Viktor Orbán built a ‘propaganda machine.’ Hungary’s next leader must dismantle it

Budapest, Hungary (CNN) — As thousands swarmed the streets of Budapest last weekend to celebrate the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Balasz said he could not help thinking of his great-grandmother – now in her 80s, living in a rural town in Hungary’s deprived east. For her, having consumed little but state media for the past decade, the victory of Péter Magyar was not cause for joy, but for crippling fear.

Throughout Orbán’s re-election campaign, the media controlled by his governing Fidesz party depicted Magyar as a reckless enemy of peace, bent on dragging Hungary into the war in neighboring Ukraine. Balasz, a 42-year-old financial analyst who only gave his first name, said he was shocked by the extremity of the “lies” his great-grandmother was told each day – how, if Magyar won, Hungarian men would be conscripted, the economy would collapse, and a third world war would surely follow.

“It’s like, you’re old, you’re in the countryside, you’re poor, you have, like, two TV channels, you’re listening to state radio” – and as a result, living in an “alternate reality,” Balasz told CNN. The Orbánist propaganda, he said, reminded him of the sort peddled by the communist authorities during his youth in the Soviet Union.

In his first days as Hungary’s prime minister-elect, Magyar has begun to dismantle the “propaganda machine” that Orbán built over his 16 years in office, which helped him crush his rivals and win four consecutive elections. It was that machine that effectively barred Magyar from appearing on state media for the past 18 months, while his opposition Tisza party built a commanding lead over Fidesz in the polls.

Only after Tisza’s thumping victory was he invited to be interviewed. In a combative appearance on the state-controlled M1 television network on Wednesday, Magyar reprimanded its anchors for spreading “lies” about his family and compared the channel’s coverage to propaganda from North Korea and Nazi-era Germany.

“We have no personal resentment, but one of the elements of our program is that this factory of lies will be put to an end after the formation of the Tisza government,” Magyar told his interviewer. “This isn’t about me, but about the fact that everyone deserves a public media that reports truthfully.”

Before the election, Magyar had said that his victory would feel to many Hungarians like the bracing, disorienting end of “The Truman Show,” the 1998 Jim Carey film about a man who is unaware he’s the main character on a reality TV show. He said voters may feel “cognitive dissonance” as their world view comes apart, warning that many “won’t change their minds overnight.”

Gábor Polyák, a professor of media law at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, said many in the capital were hearing stories of elderly people in small villages who, since Magyar’s victory, were living in fear. “I have heard stories about depressed people who cannot come out from under the bed,” Polyák told CNN.

That victory, however, showed that most Hungarians – fed up with a stagnant economy and rampant corruption – no longer believed what state media told them, Polyák added. In the end, “the propagandists believed the propaganda more than the target groups,” he said.

Still, he warned that it would take time for the incoming Tisza government to unpick the propaganda system Orbán built. “This is a big chance to have a normal, functioning European country,” he said. “If Magyar doesn’t take this chance, we won’t have another.”

Crackdown on independent media

Orbán became prime minister in 1998. Despite securing NATO membership for Hungary and steering it toward the European Union, voters ousted him in 2002. After that crushing, unexpected loss, he learned that “going back to opposition is not a very good idea anymore,” a person close to Orbán told CNN.

After returning to office in 2010, Orbán swiftly exerted control over the media. Having won a two-thirds majority of seats in parliament, the Fidesz government could amend Hungary’s constitution at will. In 2013, it passed a raft of measures to limit pre-election political advertising to broadcasters – most of which had fallen under the control of Orbán’s allies. Orbán also installed a Fidesz ally to lead the national Media Authority.

The most important changes to the media landscape came on the “business side,” according to Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative reporter who began his career while these measures were gathering pace. State-owned banks gave “cheap or even free loans” to Orbán’s allies to buy up media outlets, Panyi said, either shutting them down or turning them into Fidesz mouthpieces. The aim was to “filter out any negative news regarding the Orbán government,” Panyi told CNN.

