Before the elections on April 12, a scandal engulfed the Hungarian government. On leaked recordings, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó can be heard deferentially acquiescing to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and passing on information from EU meetings. Szijjártó appeared willing to help the Kremlin’s cause in Brussels, to remove oligarchs and their relatives from the EU blacklist, and to block efforts to aid Ukraine. Hungary’s advocacy for the Kremlin’s agenda culminated in its recent veto of fresh sanctions on Russia and over $100 billion in loans to Ukraine. On X, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union, Victor Orbán and his foreign minister left Europe long ago.” And the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin described Szijjárto’s calls with Lavrov as both “sinister” and “alarming.”

Szijjárto alleged that “foreign intelligence services, with the active involvement of Hungarian journalists, have been intercepting my phone calls.” It is a plot, the Hungarian government claims, to influence the upcoming polls. Orbán directly blames Ukraine for seeking to unseat his government. The opposition, led by Peter Magyar, has a healthy lead in the polls and describes the Hungarian government’s closeness to the Kremlin as “treason.” According to European intelligence reports, Moscow sent a three-person team to Hungary, overseen by Putin confidant Sergei Kiriyenko who ran an operation to interfere in the Moldovan election back in September. His tactics encompassed “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.” A Kremlin-linked media consultancy, facing EU sanctions, was hired to dismiss Magyar as a Brussels stooge and portray Orbán as the only candidate strong enough to to be treated as an equal by world leaders, as evidenced by the strength of his relationship with Trump. 

Despite a war with Iran that doesn’t appear to be going entirely to plan, the U.S. president took time out to back Orbán with enthusiasm and at considerable length on Truth Social. Trump said Orbán was “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER.” JD Vance, the vice president, is scheduled to visit Hungary on April 7, just five days before the election. And secretary of state Marco Rubio went to Hungary in February. It is now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy to work towards “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” To that end, notes the U.S. government, “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Orbán speaks MAGA’s language on immigration, traditional values and the Christian essence of Western societies. He is, like Putin and Trump, in MAGA’s view, an implacable opponent of secular, progressive, globalist politics as symbolised by Brussels.

Orbán, the longest serving current head of government in the EU, has become a figurehead for populist, nationalist movements across the world. The recent CPAC Hungary summit was attended by several of these leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders,who called Orbán “a lion on a continent led by sheep.” Latin American leaders close to Trump , including Javier Milei of Argentina and Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, also attended. Milei, who gave the longest speech at the summit, said Orbán was “a beacon for all… who refuse to accept that the West's destiny is one of managed decline.” This international network, with the United States and Russia included, has a vested ideological interest in seeing Orban continue to remain a thorn in the EU's side. 

But what can Brussels do? The answer, it appears, is not much. The EU is consensus driven; it needs all its parts to act in concert, giving holdouts like Orbán considerable power to hold the whole bloc hostage. But given Orbán’s prominence as an ideologue, when Hungary blocks sanctions or delays support for Ukraine, it is more than a single nation going rogue. Alice Weidler, co-chair of the far-right AfD, the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag, was among those who spoke at the CPAC Hungary conference last month. Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, is an Orbán ally. On April 19, Bulgaria will have its eighth general election in just five years. Former president Rumen Radev’s new Progressive Party leads the polls and shares Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, anti-EU inclinations.

So polarized is the Hungarian election, that right wing groups are deploying their own observers from Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Tanzania and the United States to monitor proceedings. EU observers have said the Hungarian government controls the national media and a recent documentary alleges that a desperate government is resorting to vote-buying, gerrymandering and intimidation tactics. It’s hard to see how either Orbán or Magyar will accept the election result without protest, unless the margin is crushing. But, given Trump’s disdain for NATO allies and the EU, an Orbán election defeat would be a much-needed victory for European unity. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Only if you’re lucky, will you catch a glimpse of him. He swoops in and then disappears, now giving his blessing to newlyweds at a sunrise shaman wedding, next whispering in the ear of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s loyal allies. Moments later, he reappears on horseback, trotting by in a procession of horsemen in medieval garb — Hungarian flag in hand, his long black hair tied in a low ponytail, — to greet high profile guests from Turkey, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

Andras Biro is the master of ceremonies for a biennial gathering, in Hungary, of 27 Turkic-speaking tribes called Kurultaj. It is where the right-wing government is promoting a policy of redefining itself as part of the Eastern world. Wrapped in a heavily embroidered silk robe, Biro is the leading ideologue of Hungary’s spin on ethno-nationalism: it asserts that the nation’s true roots are not in a Christian Europe but with Turkey and among the Turkic-speaking people of Central Asia, the descendants of the Huns.

