Inside Hungary’s high-stakes election, where the Hungarian prime minister is deploying fear, disinformation, and Kremlin-style tactics to cling to power. From Respekt.
Transitions note: An article about Hungarian intelligence agencies’ alleged operation to cripple the IT infrastructure of the Tisza opposition party amassed over 1 million views within roughly 30 hours of its publication by the independent news outlet Direkt36, according to a LinkedIn post by Direkt36 co-founder Andras Petho.
Petho also co-wrote the long investigative story, which appeared on 24 March, as campaigning ahead of critical elections on 12 April rose to fever pitch, with Tisza leading the polls ahead of the euroskeptic, ruling Fidesz party. The investigation has since circulated widely across social media and news platforms, unfolding alongside broader political and media developments ahead of the elections. The scale and speed of its reach are highly unusual in the largely pro-government Hungarian media landscape, and underscore the level of public interest in the allegations.
The case is unfolding against the backdrop of a broader political controversy involving Hungary’s ties to Russia. Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto initially denied a Washington Post reportciting a European security official as claiming that he regularly phoned his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov with news of EU meetings. On 24 March, Szijjarto admitted calling Lavrov “before and after” European Council meetings, as well as other foreign diplomats, calling this regular diplomatic practice.
Two days after the Direkt36 article appeared, and three days after Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced a probe into what he called the wiretapping of Szijjarto, the government filed espionage-related charges against investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi, accusing him of sharing Szijjarto’s private phone number with a foreign state.
Panyi, himself the target of government wiretapping in 2021, and a contributor to Direkt36 and the Central European investigative outlet VSquare, has denied any wrongdoing, while supporters and international observers describe the case as politically motivated and part of a broader effort to intimidate, discredit, and suppress independent journalism.
The allegations about Szijjarto are not the first claims of Hungary sharing highly sensitive EU discussions with Russia, and have sparked alarm over confidentiality and trust within the bloc, particularly in the context of the ongoing Ukraine war and the upcoming parliamentary elections that could either cement Orban’s long hold on power, or see him replaced by a newbie party yet to clarify its stances on Ukraine and the EU.
– Sian Olislagers
The small town of Szentendre is a picturesque Hungarian tourist destination, and there are no Russian secret service agents or operatives of the Kremlin’s hybrid war in sight. At first glance, a typical election campaign is underway here, organized today by the ruling party.
The speakers preceding incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orban spoke while it was still light out, but the prime minister takes the stage at dusk, illuminated only by spotlights and the torches that were handed out to rally attendees before the event began. A thousand people in the small square give him a rousing welcome.
At first he is a bit out of breath and seems a little out of sorts, but after a moment he delivers his usual – meaning good – Orban-style rhetorical performance. He mixes deadly seriousness with jokes and compliments for the town, whose square is usually full of tourists – drawn here by its small-town charm straight out of a century ago and just a half-hour train ride from Budapest.
When Orban says he will never allow Ukraine and Brussels to take control of this country, a huge roar of boos erupts. If the Ukrainians don’t repair the oil pipeline in the war zone that carries Russian oil to Hungary, they won’t see a single EU euro. The crowd loudly agrees. As one of the speakers from the ruling Fidesz party’s elite put it, the opposition isn’t their real rival in these elections. It’s Ukraine. “And so thank you for giving us your vote,” Orban continued in that vein half an hour later. “Because only Fidesz can ensure that Ukraine won’t decide Hungary’s fate and that there won’t be a war in Hungary.” The crowd responds with a chorus of “Thank you!”
A prime minister mingling with the people three weeks before an election is nothing out of the ordinary; in a normal country, it’s a political necessity. But Hungary, as everyone in Europe knows, is no ordinary country. Orban hasn’t been out among his fellow citizens for seven years; he didn’t need to win elections. Now, after 16 years in power, the ruling party stands on the brink of defeat by an opposition party, Tisza.
Orban’s standard campaign style is proof that his hitherto unshakable power is seeking every possible way to reverse the looming outcome. Many of these methods go far beyond what we in Europe understand by the terms “hard” or “negative” campaigning.