The state, which had long been the biggest advertiser in Hungary’s media market, soon began to pull adverts from outlets deemed hostile to Fidesz. Klubradio, a radio station, was an early target. After the national lottery stopped advertizing on Klubradio, private companies quickly took the hint and pulled their own adverts. The station lost its right to nationwide broadcasting, and it eventually went off air in 2021.

Origo – which was founded in 1998 and became one of Hungary’s most-read news websites – was also targeted. András Pethő, a former reporter for the outlet, recalled how the CEO, hoping to stay on the government’s good side, began to put pressure on Origo’s editor to tone down certain stories.

Things came to a head in 2014 when Pethő broke a story about the lavish expenses of a minister in Orbán’s government. The CEO wanted the editor to kill the story, Pethő claimed, “not because it was factually inaccurate – the problem was that it was true.”

The editor resigned some months later. “It’s not a normal situation where you lose your job because you did it well,” Pethő reflected. Pethő also left Origo to found Direkt36, one of a handful of independent outlets in Hungary that have worked for the past decade under significant government pressure.

In the run-up to Sunday’s election, Panyi – who also writes for Direkt36 – contributed to an investigation into secret communications between the Hungarian and Russian foreign ministers. Following that report, which caused considerable embarrassment to Fidesz, the government ordered an investigation into Panyi, alleging that his journalism was “cover” for spying.

“I never thought it would end up like that, where I would be accused of spying by the prime minister,” Panyi said.

Panyi was far from the first to be targeted by Orbán’s propaganda machine. Over the past 16 years, state media had vilified a whole cast of alleged “enemies,” from the liberal philanthropist George Soros to, more recently, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“When you only consume this news, you don’t have an opportunity for a reality check – it is your reality,” Panyi said. “You can’t be angry at that 80-year-old grandmother, because that’s what she sees of the world through her TV and her newspapers.

“The saddest thing was that (the propaganda) became normalized,” Panyi said. “Part of the audience just got used to it.”

On-the-ground campaigning

As well as getting “used to” the propaganda, the audience was also indirectly funding it through their taxes, according to David Pressman, who stepped down as the US ambassador to Hungary last year. During his tenure, Pressman was regularly attacked on state media, which painted him as an “LGBTQ activist.”

“Orbán used a sophisticated, taxpayer-funded propaganda operation built on fear,” Pressman told CNN. “He focused public attention on things that don’t exist in order to distract from things that do.”

For years, that strategy worked. One of the reasons Fidesz’s propaganda was so successful is that it was hard to escape. For weeks, rural Hungary has been plastered with posters warning that Magyar and Zelensky are dangerous. Fidesz would often air political bulletins during the half-time breaks of soccer matches, broadcast on state media.

Effectively barred from state media, it was a “surprise” that Magyar was able to break through, Pressman said. While Orbán’s campaign played out on the airwaves and on billboards, Magyar’s instead relied on a mammoth ground game. In his first international press conference Monday, Magyar told reporters he had visited 700 towns and villages over two years. His in-the-flesh campaign drew in a huge number of voters in areas of rural Hungary that had been “completely written off” as Fidesz strongholds, Pressman noted.

Dismantling the media “machine” Orbán built will take time. With a two-thirds majority of its own, Tisza will be able to undo the constitutional changes introduced by Fidesz, noted Polyák, the media professor, allowing Magyar to set up a new media regulatory body and reshape state television and radio.

The real challenge, he said, will come from private companies. Because Orbán’s cronies pocketed so much money from the public purse, Polyák said, they would be able to continue lavishly funding pro-Fidesz outlets if they wish to do so.

For many Hungarian reporters, this week has felt like a fresh dawn. Some have recalled how they would attend Fidesz news conferences but never be called on to ask a question. Instead, in Monday’s press conference, Magyar thanked the Hungarian media for their patience, before being questioned for three hours.

But Panyi said he did not expect this “honeymoon” period to last. He said he hoped the new government would allow Hungary’s media to heal “organically,” so that it can carry out its job of “holding whoever is in power to account.” When Magyar takes office next month, that will mean his untested government of inexperienced ministers.

“To me, it feels like Season One has ended,” Panyi said. “I’m pretty sure that Season Two is starting soon.”

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CNN’s Bianna Golodryga contributed reporting.