Hungary: RW Orban Media Keeps Public in the Dark, 'Propaganda Factory,' Damages Democracy, Free Press
- 'How Hungary's Orban uses control of the media to escape scrutiny and keep the public in the dark,' AP News, July 31, 2024. - Edited.
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BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — In the months leading up to elections for the European Parliament, Hungarians were warned that casting a ballot against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would be a vote for all-out war. The right-wing Fidesz party cast the June 9 election as an existential struggle, one that could preserve peace in Europe if Orbán won — or fuel widespread instability if he didn’t.
To sell that bold claim, Orbán used a sprawling pro-government media empire that’s dominated the country’s political discourse for more than a decade.
The tactic worked, as it has since Orbán returned to power in 2010, and his party came first in the elections — though not by the margins it was used to. An upstart party, TISZA led by a former Fidesz insider, attracted disaffected voters and took 29% of the vote to Fidesz’s 44%. "Everything has fallen apart in Hungary. The state essentially does not function, there’s only propaganda and lies,” said Péter Magyar, the leader of that new party who has emerged in recent months as perhaps the most formidable challenge yet to Orbán’s rule.
Magyar’s Respect and Freedom, or TISZA, party campaigned on promises to root out deep-seated corruption in the government. He has also been outspoken about what he sees as the damage Orbán’s “propaganda factory” has done to Hungary’s democracy. Since 2010, Orbán’s government has promoted hostility to migrants and LGBTQ+ rights, distrust of the European Union, and a belief that Hungarian-American financier George Soros is engaged in secret plots to destabilize Hungary, a classic antisemitic trope.
The restriction of Hungary’s free press directly affects informed democratic participation.
Public television and radio channels consistently echo talking points communicated both by Fidesz and allied think tanks. Independent commentators rarely, if ever, appear. Political polarization can reach deep into private lives. In recent years, Andrea Simon, a 55-year-old from a suburb of Budapest, and her husband Attila Kohári began to drift apart — fed by Kohári’s steady diet of pro-govt. media. “He listened to these radio stations where they pushed those simple talking points, it completely changed his personality,” Simon said. “I felt sometimes he’d been kidnapped, and his brain was replaced with a Fidesz brain.”
In December, after 33 years of marriage, they agreed to divorce. “I said to him several times, ‘You have to choose: me or Fidesz,’” she said. “He said Fidesz.”...
https://apnews.com/article/hungary-media-democracy-orban-magyar-european-parliament-f6315d7cc252f210c360863de403054e
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This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series covering threats to democracy in Europe.