Once banned under communism and pushed to the margins of the far right, this alternative history — known as Turanism — is being revived by the Hungarian government at the highest levels. Some of the central claims of Turanism have already made their way into Hungary’s national school curriculum, presenting an alternative Hungarian origin story. For Orban, Turanism has provided a convenient ideological basis for turning away from the EU and promoting closer ties with authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and with Turkey. In November, he said that “Hungarians are the only Eastern people left in Europe.”

The Kurultaj gathering is a mecca for this anti-establishment movement. The festival is financed by the government and designed for a family-friendly weekend. Kurultaj draws pilgrims from across the political spectrum to a scorching semi-desert in Hungary’s south. Right-wing historians, LARPers, horse-lovers, uniformed members of the banned Hungarian Guard, eco-activists, committed neo-Nazis, yogis and families from the suburbs mill around a vast, dusty field with hundreds of delegates from Central Asia, Turkey and the Caucasus.

The centerpiece is an irrigated, verdant pitch where skilled riders re-enact Byzantine battles and compete in ethnosport. An actor playing Attila the Hun makes regular dashes across the field on horseback to cheers from the crowd in between speeches from a range of special guests — among them youngest son of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with the former prime minister of Turkey, speaker of Hungary’s parliament Laszlo Kover and the president of the Organization of Turkic States. The sounds from the field are a constant echo across the festival grounds: heavy metal and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, the boom of speakers’ voices intoning the moral corruption of the West and its “woke” culture and the ever-present percussion of horse hooves.

Largely dismissed by Hungary’s liberal elite, Turanism proponents — like Biro — have reinvigorated an ideology that was popular nearly 100 years ago. The idea first appeared in Hungary in the late 19th century, during a time of political collapse, when a circle of Budapest intellectuals began to question Hungary’s fixation with catching up with the West.

Historian Balazs Ablonczy traces the emergence of the word “Turan” in Hungarian to the 1800s, to describe the territory that is divided between modern-day Iran and Central Asian states. Turanism reemerged during the 2008 economic crisis from the margins of Hungary’s ultra-right wing. Over the last decade, Turanism has evolved into an amalgam of ideas bringing together disparate and at times contradictory beliefs. 

In their weaponization of nostalgia, Orban and his political party Fidesz have shown just how well they understand what is often lost on Hungary’s, and Europe’s, left wing: the power of a good story.

“The left wing has left history to Fidesz,” said Adam Kolozsi, a Budapest-based journalist who has been attending Kurultaj for years. Since the first gathering in 2008, event organizers — who refer to themselves as “tradition keepers” — have been fusing together right-wing politics with history, entertainment and horses. 

Turanic messaging expresses a yearning for a lost national greatness and a connection to a much larger role in the world, which a pan-Turkic identity offers. “Even if we’re small at the moment, we are a great nation,” one festival attendee, Mate Herzsenath, told me while drinking a beer. Herzsenath lives in Germany, where he says he can make more money, and was one of many Hungarians I met living outside of the country who returned home for Kurultaj.

“The entire 19th century was all about westernizing Hungary — inventing Hungarians as civilized, liberal, western, constitutional individuals,” said Gergely Romsics, a senior fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Many proponents of Turanism view those efforts as criminally wrongheaded and consider the Hungarian defeat in World War I, which brought the loss of 75% of its territory, as proof.

Hungary is not alone in its turn east. Turanism is in step with a similar movement called Eurasianism in Russia, a pet project of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that argues that Russia is the heir apparent of the Mongol empire, destined to keep expanding its borders. In promoting kinship with the East and fostering a yearning for a greater past, both Putin and Orban stoke a popular mandate for embracing authoritarianism. The Huns, after all, didn’t conquer the world with democracy.

Since 2008, the crowds at Kurultaj have multiplied, and an entire academic and political apparatus has sprouted around the idea of a Turkic brotherhood.

Hungary's pride

The day before marching out onto the main pitch at the festival in his knee-high leather boots and sparkling silver and turquoise jewelry, Biro spoke before Hungary’s parliament, in a suit, about the importance of preserving traditions. 

For the next three days in the sweltering mid-August heat, I chased the tails of Biro’s floor-length, blue-and-silver robes, hoping he could explain how he managed to bring 200,000 visitors (according to the official event count, though it appeared to be fewer than half this number to me) to a festival celebrating the genetic ties between white European Hungarians and Asian, Turkish and Middle Eastern nations. After all, this year’s Kurultaj festival followed remarks from Orban in which he asserted that Hungarians are not “a mixed race” and that countries where Europeans and non-Europeans mingle are “no longer nations.” It made no sense.

