DEMOCRACY WATCHCould Viktor Orbán Be Back in 2030? Why Péter Magyar Has a Fight on His Hands After Landslide Win
Viktor Orban and his regime have been soundly and thoroughly repudiated by Hungary’s voters in a historic election last Sunday. But defeating Orbán will be a long-term project. A major challenge for the election winner, Peter Magyar, will be to undo the system Orbán has put in place over the past 16 years to exercise near total control over the country. A key component of that system is the extensive control over the media by Orban’s party, Fidesz.
The mood was jubilant among liberals and pro-Europeans in Hungary and beyond on April 13 as Péter Magyar led the Tisza party to a landslide election victory. His win ended the 16-year administration of Viktor Orbán’s pro-Russian Fidesz party. Given the high turnout and margin of victory, giving Tisza a two-thirds constitutional majority in parliament, the jubilant mood seems justified.
However, defeating Orbán will be a long-term project. While several centrist politicians around the world have successfully unseated governing far-right populists in recent years, fewer have been successful in keeping them at bay long term. Poland’s Donald Tusk and Joe Biden in the US are probably the most obvious examples of this struggle.
A major challenge for Magyar will be to undo the system Orbán has put in place over the past 16 years to exercise control over the country. A key component of that system is Fidesz’s extensive control over the media.
Research I have carried out alongside colleagues shows that, despite a semblance of pluralism, most Hungarian media outlets are now controlled by people close to Fidesz. The pro-Fidesz Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma) plays a particularly central role, controlling more than 500 national and local media outlets.
Here, the experience of Poland is informative. When Tusk’s center-right Civic Coalition replaced the populist, right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party as Poland’s governing coalition in December 2023, one of the first actions of the new government was to try and depoliticize public media.
In eight years of PiS government, Polish state media was accused of promoting the party’s policies and launched personal attacks on opposition figures, including Tusk. During a campaign rally months ahead of the election, Tusk said: “We will need exactly 24 hours to turn the PiS TV back into public TV. Take my word for it.”
And when in power, his government acted swiftly. It fired the supervisory boards of all three of Poland’s public media institutions – Polish Television, Polish Radio and the Polish Press Agency.
The PiS and its supporters quickly pushed back. PiS organized street protests and a sit-in at the public broadcaster, prompting the government to send in the police. This created an opportunity for PiS to denounce the new government’s action as an anti-democratic attack on the free press.