The whole country is waiting to see if it will get to watch two-year-old footage of opposition leader Peter Magyar having sex with his then-girlfriend, as promised by anonymous slanderers. A fake but sophisticated and seemingly credible “investigative portal” publishes reports claiming that the opposition leader is smuggling millions of euros to London at the behest of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy (once the lies had spread sufficiently across social media, the portal ceased to function). In early March, the government-controlled customs administration ostentatiously seized, on Hungarian territory, a routine cash transfer from a Ukrainian state bank. Ministers in Orban’s government first claimed it was dirty money for the Ukrainian elite, and then that it was money for Tisza. The prime minister is sending Hungarian soldiers to patrol power plants and refineries to protect the country from the Ukrainian military attack he has warned his fellow citizens about. He complains that the Ukrainian government is threatening to destroy him, and films himself calling his daughter to reassure her not to worry about him. Thousands of bots spread government propaganda across social media by including sophisticated videos created by artificial intelligence.
An experiment of pan-European significance is underway in Hungary: what happens when a powerful politician teetering on the brink of authoritarianism – and an EU celebrity – doesn’t want to relinquish power, is willing to go beyond the limits of what was previously conceivable, and readily employs the latest technologies as well as Russian methods and Russian assistance to do so. Orban’s government has been working closely with Putin’s state since 2015. According to reports by investigative journalists at the VSquare media outlet, a team of three Russian operatives specializing in rigging elections abroad arrived in Budapest a few weeks ago. Foreign intelligence agencies, including U.S. ones, were supposed to have warned the Hungarian government, but Orban’s government denies any such thing.
The Russian team’s specialty is said to be not only disinformation but also physical provocations and the instigation of fear and chaos. And so perhaps someone like that was there, just to be sure, on that picturesque square in Szentendre.
Then Something Happens
Hungarian ministers have dismissed reports of Russian infiltration as “desperate lies.” Peter Buda, a former high-ranking intelligence officer and now a security analyst frequently quoted by independent media, has little doubt about the accuracy of the information. “Orban’s government has been knowingly cooperating with Moscow for years, and now it has one more reason to continue doing so and let Moscow influence the elections directly on the ground,” says Buda.
He estimates that Russian agents in Budapest are tasked, if possible and necessary, with orchestrating some crime or atrocity and framing it as a Ukrainian act. “It doesn’t have to be anything major or deadly; in Hungary, a little might be enough,” he says. He points out that eight years ago, Russian intelligence services demonstrably set fire to a Hungarian cultural center in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, and are likely also behind last year’s act of vandalism against a church in the Ukrainian but ethnically predominantly Hungarian village of Palad-Komarivtsi. The Hungarian government did not hesitate for a moment and immediately accused Ukrainians of hatred toward the Hungarian minority, to whom it had promised protection.
“Violent action must be preceded by another step: convincing enough people that the local opposition to Orban and the Ukrainian government are one and the same,” Peter Buda says. Fidesz does not need Russian assistance for this.
Hungarians celebrate a national holiday on 15 March, commemorating the brutally suppressed democratic revolution of 1848, and it is traditionally the political event of the year. This year, with elections just around the corner, it is especially so. The government and opposition rallies were a kilometer apart in Budapest, and more than 200,000 people attended each. In his speech, Orban spoke almost exclusively about how, if the opposition wins on 12 April, Ukraine will prevail, along with its desire to drag Hungary into war.
“You see, Ukrainians? You see, Zelenskiy? This [Hungary] is a nation that’s a thousand years old. If you wanted to destroy it, you should have gotten up a few hundred years earlier,” he told the crowd, among other things, as they responded with boos directed toward Kyiv from the square in front of the imposing Hungarian parliament building. Thousands of posters hang in Hungarian cities, showing Magyar, alongside Zelenskiy and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, flushing Hungarian money down a golden toilet (a reference to the biggest – and internationally publicized – Ukrainian corruption scandal of recent months).
Hatred not only toward the Ukrainian elite, but toward Ukrainians themselves, who supposedly crave “Hungarian money and blood,” is the most important message the ruling party has been conveying to its citizens over the past six months. Boos echo across the square several times, though mostly half-heartedly.