I caught sight of Biro as he prepared the seating arrangements in the VIP section along the main parade pitch. He adjusted the angle of chairs and name tags, giving out directions to an assistant. The biggest names this year were prominent speakers from Turkey and Central Asian countries. But many festival attendees seemed wary of the politicians. The men — all of the invited speakers were men — were easy to spot as they sweated through their crumpling business suits and moved through the festival grounds with entourages and security details.

Many attendees, on the other hand, wore colorful native clothing from various continents. One couple I met had borrowed their elaborate costumes from the local theater where they worked. “It’s difficult to live in modernity,” Balazs Lengyel told me. “It’s gray and empty.” He and his wife Erika Lengyelne attend Kurultaj every year to be reborn at the gathering. Balazs seemed lost in thought as he spoke to me of his longing for a link to a shared past. Erika was more direct: “We are opposed to the EU. We have nothing to do with the West. It’s all a lie made up during communism. Fifty years of communism took away our pride.”

Katrin Kremmler has studied Kurultaj since 2014. She is now finishing her PhD on the subject at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University. Kremmler and I met up in Budapest where she had traveled from Berlin to attend the festival with a Hungarian friend. Before driving over to Kurultaj, she warned the friend to tear off a LGBTQ bumper sticker, worried about the car being vandalized while parked.

As a seasoned Kurultaj attendee, Kremmler had a few other pre-Kurultaj tips. I had asked her about fitting in at the festival, and she kindly sent over a couple addresses for Kurultaj lifestyle shopping in Budapest. 

In one shop in central Budapest I found head-to-toe traditional Hungarian costumes for sale, along with the legendary Hungarian sudar: a bull whip up to eight feet in length. The end of the whip makes a sonic boom as it reaches the speed of sound. Hungarians claim that it’s the first human-made tool to cross the sound barrier, and it’s a staple at Kurultaj for both the professional horse riders and drunk attendees taking a crack.

There were also more modern clothing options: black t-shirts with a Christian cross stenciled next to “HETERÓ,” shirts with the slogan “Europe Belongs to Me” and multiple apparel options showing maps of “greater Hungary.” Orban has been spotted in a scarf that shows a map of Hungary with its imperial territories intact, which includes parts of modern-day Ukraine, Romania, Austria, Serbia and other countries. At another Turanism shop, this time on the Buda side of the city, I looked through a collection of anti-Covid lockdown buttons next to more anti-LGBTQ slogans and adverts for a children’s summer camp.

“Everyone finds something that they like and tunes out what they don’t identify with,” said Kremmler, trying to explain the mish-mashing of ideologies brought together by Kurultaj and Turanism. Her PhD focuses on the contradictions within the right wing’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and its embrace of Eurasia. She noted that Bugac, the village where the festival takes place, is about an hour’s drive from Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, a major corridor for migrants from the Middle East attempting to enter the EU. Men dressed in the all-black uniforms of the Hungarian Guard, a paramilitary group outlawed in 2009, patrolled the festival grounds.

Kremmler believes that for years Hungary’s liberal elite failed to understand Turanism. Today, the festival is able to attract top researchers from the Hungarian National Museum and other academic institutions. This is also the first year she’s managed to convince any of her Budapest friends or colleagues to join her at Kurultaj.

“It’s parallel realities,” said Kremmler. “Urban liberal elites think they can ignore these developments because they consider it pseudoscience. But it’s not fringe. It’s the new mainstream because the government is working hard to make this the new popular mainstream.”

Some of the claims of the Turanism movement have now entered Hungary’s schools. Curriculum updates in 2020 included an intense focus on medieval history and introduced alternatives to Hungary’s accepted consensus on its national origins. Hungarians had learned that their language is most closely related to the languages spoken by the Finno-Ugric people found in Finland and Estonia and by indigenous tribes living in Russia. 

When this was first discovered by scholars in the 18th century, it came as a bit of a shock. Surrounded by German, Slavic and Romanian speakers, some people found it “degrading,” said Gabor Egry, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political History in Budapest. It also encouraged a sense of ethnic uniqueness. 

The new school curriculum introduces the idea that the origin of the Hungarian language is up for debate and that Hungarians may in fact be closer relatives of the Turkic-speaking tribes originating in Kazakhstan. 

Archaeogenetics, a field of research championed by Biro, is supercharging the argument that Hungarians came from Central Asia. Archaeogenetics relies on gathering a set of historic DNA samples — sometimes centuries old — that the researchers evaluate as representative of an entire population. The research requires expensive equipment that the government has helped to fund, to look at DNA samples from the 9th and 10th centuries. The field often faces criticism on how the results are interpreted. 

