The battle for Hungary

13:39Peter Magyar:Viktor Orban's party, Fidesz, did not publish a campaign programme since 2010. On the surface level, he says he is defending sovereignty, peace, stability and the national interest.

14:02Peter Magyar:But more deeply, he is fighting to keep in place a model of power in which the state and the governing party and the loyal business networks and much of the media are aligned in a single political order. Fidesz is not merely a party competing in a democracy, but the organizing force of political life.

14:28Peter Magyar:Orbán's politics work by constantly identifying an enemy and presenting himself as the shield against it. Brussels stands for outside constraints, rules, oversight, liberal norms and limits on what he can do at home. Migrants were turned into a civilizational threat. Disorder, insecurity, demographic fear, and the idea of a nation being overrun. Liberal elites function as a cultural enemy, detached, cosmopolitan, morally alien, and contemptuous of ordinary people. NGOs are also framed as agents of foreign influence, not as civil society, but as political tools working against the nation. from within.

15:16Peter Magyar:And another notable example, George Soros, became the personalized symbol of that entire worldview. Globalist, liberal, transnational, manipulative.

15:31Peter Magyar:And now Ukraine is of course made to stand for war, economic pain, instability. So the specific enemy can change, but the method stays the same. Create a sense of external threat, frame disagreement as national danger, and then offer strong leadership as the only protection.

15:52Viktor Orban:What might work as a short-term campaign tactic for a political movement fighting to get a seat at the table has, in Orbán's case, been stretched into full-blown modus operandi.

16:04Peter Magyar:Since 2010, Fidesz has used parliamentary dominance to reshape the system itself, the constitution, the media environment, the regulatory landscape, the distribution of state resources, and the wider political playing field. Orban does not fight only with speeches, he also fights through the architecture of power. He presents his struggle as civilizational. Hungary versus liberal Europe, order versus decadence, peace versus war, nation versus foreign tutelage. That gives his politics and his campaign charge that goes beyond ordinary policy debate.

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17:26Viktor Orban:You are listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. The architecture of power itself has deep relevance for the most fundamental act in a democracy. And the last Hungarian vote back in 2022 already hinted at problems with election equality. Observers from the OSCE, Europe's main election monitoring body, reported that it wasn't a level playing field. Regrettably, the parliamentary elections were marred by the blurring of lines between state and ruling party.

18:00Peter Magyar:The pervasive overlap between the governing parties' campaign messages and the government's communications tilted the playing field. The consolidation of media, as well as the prevalence of biased and unbalanced news coverage, limited voters' ability to make an informed choice.

18:18Viktor Orban:Before we dive into the campaign, we'll unpick those structural advantages that are working in the interest of the status quo. Let's bring in another Hungarian colleague from the BBC World Service, Joffia Paulikovic. Viktor Orban and Fidesz started seriously thinking about reshaping media. They felt that there was a need for a sort of right-wing public sphere to counter what they saw as the liberal bias in Hungary at the time. In the space between 2006 and 2010, they began strategically buying up media outlets, including smaller outlets, radio, TV, all sorts.

18:58Peter Magyar:What Orbán did to the media landscape in Hungary is not classic censorship. It's much closer to what people mean by a liberal information autocracy, using laws, regulators, ownership structures, state money, as well as selective pressure. So the point was not to shut every critical voice down necessarily. It was more like to make sure that the dominant information environment works in Fidesz's favour.

19:27Viktor Orban:And how did he achieve that? What kind of tools did he use?

19:32Peter Magyar:It started with the main regulator, which is the National Media and Info Communications Authority. And within it sits the Media Council. And on paper, these are just ordinary regulatory bodies, but in practice, critics have long argued that they became part of a politically captured system in which formal regulation could be used to reward allies and to increasingly pressure critics. And then came the legal and regulatory redesign after 2010, as well as the ownership concentration. Friendly oligarchs buying outlets, critical owners being pressured, and eventually the creation of the Central European Press and Media Foundation, Keshma, the umbrella for a huge pro-government media bloc, owning more than 500 outlets currently.

20:25Peter Magyar:Add to that the weaponization of state advertising, which rewards loyal media and starves critical outlets, and you basically get a system where formal pluralism survives on paper, but the balance of power shifts dramatically.

20:41Viktor Orban:And in reality, does that mean that there is one voice, one messaging that is the dominant one and perhaps even drowning out dissenting voices?

20:52Peter Magyar:From a public service perspective, there is definitely one voice because every public outlet is now basically a propaganda machine serving the main party's, Fidesz's interests. But it doesn't mean that there are no opposition or independent voices. They exist, but they exist in a much harsher and much more hostile environment. They don't have the opportunity to benefit from state funding. They don't have the opportunity to compete for government grants. So they increasingly have to rely on their own readership, donations, move behind paywalls so they can collect subscription.