Of course, all this is not merely a prelude to a possible staged terrorist attack orchestrated by Russia, but rather a common – and for Fidesz, necessary – political tactic. Analyst Peter Kreko says that after 16 years of autocratic rule, Orban’s government has no other issue to focus on besides foreign policy. “That is why it consistently portrays Ukraine as a fundamental threat and presents itself as the only safe choice. At home, Fidesz cannot claim to know best how to do anything better. It has been in power too long for that. Experience in international diplomacy is the only area where it can hold an advantage over the opposition,” he says. As Janos Lazar, a prominent Fidesz official, stated from the podium on 15 March: “Times are tough. We cannot send a lightweight into the world ring when we have a heavyweight at our disposal.”
It works only to a limited extent. Corruption scandals of an enormous scale plague the ruling party. Andras Lanczi, the party’s philosopher and former rector of the prestigious Corvinus University, said years ago that “what you call corruption is a political act and the deliberate creation of a new national economic elite,” but a large part of the nation clearly has no sympathy for this. Education and healthcare are in dire straits. The emigration of young people, mainly to Austria and Germany, numbers in the tens of thousands annually. It is coming to light that systematic sexual abuse and mistreatment of children are occurring in children’s homes and juvenile detention centers, for which a large part of society blames the ruling party. Magyar’s own political career began during a scandal in early 2024, when then-President Katalin Novak, the female and benevolent face of Fidesz, pardoned a man who had covered up the rape of children in a children’s home.
That is why opinion polls show Magyar’s Tisza leading Fidesz among “decided voters” by a margin of roughly 50 to 40 (with smaller parties accounting for the remainder), and this has been the case for about a year now. Fidesz is banking on roughly 20 percent of undecided voters – who are unsure not only of whom to vote for but whether to vote at all – and has been trying to win them over in recent weeks, by any means necessary.
One fact complicates all the estimates. The electoral system in Hungary is extremely complex. Fidesz tailored it to its own needs at a time when it was undeniably the largest party in the country: most seats are allocated in districts, but in a single round. Whoever gets the most wins. A smaller portion of parliamentarians are elected from national slates. If there is one large party in the country, the result is predictable: the large party will win far more seats than the number of votes it receives. That is why Fidesz has held a constitutional majority for 16 years. When two parties are similarly strong, thousands or even hundreds of votes in each district can decide the outcome, and anything can happen. Tisza could win a landslide victory in terms of seats. Fidesz, though slightly less likely, could as well.
The polls four years ago underestimated Fidesz. Its election results were significantly better than the pre-election models had predicted. Government officials often mention this. Four years ago, Orban was also helped by the fact that a war broke out just across Hungary’s border a few weeks before the election, and many voters rallied behind the experienced prime minister as a “safe choice.” That is Fidesz’s main campaign slogan this year, which is why Orban is trying to evoke the same sense of existential threat.
“But this year the situation is different. Let’s assume the statistics hold true. Then Tisza’s lead is unassailable in the real world,” says Gabor Torok, a well-known political analyst and strategist. “Unless something completely unexpected happens.”
This brings the alleged trio of Russian operatives back into the picture.
Don’t Lose the Tool
Russia has a strong interest in keeping Viktor Orban in power. The Hungarian prime minister is Russia’s most valuable ally in the European Union. Figures like Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico or Czech Parliamentary Speaker Tomio Okamura cannot hold a candle to him. Orban completely controls one of the EU’s member states and can effectively complicate the work of the entire bloc – currently, for example, he is threatening to block a key EU loan of 90 billion euros for Ukraine because the Ukrainians are not repairing the war-damaged Druzhba pipeline, through which Russian oil flows, on which Hungary depends.
Although he governs a small-to-medium-sized country, this educated and charismatic prime minister is a European political celebrity with strong ties to Trump’s America (indeed, Trump’s administration is counting on him to help dismantle the EU, just as the Russians are – and it also openly supports him). He controls a network of think tanks, websites, and universities that Fidesz has built over the past decade and that promote his idea of “illiberal democracy” and, with it, the Russian worldview across Europe. Perhaps only Germany’s AfD is as valuable to the Russians in Europe.
No one has yet provided a satisfactory explanation for why Prime Minister Orban made a pro-Russian pivot in 2015, or what exactly the relationship is between the Hungarian and Russian ruling elites. Around 2020, Russian intelligence agencies were systematically and continuously downloading data from the servers of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Orban’s government knew about this, failed to prevent it, and outwardly continued to build “excellent relations with Russia, the best in history,” as Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto stated during a visit to Moscow in 2021, even as his office was under a cyberattack at the time.