“It fits this broader rewriting of history: a more nationalistic, more triumphalist narrative which must emphasize Hungarian victories and greatness,” Egry said. ”Emphasizing these Eastern origins could imply that Hungary belongs to this emerging world and not the declining one.”

The new history was played on repeat at Kurultaj.

“Everything they were teaching at school is not true,” said Malinda Kovacs, who described herself as a proud Hungarian, a mother and a homemaker, is captivated by Native American traditions and had a full-back tattoo showing the busts of several Native American men.

Hungary’s school curriculum changes also included replacing the works of writer Imre Kertsz — a Hungarian Jew who is the country’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature — with the assigned reading of Jozsef Nyiro, an admirer of Joseph Goebels, and Albert Wass, a convicted war criminal. Some teachers have protested online under the hashtag #noNAT, as part of a wider movement of ongoing teacher unrest in the country. 

Memory warfare

Kremmler, the Berlin academic, has studied 21st-century Turanism and its leader, Andras Biro, who has a PhD and is affiliated with the Hungarian Museum of Natural Sciences.

"When Biro started his whole genetics project I guess this could have been contested if someone from the genetics field, in Hungary or internationally, had actually taken the time or energy to review his research,” she told me over lunch in Budapest. Instead, critics of his work came almost exclusively from among scholars in the humanities who didn’t engage with the genetic research he was touting.

“This is about a new construct of ethnicity that the government is producing,” Kremmler said. 

Kremmler, whose mother is Hungarian, first came to Hungary in the 1990s to learn the language and join the academic community. She remembers it as an exciting time, a period of critical research burgeoning in the wake of communism. She’s now watching the pendulum swing the other way.

“It’s all really fascinating, unless it’s happening in your own country,” said Margit Feischmidt, laughing when we met at the Research Center for Social Sciences in Budapest, where she is the head of sociology and anthropology. I told her about some of my Kurultaj-themed shopping earlier that day. “It’s fascinating, and at the same time catastrophic,” said Feischmidt. Over three decades, she has watched an exodus of researchers from Hungary who leave out of an unwillingness to collaborate with the government.

When I finally caught up with Biro at Kurultaj, it was in the large yurt at the festival where the guest speakers convened for meetings. He has just finished a closed session with some of the guests from Turkey and Central Asia, among them President Erdogan’s youngest son.

“There has already been cooperation in the field of science or sport and now it’s on a political level,” Biro said, smiling with his white teeth flashing.

“From several thousands kilometers away, a Kazakh or an Uzbek comes over here and they do everything as we do, they understand everything: the common legends, the names, the ceremonies, the food,” Biro said. “Besides, legends don’t come from nowhere.”

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USA

By Rebekah Robinson

Curriculum standards and content have been subject to tense debate in the U.S. for decades. These standards vary from state to state, even down to the granular level from school district to school district.

Often these debates are pedagogical. In times of change or upheaval, though, the school curriculum reflects the divisions in society and in its politics and culture.

In July, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill went into effect, limiting what teachers can say in the classroom about gender and sexual orientation all the way up to the 12th grade. Additionally, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” (ruled by a Florida judge last week to be unconstitutional) went into effect ahead of the new school year, blocking conversations around race deemed to be “critical race theory.”

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said, “This deeply disturbing legislation aims to censor educators and prevent them from valuing, affirming and supporting our students,” and that “politicians are manufacturing false narratives about young people — and then proposing unconstitutional, discriminatory and just plain harmful ‘solutions’ to nonexistent problems.”

Earlier this year, several thousand math textbooks were recalled in Florida. Not because of mathematical errors but because they had been flagged for containing material that could be considered “critical race theory.” The books were returned to the publisher to address the content contravening the restrictive legislation.

Parents also now have more control in some Florida counties to contest material they believe to be inappropriate for their children, enabling additional and arbitrary censorship of educational content. Books in Florida counties are being censored in libraries and now carry warning labels for LGBTQ content. Stories that feature characters of color are being flagged as “unsuitable for students.”

Florida’s legislative activism has catalyzed conservative lawmakers in Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia, among others, to also attempt to prohibit teaching “divisive topics.” The answer to alleged “cultural indoctrination,” these legislators appear to be arguing, is more indoctrination.

Hungary

By Katia Patin 

Amid the turmoil of Hungary’s Covid-19 crisis in September 2020, the government rolled out a new curriculum with a mandate for schools to stick close to the new centralized teaching recommendations. The biggest changes were made to literature and history instruction, with the updates aligning with the ruling party Fidesz’s rehabilitation of nationalist figures with anti-Semitic pasts. 

