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.

In his annual state of the nation address at the end of February, “looking back from the cooling shade of the American electoral victory”, Hungary’s Prime Minister reinforced his ideological alignment with Donald Trump by announcing draconian measures against those whom he rhetorically frames as enemies of his patriotic, illiberal agenda – NGOs, the LGBTQ+ community, the opposition, and independent media – and doctrinally entrenched himself alongside Trump on Ukraine and against migrants. Viktor Orbán considers Trump “the only man who can save the Western world, and probably the human beings on the globe as well”.