budapest, hungary —
As thousands of people filled the streets of Budapest last weekend to celebrate the defeat of Viktor Orban, Barasz said he couldn’t help but think of his great-grandmother, now in her 80s and living in a poor rural town in eastern Hungary. For someone who has watched almost exclusively state media for the past decade, Péter Magyar’s victory was a cause for crippling fear rather than joy.
Throughout Mr. Orbán’s re-election campaign, media controlled by his ruling Fidesz party portrayed Mr. Magyar as a reckless enemy of peace who sought to drag Hungary into war in neighboring Ukraine. Barash, a 42-year-old financial analyst who only gave his first name, said he was shocked by the extent of the “lies” his great-grandmother was told every day. If the Magyars won, Hungarian men would be drafted into the military, the economy would collapse, and World War III would be certain.
“It’s like being old, rural, poor, having two TV channels and listening to national radio,” Barras told CNN. As a result, he says he lives in an “alternative reality.” Orbanist propaganda, he said, reminded him of the kind of propaganda the communist authorities used in his youth in the Soviet Union.
In his first days as Hungary’s next prime minister, Mr. Magyar began dismantling the “propaganda machine” that Mr. Orbán built during his 16 years in office and helped him defeat his rivals and win four consecutive elections. It was this machine that effectively barred the Magyars from appearing in state media for the past 18 months, while the Magyars’ opposition Tissa party built a commanding lead over Fidesz in opinion polls.
Only after Tisza’s landslide victory was he invited to give an interview. Prime Minister Magyar made a combative appearance on state television network M1 on Wednesday, scolding anchors for spreading “lies” about his family and comparing the station’s reporting to North Korean and Nazi-era German propaganda.
“We have no personal grudges, but one element of our plan is to end this factory of lies after the establishment of the Tisza government,” Magyar said in an interview. “This is not about me, this is about the fact that everyone deserves public media that reports the truth.”
Before the election, Mr. Magyar said that for many Hungarians, his victory would feel like the peppy, disorienting ending of “The Truman Show,” the 1998 Jim Carrey film about a man who doesn’t realize he’s the star of a reality TV show. He said voters could experience “cognitive dissonance” as their worldviews become fragmented, and warned that many “won’t change their minds overnight.”
Gábor Polyak, a professor of media law at Budapest’s Eötvös Lorand University, said many in the capital have heard stories of elderly people living in fear in small villages since the Magyar victory. “I’ve heard stories of people who were so depressed that they couldn’t get out from under the bed,” Polyak told CNN.
But Poljak added that the victory shows that most Hungarians are tired of economic stagnation and rampant corruption and no longer believe state media reports. In the end, he says, “the propagandists believed the propaganda more than the target audience.”
Still, he warned that it will take time for the incoming Tisza government to dismantle the propaganda system built by Mr. Orbán. “This is a huge chance for European countries to function normally,” he said. “If the Magyars miss this chance, there will be no another.”
Orbán became prime minister in 1998. Voters ousted him in 2002, despite securing Hungary’s membership in NATO and steering it towards the European Union. After that unexpected crushing defeat, Orbán learned that “going back to the opposition is no longer a very good idea,” a source close to Orbán told CNN.
Upon returning to power in 2010, Orbán quickly took control of the media. With a two-thirds majority in parliament, the Fidesz government is free to amend the Hungarian constitution. In 2013, it passed a number of laws restricting pre-election political advertising on broadcasters, most of which were controlled by Mr. Orbán’s allies. Orbán also installed a Fidesz ally to head the national media authority.
The most important changes in the media landscape have come on the “business side,” says investigative reporter Shabolx Pani, who began his career as these measures accelerated. Pani said the state-owned bank provided Orbán’s allies with “cheap or free loans” to buy up news outlets and either shut them down or turn them into Fidesz mouthpieces. Pani told CNN that the aim was to “eliminate all negative news about Orbán’s government.”