For example, assigned reading included the work of Hungarian writers such as Jozsef Nyiro and Albert Wass. In addition to his short stories and novels, Nyiro was known for being an admirer of Joseph Goebbels and in 1940 he joined parliament as a member of an ultra-right, anti-semitic party. Wass, a novelist and poet whose work was banned until the fall of communism in 1989, was a convicted war criminal. Both men have had statues and streets named after them in recent years and were introduced into curriculum at the expense of authors such as Imre Kertesz, Hungary’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature.

In history textbooks, medieval wars got more page time with critics saying myth and legends were being presented as fact and history. There is now greater emphasis placed on victories won in the 10-14th centuries and the idea that Hungarians are the descendants of Turkic speaking people, rather than the previously established consensus of Finno-Ugric roots (shared by Finns, Estonians and some indigenous groups in Russia). These new changes highlighted that the established narrative of Hungary’s ancient past taught under communism was up for reinterpretation. 

Following the changes, protesters across social media used the slogan #noNAT to organize against the teaching of fascist writers with some teachers banding together to voice their opposition to having to revise their lessons.

India

By Shougat Dasgupta

Students in Indian schools are being provided with new, slimmed down textbooks for classes such as history, political science and sociology. It is, says the government, an exercise in "rationalization." The pandemic has meant that Indian schoolchildren, like many around the world, have fallen behind. So, the government wants to lighten the load.

This means — a national newspaper revealed — removing chapters from textbooks on the Gujarat riots of 2002 in which nearly a 1,000 Muslims were killed and tens of thousands displaced over three days of violence. The state authorities, led at the time by current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stood by, seemingly twiddling its thumbs. 

"The approach I gather is in conformity with the theories of Hindutva," Romila Thapar, the nonagenarian professor emeritus, and arguably the world's preeminent expert on ancient India, wrote archly to me about the proposed revisions. These include eliminating, diluting, and changing the wording of sections to do with Mughal history, caste discrimination, democratic functions and even periods of authoritarian rule in India such as Indira Gandhi’s infamous “Emergency” in the 1970s.

When governments change in India, it  is not unusual that textbooks change. But since Narendra Modi came to power eight years ago, the changes to textbooks, dozens of public intellectuals like Thapar have asserted in an open letter, reflect a "Hindu first" worldview.

Modi leads the BJP, a political party that is ideologically committed to a Hindu India — like a number of affiliated cultural and political organizations known collectively as the Sangh Parivar — rather than the secular country India chose to become in 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned.

As Thapar put it in her email to me, "since the political aim of the Sangh Parivar is to establish a Hindu Rashtra (nation) then the attempt will be to project history as a support for this political change." A history that must necessarily avoid India’s complexities, its many wafer-thin layers, each bleeding into the other.

It is, wrote historian S. Irfan Habib in June, "a historical fact that India has been a palimpsest." The BJP, though, appears to want to scrawl over and obscure centuries of text with a permanent marker.

Egypt

By Masho Lomashvili

Truth in Egypt has long been under attack. Deception and manipulation have been part of Egyptian politics long before the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, organized a coup d'état and seized power eight years ago.  

But the Arab Spring in 2011 offered hope of an end to authoritarian rule, and the real possibility of democracy. El-Sisi plunged Egypt back into the strongman era it had hoped to escape. He is in the process of completing the job by reducing the Arab Spring to a footnote in revised textbooks.

Will schoolchildren in Egypt no longer be made aware that Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the iconic heart of the protests that swept through North Africa and the Arab world?

Pupils in Egyptian schools once had a full chapter in their textbooks devoted to the events of the Arab Spring. Under el-Sisi, that chapter has become a deliberately misleading, confusing paragraph.

The “Modern Egyptian and Arab history” curriculum taught to secondary level students significantly underplays the Arab Spring. It was a people’s revolution, an outpouring of anger at decades of authoritarian rule in which corruption was rife and dissent was brutally crushed.

There is no mention in these textbooks of the nearly 1,000 protestors who died in 2011 as a result of police brutality. Anwar, now 31, remembers the events of 2011 very well. “It was the first time people felt their power,” he told me. “And Sisi wants them to forget this feeling.” 

According to Anwar, the Arab Spring had set an example that revolution was possible. “During Mubarak’s time,” he says, referring to the 30 years Egypt spent under the thumb of Hosni Mubarak culminating in the events of 2011, “when people talked about protests, it wasn't really seen as a threat to the government. It was because a successful revolt hadn't happened before.” Now, though, he adds, “the government knows that the people are capable of succeeding and they're scared that it might happen again.”

Serbia

By Frankie Vetch

In July 1995, Serbian paramilitaries and Bosnian Serbs from the Army of Republika Srpska marched into the town of Srebrenica and massacred thousands of Bosnian Muslims. The event was the pinnacle of a bloody war that split apart the former Yugoslavia. 