While the rest of Europe stopped consuming Russian oil following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Hungary, along with Slovakia, increased its consumption, even though Russian oil is ultimately more expensive than what the rest of the EU purchases elsewhere on the global market. It deliberately does not use the oil pipelines from the Adriatic Sea; over 80 percent of Hungary’s consumption now flows through the non-functional Druzhba pipeline – and that is why Orban is now accusing Ukraine of imposing an “energy blockade” on the country. Hungary is dependent on Russian oil (and Russian whims). So it may not be that Orban wants something from his Russian partners. “The Russians may want something from him, and it doesn’t even have to be a partnership. The Russians don’t have partners; they have tools,” Buda says.
Fidesz has been preparing for a situation like this for years on its own initiative, though often following the Russian playbook for disinformation warfare. It goes without saying that it controls 90 percent of the media market, just as it is a given that, thanks to its vast financial resources, it can plaster the entire country with its billboards. Its operatives have internet bots at their disposal and artificially inflate the reach of government messages on social media. It has built a network of “digital activists” among its members and supporters – real people who campaign for the party online – debating, arguing, supporting, and sharing. Fidesz voters tend to be older people, so the party has a large group of professional influencers tasked with attracting young Hungarians to Fidesz. It is a glossy propaganda machine.
When Magyar and Tisza entered politics in February 2024, government spokesperson Zoltan Kovacs was still referring to them that spring as “this month’s opposition flavor.” By summer (when Tisza, three months after its founding, succeeded in the European and municipal elections), however, it was clear that the threat to Fidesz was much greater. Orban immediately ramped up his public opinion–shaping machinery to full speed and directed it against the new opposition party. But nothing happened.
And Go Home!
Kreko and Torok see several reasons for this: voter fatigue and disillusionment with the ruling party’s officials. Also important is that Magyar doesn’t really resemble opposition politicians of the past, whether those linked to the socialist governments of the early 2000s or those who were too “Budapest-liberal.” For a long time, he was a promising member of the mid-level Fidesz cadre, married then to Judit Varga, a prominent government politician and minister of justice. Magyar focuses on the issues of corruption and living standards. After the Russian attack on a children’s hospital in Kyiv in July 2024, he traveled to the site with humanitarian aid, but otherwise he does not speak much about Ukraine. On the contrary, he is increasingly critical of Russian influence in the country. He has fully revived the slogan with which Orban entered Hungarian politics in 1988: “Russians, go home!”
The success of the Tisza party shows that while the government and Fidesz’s hard-core voters have embraced a pro-Russian shift, the majority of the population has not. In polls, Fidesz voters say they prefer Russia to Ukraine. But the Hungarian average is the same as, say, that among Czechs – 30 percent of respondents view Ukraine as a state positively (pollsters note that “Ukraine” is not the same as “Ukrainians”; that is a different question, and the assessment is more positive). Among Tisza voters, the figure is 40 percent, which is above the Czech average.
Security expert Buda also says that Magyar is currently pushing back against smear campaigns exactly as the playbook dictates: by speaking openly and in advance about what might happen. As for the aforementioned sex video, Magyar recorded a statement saying that “his family is facing several difficult days and that what people will see is consensual sex between two adults, with no drugs involved.” Nothing new has appeared yet on the website, which features a shot of an empty bed with the caption “coming soon.”
But perhaps something will surface a few hours before the vote – or something else, described by Torok as “completely unexpected,” in which the alleged Russian agents may or may not be involved. There is a whole range of speculation: that Orban will declare a state of emergency under the pretext of Ukrainian aggression and postpone the elections. Or that he will let them take place, but then simply refuse to step down.
But such drama didn’t cross anyone’s mind in Szentendre. Orban spoke combatively, yet people dispersed calmly and in high spirits. “Peter Magyar should see how many of us were here,” says Laszlo, a local man in his forties, who bought a cardboard sign at a party booth with the name of the main opposition party crossed out, in Ukrainian colors, chipped and peeling, evoking post-Soviet despair. “Everyone is against us, but the prime minister was right. There’s still hope that we’ll win.”
Tomas Brolik is deputy editor-in-chief of Respekt, the leading Czech newsweekly where this article originally appeared. Republished by permission. Translated by Jeremy Druker.