Long the largest advertiser in Hungary’s media market, the country soon began pulling advertising from outlets deemed hostile to Fidesz. Radio station Klubradio was an early target. After the National Lottery stopped advertising on Klubradio, private companies quickly took the hint and ran their own ads. The station lost national broadcast rights and ultimately ended broadcasting in 2021.
Origo, which was founded in 1998 and has become one of the most read news websites in Hungary, was also targeted. András Peto, a former reporter for the paper, recalled how the CEO wanted to be on the government’s good side and began pressuring Origo editor-in-chief to tone down certain stories.
The situation came to a head in 2014 when Mr. Petoju exposed stories about the extravagant spending of ministers in Orbán’s government. The CEO wanted the editor to scrap the article, Peth claimed. “The problem is not that it’s factually incorrect; the problem is that it was true.”
The editor resigned a few months later. “It’s not a normal situation to lose your job after doing a good job,” Petush recalled. Petos left Origo to found Direkt36, one of Hungary’s few independent media outlets that has operated under significant government pressure for the past decade.
Pani, who also writes for Direkt36 in the run-up to Sunday’s election, contributed to an investigation into secret communications between the Hungarian and Russian foreign ministers. Following the report, which caused great embarrassment to Fidesz, the government ordered an investigation into Mr. Pani, claiming that his journalism was a “front” for espionage.
“I never expected that I would end up being accused of spying by the prime minister,” Panyi said.
Mr. Pani was not the first target of Mr. Orban’s propaganda machine. Over the past 16 years, state media have slandered every supposed “enemy,” from liberal philanthropist George Soros to, more recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“If you only consume this news, you don’t get a chance to check reality. That’s your reality,” Panyi said. “Don’t be angry at your 80-year-old grandmother, because she sees the world through television and newspapers.
“The saddest thing is that (propaganda) has become normalized,” Pany said. “Part of the audience has become accustomed to it.”
David Pressman, who resigned as U.S. ambassador to Hungary last year, said viewers were not only “accustomed” to propaganda, but were also indirectly funding it through their taxes. During his tenure, Mr. Pressman was regularly attacked in state media, where he was portrayed as an “LGBTQ activist.”
“Mr. Orbán has run a sophisticated, taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign based on fear,” Pressman told CNN. “He drew attention to what did not exist in order to distract from what did exist.”
For years, that strategy worked. One of the reasons Fidesz’s propaganda was so successful was that it was difficult to escape. For weeks, posters have been posted in the Hungarian countryside warning that the Magyars and Zelenskiy are dangerous. Fidesz often broadcast political news on state media during the halftime break of soccer matches.
Pressman said it was a “surprise” that Magyar was able to break through after being effectively shut out from state media. While Mr. Orbán’s campaign ran on the airwaves and billboards, Mr. Magyar’s campaign relied instead on a huge ground campaign. At his first international press conference on Monday, Magyar told reporters that he had visited 700 towns and villages in two years. His flesh-and-blood campaign attracted huge numbers of voters in rural areas of Hungary that had been “totally ignored” as Fidesz strongholds, Pressman noted.
It will take time to dismantle the media “machine” that Mr. Orban has built. Polyak, the media professor, said that a two-thirds majority would allow Tisza to reverse the constitutional reforms introduced by Fidesz, allowing the Magyar government to establish a new media regulatory body and reorganize state television and radio.
He said the real challenge will come from private companies. Mr. Poljak said Mr. Orbán’s cronies receive so much money from the public purse that they could continue to lavish funding on pro-Fidesz media outlets if they wanted to.
For many Hungarian reporters, this week felt like a new dawn. Some recalled attending a Fidesz press conference but not being asked questions. Instead, at a press conference on Monday, Magyar thanked Hungarian media for their patience before undergoing a three-hour interrogation.
But Pani said he did not expect this “honeymoon” period to last. He said he hoped the new government would allow Hungarian media to recover “organically” and allow the media to carry out its mission of “holding those in power accountable.” When Magyar takes office next month, he will have an untested government with an inexperienced cabinet.
“For me, it feels like Season 1 is over,” Panyi said. “I’m sure season 2 will start soon.”
