The ousting of Viktor Orbán by Hungarian voters on Sunday has ramifications far beyond what would normally be expected from an election in a small central European country.
European Union leaders will be relieved to see the back of a prime minister who persistently used his veto to block aid to Ukraine and who acted as Moscow’s uniquely useful ally inside the EU.
Ukraine’s government will be equally delighted that the €90 billion in EU funding previously frozen at Hungary’s insistence now looks set to be agreed. And election winner Péter Magyar’s promise that his first three trips as prime minister would be to Warsaw, Vienna then Brussels signals a fundamental reorientation in Hungarian foreign policy.
From a media perspective, the Orbán era deserves a reckoning of its own for what was done to journalism inside Hungary and for the regime’s many attempts to manipulate political discourse internationally.
Over his 16 years in power, Orbán systematically dismantled independent media at home. State broadcasters became party mouthpieces. Independent outlets faced advertising boycotts orchestrated by government-aligned businesses, legal harassment and regulatory pressure. Oligarchs allied with Orbán’s Fidesz party swallowed up hundreds of outlets into a single conglomerate.
[ Orbán’s defeat a blow to nationalist parties in advance of key European votes ]
Hungary, which ranked 40th in the Reporters sans Frontières press freedom index a decade ago, had fallen to 85th by last year. It became the first EU member state to be downgraded from “free” to “partly free” by Freedom House.
Last year, Orbán tried to consolidate this control still further with an Orwellian On the Transparency of Public Life Bill, which used the language of accountability to target investigative journalists, NGOs and independent researchers as “foreign-influenced” actors subject to investigation and sanction by a new government-controlled supervisory body.
More than 90 editors-in-chief across Europe signed a statement warning it could “effectively outlaw the free press”. Whether Magyar’s new government will formally withdraw it will be an early test of his intentions.
But even in that degraded media environment, independent journalism proved its worth in the final weeks of the campaign. The leaked recording of a conversation between the Hungarian and Russian foreign ministers, which demonstrated conclusively the degree to which Budapest had been acting as a conduit for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s interests, emerged regardless.
The end of the Orbán model
The media fallout from the Orbán era extends beyond Hungary and has received less attention than it deserves.
It became fashionable over the past decade in US conservative circles to argue that Hungary, a country of fewer than 10 million people, offered a template for US national revival in a second Trump term.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to look at events in the US over the past year – the acquisition of major media brands by Trump-friendly oligarchs, the rightward tilt of the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos, the overt threats to insufficiently pliant news organisations from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr – and notice the Hungarian parallels.
In the UK, the connections have been more direct. A detailed investigation published last week on the Democracy for Sale Substack by Budapest-based journalist Daniel Nolan laid out the infrastructure in full.
At its centre are two institutions, the Danube Institute, a Budapest think tank founded by the British-American conservative intellectual John O’Sullivan, and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Orbán’s so-called “pet university”, endowed in 2020 with a €1.7 billion transfer of state assets, including a 10 per cent stake in MOL, Hungary’s energy company, which sources roughly 65 per cent of its crude oil from Russia.
Through these bodies, a network of British commentators and media figures received regular payments in exchange for contractually specified deliverables. These included speeches, events and the placement of articles in named UK publications including GB News, The Spectator, The Critic and UnHerd.
[ Who is Peter Magyar, the man set to take over from Viktor Orbán in Hungary? ]
US writer Rod Dreher received $8,750 (€7,480) a month. Failed Reform UK byelection candidate Matt Goodwin was paid up to €10,000 monthly, according to leaked documents. David Oldroyd-Bolt, the Danube Institute’s London-based Anglosphere Fellow, appears regularly in the Daily Telegraph.
The Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, whose board includes Spectator editor and former UK government minister Michael Gove, has received more than £512,500 (€589,000) from MCC since 2023, representing more than 90 per cent of its total funding. MCC’s Brussels operation, pushing hard-right positions on EU policy, declared income of more than €6.3 million in 2024.
Some Irish figures also appear in this network. Dublin-born economist Philip Pilkington, who has affiliations with the Danube Institute and the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, has been a prolific pro-Orbán voice in Anglophone media. During the election campaign, he moved beyond commentary into political partisanship.
Barrister Laoise de Brún, founder of the gender-critical The Countess and more recently the public face of the Women’s Coalition on Immigration, was in Budapest last month to advocate for the adoption of Hungary’s natalist housing policies in Ireland.
What happens now to these activities?
Péter Magyar enters office with the parliamentary supermajority Orbán deliberately set as the bar for altering the laws he had passed. Magyar has explicitly committed to recovering state assets from MCC and ending the use of public funds for political network-building.
Fellowship contracts will probably not be renewed. Right-wing pundits will have to look elsewhere for their stipends (which probably won’t be too hard). The London events, the Brussels operation and the publication subsidies will come under pressure.
Beyond these financial supports, though, Orbán’s Hungary was an important proof of concept for the international illiberal right. He showed that this model could survive indefinitely inside a liberal democratic alliance. That example has now failed.
Orbán’s English-language supporters have been quick to argue that his defeat proves the government was not autocratic after all. But it’s more accurate to say it was the sheer scale of the Hungarian people’s rejection that overcame the regime’s corruption, intimidation and gerrymandering.
This week, Hungary offers a different, better model of democracy to the world.