21:34Viktor Orban:Independent media went on, their circumstances became incredibly hard. Newsrooms were disbanded, people that objected to new ownership and had to kind of make their own way separately. But they did go on. However, as the government media space became increasingly politicized, so did the opposition media space. But they do carry on and they carry out very high quality journalism and investigations on extremely shoestring resources. Rita Palfi, another Hungarian colleague from the BBC World Service, was cutting her teeth as a young journalist as these changes were unfolding, witnessing the transformation firsthand.

22:16Peter Magyar:The government likes to frame independent media as pro-opposition. When you hear in the actual electoral campaign that politicians say, I'm not talking to you because you are a pro-opposition media, and they're telling it to an independent media who is financed by its readers, then it becomes a narrative to talk about independent media, but it's obviously not pro-opposition.

22:42Viktor Orban:Where do Hungarians usually get their news from?

22:45Peter Magyar:Online media, almost 80 % of people are getting their news from there. And the second one is social media. It's 54 % according to the latest Reuters digital report. On social media is Facebook. The second one is YouTube. Television declined, so in nine years it lost almost 30%.

23:05Viktor Orban:This isn't just about remodelling power in Hungary, a country of 9.5 million people. Viktor Orban has become an ideological influencer for leaders around the world who admire his signature brand of illiberal democracy, a phrase he himself adopted. But at home, he's facing a growing challenge and cracks are beginning to show within his own voter base.

23:31Peter Magyar:Peter Magyar is the leader of a plausible governing challenge. His strongest support is younger voters, urban voters, as well as conservatives, centrists, and disillusioned former Fidesz voters. And that social coalition is really the key to his momentum. He has managed to bring together several kinds of dissatisfaction at once. Anger over corruption, fatigue with Orbán, economic frustration, and a deep disappointment with the weakness of the traditional opposition.

24:06Viktor Orban:But as public media has been repurposed into a tool of the state, any potential challenger has effectively been shut out of a large part of the information space. So Peter Modjar went analogue to generate attention in the digital world.

24:23Peter Magyar:Peter Modjar's rise shows that control is not the same thing as total monopoly.

24:30Viktor Orban:There are huge problems with the media freedom in Hungary. What we have is only my personal Facebook page. This is our biggest tool. Our only chance is to go there, directly to the people.

24:42Peter Magyar:Orbán still dominates the legacy of broadcasters, but Magyar found momentum in the one arena that remained harder to seal off completely. It's direct, digital, high-frequency political presence. And he did it by barnstorming the country rally after rally, town after time, and turning that movement itself into media.

25:12Peter Magyar:He used Facebook Lives, constant video footage, direct addresses, and just a much more personal campaign style to reach people without the usual gatekeepers. His more personal online approach generated higher engagement than Orbán's. It created atmosphere.

25:41Peter Magyar:His rallies were not just campaign events, they were also proofs of existence, and then the Facebook Lives turned those local proofs into national ones.

25:57Peter Magyar:And there is also a massive difference in tone. Phineas's communication often sounds managed, sanitized and distant. Magyar style has been much more blunt, immediate and recognizably human.

26:20Peter Magyar:He films himself on trains, in streets, in crowds, in messy real time. So while Orbán speaks through a system, Magyar often speaks as if he is speaking directly to the people over that system's head.

26:39Peter Magyar:Every event fed the next one, and that made the campaign feel mobile, alive, and very hard to contain. He could not out-broadcast Orbán on state media, so he built a rival channel out of movement, social media, repetition, and direct contact. And once enough people started seeing that energy, momentum itself became part of the message.

27:14Viktor Orban:If you go to one of the stops on Peter Magyar's tour around the country, you will often see different little knickknacks, these are handouts, but also you can buy a fitted white shirt, which is part of the Peter Magyar uniform, essentially. So this idea that he is a symbol in himself that people can identify with, that people can dress like is very much a part of the campaign. Similarly, at a certain point in his speech, he will do a pause and then he will begin this chant, which is Tissa is flooding, there's drumming, the crowd is chanting along.

27:55Viktor Orban:It's a very powerful moment, reminiscent of the sort of national feeling that Fidesz is also known for. I think something that to me is really interesting about Peter Magyar is that he learned a lot from Orban. Orban is an incredibly talented politician. You can't take that away from him. I think that Fidesz got too comfortable, too inward looking. They're rarely challenged by the media and they've slowed down and they lost touch.

28:23Peter Magyar:I think the best way to understand his momentum is not that Hungary has suddenly fallen in love with Peter Magyar as a political visionary. It is that he has become the most credible vessel for accumulated frustration.

