The Hungarian Government is giving itself the power to deprive any company or organisation of its revenues on the grounds of protecting the country's sovereignty. The hysteria against foreign agents is becoming insane. The main enemies are Ukraine and the EU institutions.
The bill, submitted to the Hungarian Parliament at 23:38 on 13 May by a Fidesz MEP, goes against all EU rule-of-law requirements. It is cynically entitled “Transparency of Public Life”, similar to the erstwhile Soviet Union’s Constitution on the “voluntary association” of its Member States. The bill violates the Hungarian Constitution and EU Treaties on several points; it is full of general clauses stretching its application to the limit. In a very complicated way, it allows the Hungarian Government to dissolve any enterprise, organisation, or association according to its own political considerations. This is not an exaggerated statement. Since the bill was published, protests have been voiced primarily by the press, by NGOs, and by lawyers critical of the Government, but politicians from the ruling party have taken a firm stand in favour of the bill. The latter say that the time has come to “expose foreign agents”.
It is impossible to summarise all the intricacies of the 25-page bill in a meaningful way, especially because the text is not meaningful in the first place. Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks could have produced a collection of legislation of similar quality - but this bill is real and is about to be adopted in a Member State of the European Union.
It started with the Sovereignty Protection Office
Here I will try to outline what worries me. There is an organisation in Hungary called the Sovereignty Protection Office, which is primarily engaged in research and in exposing Hungarian organisations which influence Hungarian political life in the interests of foreign powers. The European Commission has already initiated infringement proceedings against the law that allowed the creation of that office, and last October it went to the EU Court of Justice to have several paragraphs of the law annulled. The Commission believes that the office violates the right to respect for private and family life, freedom of expression and information, freedom of association, the right to legal professional privilege, the presumption of innocence, and the resulting prohibition on self-incrimination. The Commission also considers that the law infringes several fundamental freedoms of the internal market, the e-commerce directive, the services directive, and the EU data protection law.
I personally heard Tamás Lánczi, president of the Sovereignty Protection Office, saying that the revolution in Kyiv in 2014 was organised by the CIA, and when he was editor-in-chief of a weekly paper for a few months, he published a list of George Soros’s alleged agents in Hungary, people whose only crime was to criticise the Government. Among them was a university professor who had previously been a minister in Orbán’s administration. No evidence was provided, the Soros connection was generally a matter of speculation, and several of those on the list won their cases against the paper.
Well, under the leadership of that same man, the office is now empowered to draw up a list of any organisations (companies, associations, societies, whatever) which have both of the following characteristics: They have received money from abroad, and their activities are capable of “influencing public debate or the will of the electorate”. Yes, that is the definition. There is no limit on the amount of funding at issue, so theoretically such foreign funding could be a single euro given to the organisation by a non-Hungarian citizen, or even by a person with dual citizenship. There is also no restriction on the way the money might have been given: it can be a donation, but also a loan or income from a commercial activity, such as a Google Ad on the organisation’s website. The concept of “influencing public life” is also defined as broadly as possible. It can essentially cover the communication of any news or opinion.
Does that sound shocking? The best is yet to come. The list will go to the Government, which will then register, by decree, those whom it considers to be a threat to Hungary’s sovereignty. The registered organisations will never again be allowed to accept money from abroad. This must be checked jointly by the Hungarian tax authority’s anti-money laundering department and the banks that manage the organisations’ accounts. They will only be allowed to accept money (even 1 HUF, there is no lower limit) from a Hungarian citizen or company if the person paying the money makes a written statement (in front of two witnesses) that the money did not come from abroad. In addition, there are a number of other disadvantages for the organisations on the government’s list and their officials personally, but I will not bore the reader with the details of these.
EU grants are particularly suspect
The bottom line is that any entity on the Government’s list can be closed down this way. It will become technically impossible for them to have income from abroad. There is no meaningful recourse. If we take the wording of the bill seriously, there is no church, foundation, sports association, press group, political party, or civil society organization that cannot be put on the list, first by the Sovereignty Protection Office and then by the Government. Hungary is one of the most open economies in the world, with millions of dual citizens living outside its borders, and money from across the border reaches virtually everyone.
On the basis of the statements made so far, those who have received institutional support, for example by winning tenders from EU institutions, will be watched with particular scrutiny. In recent weeks, the Sovereignty Protection Office, which is still just conducting research, has uncovered alleged “disinformation campaigns”, such as a collection of articles and Facebook posts promoting Ukraine’s EU membership (the Hungarian Government opposes Ukraine’s EU membership), or alleged “corrupt practices” by USAID and the European Commission, as well as studies on foreign-funded practices by specific newspapers and NGOs undermining Hungarian sovereignty.
The validity of these claims goes something like this: According to newspaper X, those who raise issues of Hungarian corruption with EU institutions are right to do so, and since newspaper X won a grant from a foreign foundation (as was published by the newspaper itself), the office then announces that X’s journalists are foreign agents. The quality and content of these written arguments are reminiscent of the communist dictatorship’s denunciations in the 1950s. It has been difficult to take them seriously so far because such reports have had no consequences. If the bill becomes law, they will have consequences.
What does it all mean?
That this bill is even on the agenda says a lot.
The Government has absolutely no fear of either the Hungarian Constitutional Court or the President of the Republic, confident that they will not stand in the way of the law’s entry into force because the Government fully controls all state institutions.
The governing party is confident that its own MPs will vote for the bill without any problem and there are no members of the party who are committed (or openly committed) to democracy.
The Government does not care if the EU Court of Justice annuls the law. There are judgments from the EU Court of Justice which Hungary has not enforced since 2023, even taking the punishment of a €1 million per day fine. By the time a judgement to fine the country is made, the newspapers or organisations the Government wants to close down will no longer exist.
The Government is desperate. For the first time since Orbán came to power in 2010, there is an opposition party in Hungary that is polling as a contender to win the election. This party is probably the most important target of the bill.
The Government is behaving hysterically, not only with this bill, but also with its very strong propaganda against the Ukrainian state and EU institutions. In general, the stigmatisation of foreign influence is closely linked to the administration’s other measures and messages, which may foreshadow that the elections scheduled for spring 2026 will not be held properly on the grounds that sovereignty is allegedly at stake.
The unforeseeably broad mandate given by the new bill to shut down organisations and press outlets which criticise the Government could be a gun that is never fired, one just used to scare people. However, it could also transpire that by the end of the year, organisations criticising the Government will be systematically dismantled one by one. Hungary has long ceased to be a proper state governed by the rule of law, and if this bill passes, it will cease to be one at all.
