Hybrid regimes occupy a middle ground between democracies and autocracies. We argue that the same applies to their rule of law. Just as hybrid regimes maintain the façade of democracy, they sustain judiciaries that seemingly mirror those of a functioning Rechtsstaat. Due to constitutional and international demands for judicial independence, informal means are used to exercise control over judges, making a focus on legal characteristics insufficient to detect their actual functioning. Through an in-depth case study of Hungary’s judiciary after 2010, we show that ‘constitutional tinkering’ and informal clientelistic networks, used to control the executive and legislative branches, were also applied to the judiciary. Still, they remain underdeveloped because of the domestic and external restraints of judicial independence. Since reliable hard data is not available, we build our paper on interviews with Hungarian judges conducted in 2022. Based on these, we test the validity of existing theories and leverage thick descriptions to explain the means of control over judges.