In 2004 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that what happened in Srebernica qualified as genocide. But, as recently as in 2020, textbooks in Serbia, while containing an acknowledgement that war crimes had happened in Srebrenica, stopped short of describing the massacres as genocide and questioned the accuracy of the death toll.

According to Marko Milosavljević, Programme Coordinator at the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, “there is still a big policy of denial of the genocide in Srebrenica.” Years ago, he told me, “they used to say that Srebrenica didn’t happen at all. Now over the last decade, the authorities don’t say ‘nothing happened,’ they just deny the implications of the genocide.”

In 2017, Milorad Dodik, who was at the time the President of the Republic of Srpska, stated that no textbooks should ever teach students about the Srebrenica genocide, nor the siege of Sarajevo. Textbooks only briefly mention Srebrenica as a place where Bosnian Serbs conquered. The textbooks also only refer to Serbs and not Croats or Muslims as victims of ethnic cleansing.

Serbian textbooks have also failed to mention the state’s role in committing war crimes in the 1990s against Kosovans. Dodik, now the Serb member of the three-member Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina (which serves as the collective head of state), has repeatedly called for the Republic of Srpska to secede from the rest of the country. 

With tensions rising in the region, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with a new generation of ethnic-Serbs in Serbia and the Republic of Srpska being taught little to nothing about war crimes committed against Muslims and Kosovans in the 1990s, there is an ever-present danger of history repeating itself.

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“Viktor Orbán of Hungary truly loves his Country and wants safety for his people,” Trump wrote on January 3 in an endorsement of Orbán’s bid to be reelected in Hungary’s race for prime minister to take place in April or May of this year. “He is a strong leader and respected by all.” 

Early on in Trump’s political career, his praise of an authoritarian leader would have raised eyebrows. His admiration of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un at first vexed and infuriated Republicans. But after years of coming to the defense of despots around the world, Trump’s embrace of authoritarians has become a defining characteristic of his foreign policy. From Jair Bolsonaro to Orbán, Trump emerged as the leader of a group of wily, "soft" authoritarians who de-legitimize elections, demonize the press and take a xenophobic approach to immigration. 

I spoke to experts on authoritarianism to understand why Trump’s endorsement of Orbán isn’t just more flattery. 

Trump is known for publicly praising authoritarians from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to China’s Xi Jinping. Is it saying the quiet part aloud — authoritarians stick together? 

It’s no secret that Trump has a soft spot for authoritarians, and he has shown his support for autocrats facing reelection before. In 2020, Trump endorsed Polish President Andrzej Duda, who weaponized homophobia to fuel his campaign. He continued the practice even after he left office and endorsed Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in October 2021. “Brazil is lucky to have a man such as Jair Bolsonaro working for them,” Trump wrote. 

Trump has admitted that he sees himself in Orbán. According to David Cornstein, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary under the Trump administration, the former president compared Orbán to a twin brother when the two leaders met in 2019. 

“Trump correctly believes that Orbán is fighting the same forces as Trump fought in America: democratic institutions, a free press, an independent judiciary, ethics rules, and opponents who still try to insist on democracy and rule of law. Birds of a feather flock together,” said Brian Klaas, an associate professor of global politics at the University College London and author of “How to Rig an Election.” 

Have other former U.S. presidents endorsed foreign leaders? 

Yes. Former President Obama endorsed Emmanuel Macron in 2017 during the French presidential election which pitted Macron against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. But it’s not a common practice for a U.S. president to endorse a candidate in a foreign election once they’ve left office.

Are there elements of Hungary’s style of authoritarianism reflected in Trump’s way of governing? 

“Authoritarians learn from one another,” Klaas wrote in an email to me. “Their playbooks draw on similar tactics: attack the press, demonize opponents, particularly if they're ethnic or religious minorities, engage in nepotism and cronyism, undermine rule of law, steal, blame your opponents for the things that you're guilty of, and attempt to subvert free and fair elections.” 

All of this is characteristic of both Orbán and Trump.

What about the GOP more broadly? 

The embrace of Hungarian-style authoritarianism isn’t limited to Trump. It’s a facet of the GOP, argues David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of "Laboratories of Authoritarianism."

Hungary is a competitive authoritarian country where the facade of democracy hides an autocratic reality. Elections take place, but districts are heavily gerrymandered and mail-in voting rules favor Orbán’s supporters. The government controls the national election agency and packs the courts with conservative allies. 

