Abstract While the issue of the Szekler autonomy has attracted considerable tabloid interest in the past two decades, it is rarely addressed in more systematic, scholarly accounts available for a wider international audience. The political project of achieving some form of autonomy has been on the agenda of several political actors speaking in the name of Romania’s sizeable Hungarian minority after 1989 and constitutes the object of heated debate between those actors and authorities of the Romanian state. In 2020 this debate recorded a peak which will seemingly require a new approach on behalf of protagonists, if the project is meant to be kept alive. This paper aims to fill some of the above-mentioned scholarly gap by providing an account of the parliamentary reception of the draft autonomy conceptions submitted by ethnic Hungarian politicians to Romania’s parliament in the three decades that passed since the regime change. Based on a content analysis of documents produced during the legislative process, we identify the most important arguments, as well as a number of procedural tricks deployed by Romanian politicians and political parties against the autonomy initiatives. We also emphasize the differences between the reception and trajectories of the bills, which is clearly related to the authorship and political backing of the various autonomy drafts. This comparative analysis also allows the formulation of a number of conclusions concerning the prospects of the Hungarian autonomy movement.