28:38Viktor Orban:Peter Magyar has been able to, taking the elements of Fidesz's ideology at work, but speak directly to people. He meets with people, he talks to them, with young people, he's taking selfies with them and appearing in their TikTok videos.

29:02Viktor Orban:Every time he visits a new place, like often he will arrive in a sort of on a boat or like an exotic car or something, it cuts through more than the kind of convoluted and slightly forced Fidesz messaging does. When he went to Transylvania, the Hungarian diaspora, he walked into these villages on foot wearing their national dress. Transylvania is in Romania, so he would travel to a neighbouring country to campaign for the Hungarian elections, right? He's campaigning abroad because Viktor Orban has introduced the possibility to vote for these regions and has actually counted very heavily on these votes and has done a concerted effort to locate a new voter base there.

29:48Viktor Orban:Viktor Orban is extremely popular in these territories because he has essentially given people Hungarian citizenship. Fidesz found itself in a kind of cukcvang. Every move carried a risk, but doing nothing wasn't an option. In previous campaigns, the party could simply throw money at the problem. But in October 2025, the EU's new transparency rules on political advertising came into force, according to which paid and targeted political ads must be labelled as such. And Meta and Google obliged. This was particularly worrying for Fidesz in the region, the sort of Central Eastern European region.

30:32Viktor Orban:They are among the highest spenders on political advertising. As a kind of illustration, their non-election campaign spending was similar to Poland's election campaign spending, which obviously Poland is much bigger. And Orban himself had in the past said that the 2018 election was won on Facebook.

30:51Peter Magyar:So what did Fidesz do? It shifted from buying visibility into manufacturing visibility. So material that looks like ordinary opinion or memes or cartoons, but functions politically. If something is not clearly labeled as a party ad, then it becomes harder to track and much easier to deny. If content is spread by unofficial-looking pages, loyalist networks or issue-based accounts rather than the party in its own name, then the system becomes much harder to police.

31:23Viktor Orban:And so they began to really throw everything at what Viktor Orbán has called the digital conquest, digitális honfoglalás in Hungarian.

31:36Viktor Orban:It's a very historically charged term. This was really a mobilization of core Fidesz supporters who were then encouraged in this new role to really get on Facebook and share.

31:51Peter Magyar:Fidesz has turned much more heavily to influencers and AI-generated content. Influencers can make messaging feel more personal, even when they are clearly operating inside a pro-government ecosystem. And then there is, of course, the organized online activism part. And this is where Artsusokklubia, so Fight Club, and the Digital Civic Circles or DPKs come in. The idea is to turn supporters into organized identity-based communication networks that can share content, shape comment sections, reinforce narratives, and create the appearance of broad, spontaneous support.

32:37Viktor Orban:The great advantage of this digital civic circles is that they are real people, so that bypasses advertising that way. And then on the other side of this, fake profiles. And these were created in the past couple of months. They have barely any content. They are a page rather than a person because meta isn't alerted that you're posting political content. It's like a gardening group or like a car repair shop page or something like that. Often they get deleted or renamed and their job similarly is to like and comment on content. Often you can see they will all like something at the same time. or if they share something, it will be sort of verbatim the same content as the others.

33:26Viktor Orban:And it got personal, as the leaders of TISA discovered.

33:30Peter Magyar:This campaign increasingly seems to be built around controlling the first frame and then letting correction lag behind. One of the clearest examples was the episode around rodnajmark.hu, a website named after TISA's vice president, Mark Rodney, which suddenly appeared with an image of a bedroom. There was an unmade bed, a ceiling-mounted camera perspective, and teaser-style text suggesting compromising material was about to be released. Peter Moller later said that this was part of a Russian-style smear campaign built around some alleged kompromat. But the interesting part is that no such video needed to appear at all for the tactic to work.

34:18Peter Magyar:You create a sense that something shameful or dangerous is about to emerge, and that alone alters the emotional environment.

34:28Viktor Orban:The vice president of Modiar's party has denied having to do anything with the website bearing his name. You are listening to The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring. The war in Ukraine looms large over the Hungarian campaign. Orbán leaned on it in the 2022 election, and he won. And it's not surprising he's reaching for it again.

34:55Peter Magyar:It was an AI-generated Fidesz campaign video in which a little girl asks her mother when her father is coming home before the scene cuts to his execution on a battlefield. And the video was published by Fidesz and framed the party as the safe choice. Of course, the implication is absolutely unmistakable. If Orban loses, Hungarian families will pay the price. It is a highly manipulative compression of the campaign's core message that only Fidesz can keep danger outside the home. It shows clearly the campaign at its most distilled. Fear politics aimed not at reason debate, but at visceral family anxiety.