Pepper sees similar patterns in the U.S. He points to Ohio, where Republicans in the state legislature pushed to change the election process for judges to require candidates' party ID on the ballot. Or Wisconsin and Georgia where the Republicans have fought to take control of the states’ electoral commissions. 

Orbán’s brand of competitive authoritarianism is “a system where they cling to keeping an appearance of legitimacy while predetermining all the outcomes,” said Pepper. “And that’s, I think, the closest parallel to what we see in so many states, and if those states and people like Trump have their way, what we would see nationally.”

It’s not a coincidence that Hungary shares anti-democratic strategies like gerrymandering with the U.S. In fact, Hungarian autocrats have learned from the GOP, argues Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative journalist with the independent newsroom Direct36.

“I think Orbán learned a lot from Republican policies and also mostly from Republican spin doctors. So it’s Orbán who has been importing and implementing Republican tactics into Hungarian politics, not the other way around,” said Panyi. 

Other people in Trump’s inner circle have been friendly towards Orbán recently. Tucker Carlson took a trip last summer to Hungary where his interview with Orbán made headlines. What does this say about the GOP and Trumpism right now? 

Trump’s support of Orbán ahead of Hungarian elections goes beyond his praise of Bolsonaro or Putin, argues Klaas. “The authoritarian Republican base has made Orbán into a sort of folk hero,” he said. “They have created a false caricature of Orbán as some sort of conservative who defends Western values, rather than as a racist, anti-Semitic authoritarian who is using state power to destroy dissent while steadily enriching himself.”

In August 2021, Tucker Carlson took his viewers to Hungary to show off what he claimed was an exemplar of conserviatve nationalism. In a full week of coverage and one-on-one interviews with Orbán himself, Carlson praised the crackdowns on immigration and the pro-family stance that has fostered blanently homophobic policies.

On a visit to the Hungarian capital in September 2021, Former Vice President Mike Pence praised Orbán’s restrictive abortion policies. 

“Hungary has become the GOP’s new model in terms of racist demographic politics and electoral autocracy,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy. 

It isn’t a coincidence, Ben-Ghiat argues, that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual gathering of American conservatives, will be held in Budapest later this year. 

What’s the message Trump and his inner circle are sending?

In a way, Trump is endorsing his own brand of authoritarianism too, argues Pepper, the former former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.

“I think it says that they’re all in on this form of governing,” he said. It legitimizes Orbán, but “it also legitimizes that brand of politics.”

Pepper is worried conservatives in the U.S. are taking notes on Orbán’s authoritarian strategy.  Tucker Carlson’s visit to Hungary, CPAC’s upcoming conference in Budapest and Trump’s endorsement are all signs that conservatives are “studying how they can build something here where they have a minority party and view of the world locked into power through an Orbán-style competitive autocracy.”

Hungarians aren’t going to be swayed to vote for Orbán because of Trump’s endorsement. So what does this mean for Hungary?

The Hungarian election between Orbán and the opposition is tight, but it’s hard to imagine that someone on the fence is going to be convinced by Trump’s endorsement. But that doesn’t mean the endorsement is unimportant. 

Orbán has few allies in the European Union, and prior to Trump’s administration, the Hungarian government was on the outs with the U.S. too. But because of Trump’s public support, Orbán can claim he has allies who share his autocratic worldview, according to Panyi, the Hungarian journalist. 

“This is material that Orbán and his people can use to fuel their propaganda, saying that ‘Oh, even Trump supports us,’” said Panyi. “He can still portray himself as having some kind of backing from influential people. But in reality, Trump’s out of power,” he added.  

Hungary is a small country with the population the size of Michigan. But a former U.S. president’s support allows Orbán to claim legitimacy and relevance on the international stage. “Think about it this way: do you think Trump knows the name of the president of Estonia? Absolutely not. The fact that Trump knows Orbán shows that Hungary is punching above its geopolitical weight, and Orbán and his followers will try to exploit that for their political gain,” said Klaas, the political scientist at University College London.

So will Trump’s endorsement add extra votes for Orbán? Probably not. But let’s say the election doesn’t go the way Orbán wants. By refusing to accept the results of the U.S. 2020 election, Trump created a roadmap for authoritarians to claim unfavorable elections were rigged. This cozy relationship between Orbán and Trump might set the stage for the Hungarian autocrat to make the same argument, said Orsolya Lehotai, a doctoral student in the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research. “It basically endorses aspects of what happens when a political leader accuses its opponents of cheating with elections,” said Lehotai. 

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Last week, it emerged that the Hungarian government is gathering information about foreign travel by journalists. A team of reporters at the new independent media outlet Telex obtained an email sent in June by József Magyar, deputy under-secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Hungarian embassies in EU states. In it, he requested details of foreign study programs and training courses attended by journalists, and which local media they had interacted with while away.

