedly blocked key EU agreements, most recently a huge financial support package for Ukraine.
In a sign of the reset in relations, theEU flag was raisedalongside the Hungarian one outside the Hungarian parliament on Saturday for the first time since Mr Orbán ordered it to be removed in 2014.
Mr Magyar has promised to use his huge majority to tackle corruption and restore independence to public broadcasting, which was widely seen as a propaganda instrument for his predecessor’s Fidesz party.
