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Hungary’s Orbán captured state institutions and the media
The landslide victory of Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party in Hungary’s parliamentary election represents much more than a routine change of government. It marks the fall of an “electoral autocracy”, a regime that used elections to shroud and legitimise a system designed to keep the ruling Fidesz party and its leader, Viktor Orbán, in power indefinitely.
The Orbán regime was founded on three pillars. The first was the concentration of power in Orbán’s hands and the destruction of constitutional restraints and oversight mechanisms.
Propelled to power in 2010 by a wave of revulsion at corruption scandals and economic crisis, Orbán quickly took over key state institutions like the judiciary, the taxation office, the prosecutor’s office and the election commission. Each were stacked with Fidesz loyalists, who transformed them into instruments of the regime.
The second pillar was corruption. The Orbán regime enriched Hungary’s elite by transferring vast resources to a group of loyal oligarchs and Orbán cronies.
It achieved this through skewered tendering processes to award massive state contracts to people like Lőrinc Mészáros, a former gas-fitter who had been one of Orbán’s close childhood friends. In 2010, Mészáros was a minor local businessman, but his wealth doubled every year of Orbán’s rule. By 2018, he was the richest man in Hungary.
The third pillar was the media, slowly subjugated by a pincer movement of government institutions and loyal oligarchs.
Legislation passed in 2011 created a Fidesz-controlled Media Council, which was empowered to impose fines for “unbalanced” reporting. This had a chilling effect on journalists.
At the same time, the regime distributed lavish subsidies and advertising contracts to pro-regime outlets. And loyal oligarchs acquired the last bastions of the Hungarian mainstream media. In 2016, one of Hungary’s most influential newspapers, Népszabadság, was purchased by a company linked to Mészáros and promptly shut down.
The culmination of this war of attrition was the creation of a massive media conglomerate, the Central European Press and Media Foundation. It came to control hundreds of media holdings donated by pro-regime businesses. The result was the consolidation of the regime’s control over an estimated 80% of Hungary’s media market.
Orbán justified this concentration of power by posing as a defender of Hungary’s sovereignty and traditional values against threats to the nation.
His rule was punctuated by a series of scare campaigns constructed around external threats – the philanthropist George Soros, the European Union, refugees and Ukraine. He used these threats to justify increasingly draconian controls over civil society and the domestic opposition.
What enabled opposition leader Péter Magyar to topple this system in Sunday’s election was the fact he was an insider.
As a moderate conservative and former Fidesz functionary, Magyar was not easy to stigmatise using the regime’s usual stereotypes. At the same time, he had deep knowledge of the inner workings of the system.
In early 2024, he broke with Fidesz during a massive scandal over a presidential pardon for a man convicted of covering up paedophilia in a children’s home. And he became an anti-corruption crusader.
On his Facebook page, Magyar reflected he had always believed in Fidesz’s vision of a “national, sovereign, civic Hungary”, but had slowly come to realise: “[…]this is really just a political product, a sugar coating that serves only two purposes: to conceal the operation of the power factory and to amass immense wealth”.
A few weeks later, he magnified the impact of this bombshell by releasing audio recordings of a conversation in which his ex-wife, former Justice Minister Judit Varga, discussed how Orbán’s Cabinet chief had organised the removal of files in a corruption case.
Before the Orbán regime had time to react, Magyar had emerged as the leader of an obscure centre-right party, Tisza, in the elections to the European parliament. In a blow to Fidesz, it came from nowhere to win 30% of the vote. The result transformed Magyar into the undisputed leader of Hungary’s democratic movement.
Magyar undermined the Orbán regime in two ways.
The first was to neutralise Orbán’s populist, anti-elitist politics by focusing on corruption. Magyar repeatedly drew attention to the luxurious estate at Hatvanpuszta, a 19th-century country estate and model farm that was massively redeveloped after 2018.
Although formally owned by Orbán’s father, Győző, it was widely believed to be a personal retreat of Viktor Orbán himself. Magyar called Hatvanpuszta “the heart of the system”, and likened it to one of Putin’s palaces.
The second was to reach out to Orbán’s rural heartland. In 2025, Magyar walked hundreds of kilometres in a series of political marches across the Hungarian countryside, visiting the small towns and villages that traditionally voted for Fidesz.
His party, Tisza, soon overtook Fidesz in the pre-election polls, but a peaceful transition of power was far from inevitable.
During its final years, the Orbán regime had became increasingly repressive. It used the security services to conduct a covert operation to penetrate the Tisza party’s computer servers. It also laid espionage charges against the country’s famous investigative journalist, Szabolcs Panyi, for exposing how Orbán’s foreign minister was collaborating with the Kremlin.
And a disinformation campaign, apparently of Russian origin, prepared the ground for a government crackdown by raising the spectre of post-election violence and attempts to assassinate Orbán.
But what broke the regime was the tidal wave of popular support for Magyar’s campaign. In the lead-up to the election, fractures began to emerge within the regime. A combination of whistleblower testimony and leaks from the security forces shone a spotlight on its abuses of power.
When the scale of Magyar’s victory became clear on election night, there was no room to dispute the verdict of the people. Orbán was finished.
This article first appeared on The Conversation.
Source: Scroll
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