35:47Peter Magyar:It takes an abstract foreign policy question and turns it into an intimate domestic nightmare. Your child, your home, your father, your loss.

35:59Viktor Orban:Speaking of Ukraine, Modjar says no one in Hungary wants war.

36:07Viktor Orban:He actually has said that he doesn't back Ukraine's sort of accelerated EU membership, which is in keeping with what Orbán says. But at the same time, when this children's hospital was bombed by Russia, he then delivered aid personally. Whilst these seem like tiny differences in the highly contentious approach to Ukraine, they are actually quite a big stand. In early March, while addressing the issue of the EU emergency fund for Kyiv, the Ukrainian president inadvertently delivered a gift to Orbán's campaign.

36:47Peter Magyar:Zelensky said publicly that he hoped one person, quote-unquote, would stop blocking the package and then added that otherwise he could give that person's address to Ukraine's military. Now, he did not name Orbán directly, but it was widely understood as referring to him. And Orbán's side seized on that immediately. The Hungarian government described Zelensky's words as an open threat, and Orbán himself answered by saying that he did not think this was only about him personally, but about Hungary.

37:31Peter Magyar:And the exchange let Orbán turn a diplomatic row into campaign material for his bigger message, that Hungary is being bullied by reckless outsiders and only he can defend it.

37:44Viktor Orban:Peter Modjar, for his part, also took a stance based on principle.

37:48Peter Magyar:Modjar has been on a campaign event in the countryside on stage, and he just said it out loud.

37:58Peter Magyar:I would like to reiterate one thing very clearly. Regardless of who the prime minister is, no other president has the right to intimidate another leader of a country.

38:11Viktor Orban:And with Ukraine now folded into the campaign narrative, Russia isn't far from the frame. Some media reports have alleged influence efforts by spy agencies, even rumours of a staged assassination attempt.

38:25Peter Magyar:The most serious recent reporting is the Washington Post article, which says that it reviewed an internal SVR for an intelligence service document authenticated by a European intelligence service in which Russian operatives discussed how to help Orbán, including a proposal they called the Game Changer, a stage assassination attempt designed to shift the campaign out of the rational realm of societal economic frustration. and into the emotional realm of state security and stability. The Kremlin denied the report, but if accurate, it suggests Russian actors were actively exploring ways to reshape the election.

39:10Viktor Orban:The prime minister dismissed the story on Hír TV.

39:19Viktor Orban:Even if Hungarian voters try to tune out the messaging that comes from what is in effect state media, that messaging still saturates the fabric of everyday life.

39:30Peter Magyar:It is government billboards, public poster campaigns, so-called national consultations and petitions, as well as state and pro-government media. It blurs the line between public information and campaign propaganda.

39:46Viktor Orban:BIDAS also has a history of offering different financial incentives. One of them is a tax exemption for mothers with three or more children, which has recently been actually lowered to two children.

40:05Viktor Orban:Similarly, as a family with a certain number of children, you have access to different housing support for young families for buying a house. And on the other end of the spectrum, they also introduced 13th and 14th pension. so adding on two extra months of pension just a couple of months before the election. They also offer a cap on utility bills and they make sure that people know it too. So when you receive your utility bill, you will see in large letters, your utility bill has been lowered. This isn't just a fight over the future direction of a small central European country. Orban and Modiar represent two camps increasingly at odds with each other, which is why the elections are seen as pivotal around the world too.

40:57Peter Magyar:This election is not just about who is going to govern next. It is about whether Hungary stays inside the same political model Orban built, captured media, weakened checks and balances, permanent enemy politics, or whether there is a chance to begin reversing that. There are 199 seats in the parliament. So that means that if you have 100 seats, then you won't. But there is a third party that might get into the parliament that could form a coalition with Fidesz. So that means that even if TISA wins the elections and even if they have more MPs in the parliament than Fidesz, there might be still a Fidesz government.

41:44Peter Magyar:after the election. If you want to change the system, you need a two-third majority, and that's another level.

41:51Viktor Orban:And there could be another unsettling outcome.

41:54Peter Magyar:The darkest stake of all, transfer of power. Serious European policy voices are openly discussing the possibility that in a narrower contested result, Hungary could face a slowed, obstructed, or maybe even an openly disputed handover.

42:15Viktor Orban:This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. Thank you, or köszi, to our Hungarian guides Amity Sedghi, Joffia Paulikovic and Rita Palfi. Our technical producer is Elcin Suleimanov. At the mixing desk is John Hemingway. And as usual, this programme was produced by the Global Jigsaw Podcast team, exec producer and Hungarian herself, Krista Shattori, and me, Krasi Ivanova-Twig. Thank you.