In the run-up to Hungary’s 2026 election, the battle for power is being fought not only at rallies, but also across billboards, TV studios, and Facebook feeds. After more than a decade of media capture under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, critics warn that the country’s tightly controlled media space risks turning the vote into a test not of political support, but of propaganda’s reach. Still, the question remains: what will happen afterwards
‘They lie to you with your money.’ In the first days of 2026, Budapest woke up to unfamiliar billboards. Across the city, posters showed recognizable faces of journalists and bloggers from Hungary’s pro-government media, each one gripping a fistful of banknotes.
The campaign was organized by the opposition party Momentum, and its message was blunt: these were ‘propagandists paid with public funds’, who would be mobilized to shape the outcome of the 2026 elections. Momentum, which has decided not to stand in the elections, said these billboards were only the beginning. Next would come a travelling exhibition, designed to bring “the truth” to voters who, in the party’s opinion, hear little beyond the government’s version of reality.
The stunt raised eyebrows, but it also tapped into a deeper unease: a growing sense that the media landscape has been so thoroughly captured by the state that elections are no longer fought on equal terms.
A media market remade
Since Orbán returned to power in 2010 with a parliamentary supermajority, his Fidesz party and its junior partner, the Christian Democrats (KDNP), have methodically reshaped Hungary’s media system. They overhauled Hungary’s media law, loyalists were installed at the media regulator, and control of the public broadcaster, MTVA, was consolidated. More than 1,000 journalists lost their jobs in the process.
The most dramatic shift came in 2018. Pro-government businesspeople donated dozens of outlets they had acquired over the years to a single entity, the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA). That pro-government media conglomerate is now numbering more than 470 outlets, all pushing variations of the same government narrative.
By 2025, even that process had not quite finished. Indamedia, a publisher also under government influence, bought Blikk, the country’s most-read tabloid. Not long after, the closure of Radio Free Europe Hungary was announced, coinciding neatly with Orbán’s visit to Donald Trump in Washington. The political message was hard to miss.
What has emerged is a propaganda system with barely any financial limits. In just the first six months of 2025, MTVA received around 80bn forints (€207m) in public funding. State advertising further props up the wider pro-government press. Because the Hungarian government is the country’s biggest advertiser, it effectively decides which outlets live and which struggle. Research by Mérték Media Monitor suggests up to 90% of state advertising money flows to pro-Fidesz media.
Working in the wreckage
Independent journalism has not disappeared from Hungary, but it survives under relentless financial and political pressure. Reporters are routinely denied access to information. They are excluded from press conferences, including those held by the prime minister. Ministries have quietly removed phone numbers from their websites, replacing them with centralised email addresses that often go unanswered.
Freedom of information requests are delayed or ignored, forcing newsrooms into lengthy legal battles. Some journalists have been targeted with Pegasus spyware. Smear campaigns against critical reporters have become more frequent, with senior Fidesz figures openly accusing them of acting as foreign agents.
The government’s newly created Sovereignty Protection Office has added an institutional side to this pressure, publishing reports which name and shame the journalists whom it claims undermine Hungary’s sovereignty. Alongside this, a draft bill on “transparency in public life” would allow the state to blacklist, financially cripple, or even shut down media outlets and NGOs receiving foreign funding. The legislation has been shelved for now, but few doubt it could be revived at short notice.
Many journalists have simply walked away from the profession. Those who stay sometimes describe themselves, half-jokingly, as “castaways”: survivors of newsrooms swallowed up by government-aligned owners. Advertising is scarce, wages are low, and financial precarity is the norm. To stay afloat, independent outlets have turned to paywalls, grants, and reader donations.
Escalation before the vote
With parliamentary elections scheduled for April 2026, most analysts expect the pressure to intensify. The trigger is Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider and the ex-husband of former justice minister Judit Varga, who now leads the newly formed Tisza party. Despite months of hostile coverage, opinion polls have shown Tisza building a double-digit lead over Fidesz – an alarming development for the ruling party, which is unused to serious electoral threats.
