Bihari is not the most senior judge, and nor is he the most popular candidate, but he is now certain to to succeed András Holló as the fourth president of the Constitutional Court.

The president has been a member of three parties - the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the Hungarian Social Democratic Party. He was even sat on the Socialist benches in Parliament between 1994 and 1998. But despite this, Bihari remains a figure of consensus, accepted as an authentic figure by every political camp. That he was not elected president of the republic was not the fault of the right-wing, nor of the Free Democrats. The 62-year-old judge, who has taught generations of law students in Pécs, would almost certainly be settling in in the Sándor Palace by now if the Socialists had followed the popular left wing of their party in proposing him as an alternative to Katalin Szili. His six years on the Constitutional Court have been characterised by a willingness to find compromises between two extremes. He is also a genuine self-made man. Gyula Horn is the only other senior figure in the Third Republic to have had a career that was not an effortless rise through the ranks. His parents were tram ticket inspectors, and he originally trained as an upholsterer in a small factory in Budapest's Józsefváros, a district which still has a reputation for being rough. He gained his school-leaving certificate at the age of 23, after years of night school.

And what of the previous Court? The body that András Holló headed is regarded with mixed feelings, both by the experts and by the wider public. The third Court had to work under a continuous impasse. The parliamentary parties' inability to agree on Court nominations meant that the number of judges fell from 11, the numbers specified by the Constitution, to only eight earlier this year, as as judges retired or resigned from the body. And opinion polls have shown a continuous decline in public confidence in the Court, even though it worked to an ever faster tempo.