With less than a year to go until the next Hungarian parliamentary elections, Viktor Orbán’s Government appears to have a weak hand in its communications battles with its new political opponent, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party. To cover up the challenges it faces, the administration has turned up the heat under the independent media, NGOs, and opposition parties, playing from the same old authoritarian playbook of threatening a free civil society.
Orbán’s Fidesz has been Europe’s worst offender in terms of undermining the rule of law and civil rights during the past 15 years of its governance in Hungary, even when it has had no strong opponent. However, over the last couple of months, with challenger party Tisza taking the lead in many polls, the administration has accelerated its pace in introducing anti-democratic reforms catering to its own camp while creating further threats to independent civil society, media, and opposition stakeholders.
Visible signs of losing ground
Given the Tisza party’s lead in the polls among the general population for a few months now for the first time since Fidesz came to power in 2010, this “panic mode” should not come as a surprise. These latest rules for harassing civil society fit patterns most recently reinforced by PM Orbán at his 15 March public speech in Budapest marking the anniversary of the 1848 revolution. The populist Hungarian prime minister went as far as to speak of the need to bring a “spring cleaning” to the country. Orbán labelled as “parasites” those he called “bought politicians, judges, civilians, journalists, fake NGOs, political activists”, sparking outrage.
While the “banning of the Pride marches” in Hungary caught the most attention of the European media and public, a more recent development, the announcement of the suspiciously titled bill on the “transparency of public life”, could have a much more devastating effect on the rule of law, liberties, and democracy in Hungary. If passed by Parliament, it would authorize the Sovereignty Protection Office to place organizations receiving foreign funding on a blacklist. The scope of the bill suggests that EU grants, too, could be held back in case they pose a “threat” to national sovereignty.
The Sovereignty Protection Office was established by the Government to fierce international criticism at the end of 2023 with the aim of investigating any groups or individual recipients of foreign funding. This is the latest such attempt by the administration after the “NGO law,” which stigmatized independent civil society actors as representatives of foreign interests, was revoked after the European Court of Justice ruled it unlawful in June 2020.
Attacks on free media, civil society and oppression of vulnerable social groups
Also going relatively unnoticed was the recent further strengthening of what are already some of the harshest drug laws in Europe, according to Drugreporter.net, a website that supports evidence-based drug policy. Until now, drug users in Hungary could avoid criminal prosecution by participating in a six-month outpatient addiction treatment programme, but that will only remain an option if the drug user identifies the person who sells drugs to them to the authorities. The law also increases the range of the drugs for which possession qualifies as a felony instead of a misdemeanour to include essentially all non-prescription drugs and introduces much harsher punishments for anyone involved in selling them, giving no leeway to small-scale dealers.
Orbán’s policy radicalisation has resulted in laws which are shaping into a toolkit for the harsh, authoritarian-style oppression of his opponents. Several concerning instruments have now been legalised, such as using facial recognition software in the surveillance of protests; having the option of suspending the Hungarian citizenship of dual citizens with views opposed to official policy; listing, auditing, or monitoring opposition actors; forbidding any foreign funding to go to independent and opposition organisations; and extensively punishing or even imprisoning the leadership of such organisations for accepting such funding, which echoes the practices of any proper dictatorship.
To what extent will Fidesz use its anti-democratic powers?
The only remaining question, therefore, is whether Fidesz will use these tools to their full extent. Currently, both the sovereignty protection bill and the law restricting freedom of assembly (including Pride) are loaded guns in the hands of the Hungarian leadership, but it is far from certain they will fire them. Over the years, the Fidesz Government has put some hard-line Russian-style laws on the books, but did not end up applying them to their full potential. The 2021 Child Protection Law, very noteworthily, was an almost exact copy of its Russian counterpart adopted a few years earlier. Due to the loose phrasing of the Hungarian law, which is even harsher than the one in Russia, it could be used, for instance, to prevent the portrayal of any LGBTQ+ individuals or characters in the media from being broadcast at any time when children might see them.
While that law has had some devastating consequences, such as drastic cuts to school sex education or the self-censorship of many bookstores which decided to sell children’s books with LGBTQ+ characters under foil packaging, it has not yet resulted in the full disappearance of gay people from the media, which was well within the realm of possibility. In fact, most news programs and entertainment products continue to feature LGBTQ+ people, and fines from the Hungarian authorities are far from consistent on the matter, effectively limiting the scope and impact of this legal tool. Therefore, it is possible that if it becomes law, the current bill will also not be applied with the highest rigour and will serve mostly as a communications tools to signal to Fidesz’s own supporters and chill the speech of its opponents.
No prospect of settling disputes with the EU
Still, it is undeniable that Fidesz is amping up its populist politics in every possible sense. This communications “crisis mode” comes as no surprise: The economic prospects of Hungary are grim, public education and healthcare are in a disappointingly bad state, and the Government has managed to cut itself off from all major EU funds which had been earmarked for the country. The latter is a direct consequence of its long-stalled, unresolved rule of law disputes and infringements, the biggest being the full freeze on Hungary’s Covid Recovery and Resiliency Facility payments, which were blocked because the country failed to fulfil 28 rule-of-law “super milestones” to which the Government voluntarily committed.
The most recent reforms are just making these disputes worse. The ban on Pride was enshrined into law in March 2025, a move strongly condemned by the European Parliament in a 19 March 2025 resolution which read, in part: “This attempt to suppress peaceful assembly is an undeniable violation of basic rights enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and the values that bind our Union together, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights.”
A previous version of the sovereignty bill, far less excessive than the current proposal, and the establishment of the Sovereignty Protection Office were both already under an infringement proceeding by the Commission and were recently transferred to the ECJ, with 14 Member States and Norway joining the EC’s complaint.
The Hungarian Government is losing battles on other fronts, too, when it comes to Brussels. At the end of April, the EC announced that it has opened a case based on a legal complaint filed by independent publisher Magyar Hang in close cooperation with Kai-Uwe Kühn (Professor of Economics, Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia), titled Evidence for Illegal Selective State Aid to Media Outlets in Hungary.
EC lawyers now have to investigate whether or not 335 billion HUF [823 million EUR] in state advertising money was disproportionately spent on pro-Government and state media, ignoring any media market spending logic. If the European Commission lawyers come to the same conclusions as the professor did in his legal research, the affected pro-Government media companies might have to pay back up to 1.1 billion EUR, which could easily result in the bankruptcy of the highly-centralised Fidesz media conglomerate within three to five years (after a final ECJ decision).
In conclusion, the years of the EU’s moderating influence on Hungary’s democratic backsliding may be coming to an end. The Orbán Government no longer seems to show any interest in keeping up at least the pretence of democracy in the country and is implementing one authoritarian law after another. The question is what the EU can do if Orbán really chooses to crack down on the opposition. The EU has some tools, from its rule-of-law sanctions framework to Article 7 proceedings to address anti-democratic developments. However, the most the EU can do is take money away from undemocratic actors and shut them out from EU decision-making, none of which has seemed to faze Orbán so far.