The playing field was never level to begin with. Public television and radio function as mouthpieces for the government. Opposition politicians are effectively absent, save for the legally-mandated five minutes of airtime before the elections. When members of the opposition do appear in the media, they are usually framed negatively. News distribution is tightly centralised: the state news agency supplies content not only to newspapers and broadcasters, but even for the short news bulletins aired on music radio stations.
As Magyar’s profile has risen, government-friendly outlets have moved quickly to discredit him. He is routinely portrayed as a puppet of foreign interests, whether Brussels bureaucrats or western political elites.
Last year, Index – once an independent news site, now part of the pro-government ecosystem – published what it claimed was an internal Tisza memo outlining plans to raise the income tax. The document appeared to be AI-generated. Magyar denied the claims and won the case in first instance court, but the story was repeated across government media, becoming the basis of a coordinated campaign.
The tabloid Bors even announced plans to distribute four million free copies of a special issue warning readers about the so-called “Tisza tax”. A court temporarily blocked the distribution. Bors responded by accusing the judiciary of attacking press freedom, while members of the government themselves began handing out copies of the banned issue.
The online front
Control is tightening online too, mainly over social media. Fidesz has long dominated Facebook, where Orbán has more than 1.5 million followers and government posts are routinely boosted. According to the thinktank Political Capital, €10.6m was spent on political advertising by late September 2025, with government-linked actors responsible for 87% of that total.
When Meta, which owns Facebook, stopped running paid political ads in the EU in October 2025, Fidesz barely slowed things down there, but started to use new methods. The party founded pro-government “digital civic circles” – basically a network of commenters amplifying approved messages. Bloggers and influencers have been drawn into the system, targeting younger voters in particular, a group in which the government is deeply unpopular.
Against the odds
Without comparable resources, Magyar and other opposition figures have little choice but to improvise. The leader of Tisza relies heavily on social media, appears frequently in the remaining independent press, and spends much of his time on the road. Even so, Fidesz’s media dominance is beginning to show in the polls. By December 2025, Tisza’s lead had narrowed, helped by generous cash handouts targeted at pensioners, women, and rural voters. But new polls in January again showed a clear Tisza lead.
Rural Hungary remains especially difficult territory for the opposition. Older voters outside the cities rely heavily on public television and use the internet less, making them more vulnerable to disinformation. With public and regional media firmly under its control, Fidesz can deliver its message to them with ease, whether the topic is the opposition or the war in Ukraine.
Tisza’s response has been limited, but energetic. The party has begun distributing a free newspaper, and Magyar has embarked on an almost continuous tour of towns and villages. Whether this can counter a state-backed propaganda machine remains uncertain.
Free but not fair
The OSCE’s election monitoring mission in 2022 concluded that Hungary’s elections are undermined by the absence of a level playing field. With media control now tighter than ever, there is little reason to expect a different verdict in April 2026.
The European Union’s leverage is limited. Infringement proceedings have been launched under the European Media Freedom Act and against Hungary’s sovereignty law, but neither case will reach a decisive stage before the elections in April. Even shutting the Sovereignty Protection Office would only marginally ease pressure on journalists.
What happens afterwards is just as unclear. Another Fidesz victory would confirm that their strategy works and independent media might expect conditions to deteriorate further. A win for Magyar would open up a different set of problems. Without a two‑thirds majority, dismantling the propaganda system would be slow and politically fraught. The party leader has promised not to shut down pro-government outlets, but says their state funding would end. He also insists he does not want to replace one loyalist public broadcaster with another, but to rebuild a genuinely balanced one – a task that would inevitably involve sweeping changes to staffing and structure.
Either way, the damage is already visible. According to the Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report, trust in news media in Hungary is the lowest in Europe. Just 23% of respondents said they trust most news most of the time. Reversing that collapse in confidence, whoever wins in 2026, is likely to take many years.