“Independent media has been under attack since 2010 and the pressure from the government is rising. This story is a good example of the mood around the independent media in Hungary,” Telex journalist Tamás Fábián told me in an email.

The reporters who brought the leaked email to light are former employees of Index, once a leading independent Hungarian news site. In July, more than 70 journalists resigned from the publication after the dismissal of editor-in-chief Szabolcs Dull. The threat to Index began in March, when Miklos Vaszily, a businessman affiliated to Prime Minister Viktor Orban, took 50% ownership of Indamedia, the company that manages Index’s advertising and revenue. 

In September, former Index staff launched a crowdfunding campaign to set up Telex, which has already been a target of pro-government media attacks, including that it received €200,000 in funding from billionaire philanthropist Zdeněk Bakala — a man who has been referred to as the “Czech Soros.”

When asked by Telex why the requests were made, the foreign affairs ministry replied that it "does everything necessary to avoid foreign influence in Hungarian internal matters.”

In a television interview last week, communications secretary Tamás Menczer denied that the ministry was collecting information on journalists. He did, however, comment on the disclosure itself, saying that "it looks like the minister of foreign affairs hasn't fired enough people, because documents are still leaking." 

According to Dalma Dojcsak, a lawyer at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, which provides free legal services to journalists, this reported surveillance is simply “business as usual.” 

“Since, in Hungary, the law allows for members of the cabinet to basically gather information on any citizen, without effective legal oversight from the court, this thing that happened to the journalists is obviously happening on a regular basis but was not leaked before,” she said.

Over the years, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has clamped down on the independent press. Journalists have reported being denied access to government events and their requests for information being dismissed by the authorities. Others say they have been verbally insulted by officials and their sources intimidated.

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The editors of Index say their independence is in “grave danger” following management changes within a news organization that is one of the last remaining critical voices of Viktor Orban’s government.

Under the guise of addressing falling advertisement revenue, Index’s board of directors moved to outsource the paper’s reporting to external businesses and dismissed editor-in-chief Szabolcs Dull from the board on June 21. The announcement plunged Index into turmoil, with its CEO stepping down on June 23, followed by the resignation of his replacement in the same week. Index continues publishing, with editor-in-chief Szabolcs Dull writing on the website, “We don’t have a CEO, we know little.”

The changes at Index, which launched in 1999, follow a pattern that has brought a number of Hungary’s once-independent media outlets under the control of the government, according to Dalma Dojcsak, a lawyer at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union in Budapest. “Everything is presented as a tool to make Index work better and to serve its owners better,” said Dojcsak. “It’s a sophisticated tool to blur the lines of the story and to distance the whole issue from the government.” 

Several members of Index’s board have indirect ties to the government.

Index has weathered a number of dramatic shake-ups in Hungarian media, holding on to its independence as nearly 80% of the country’s media was brought under the control of the state or the ownership of friends and allies of Orban. Some of Hungary’s pro-Orban media moguls have also purchased news outlets in other parts of Europe, including the UK, Macedonia and Slovenia.

With 62% of Hungarians reporting that they are satisfied with Viktor Orban’s response to the coronavirus, the government feels it can silence any remaining critics. “I think they feel very confident now that they can manage situations like closing down Index,” said Dojcsak.

Following an ownership change back in 2018, Index created an “independence barometer” for its readers. On June 21 the dial turned from “independent” to “in danger.” 

The site also opened up a page where readers can post their support for the site. Words of support came from leading public figures and celebrities in Hungary. “Index is one of the last memories of long-standing press freedom,” wrote professor and author Vilmos Csanyi. In another post, singer-songwriter Jonas Vera said that “Index is a critical voice to me, they seek the truth, they follow it and stand up.”

Illustration by Inge Snip & Karol Bohacova

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The loss being mourned was that of Central European University (CEU). After a long and bitter campaign, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his far-right Fidesz party had managed to effectively force the institution out of the country. Two days later, on December 3, CEU announced that it would begin to move its staff and U.S.-accredited degree programs to Vienna in the fall of 2019. 

In recent years, Orbán has systematically undermined liberal educational institutions as part of a far-sighted plan to create a generation of citizens rooted in traditional Hungarian values. The ostracization of CEU formed the main focus of this strategy. 

Founded in 1995 by the Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist George Soros, CEU’s stated mission is to foster values of “socially and morally responsible intellectual inquiry.” The institution has also gained a reputation for diversity, recruiting many of its students from the developing world. 

Despite being a former protege of Soros and even attending Oxford University on a scholarship funded by him, Orbán’s contempt for the billionaire financier is extreme. Fidesz propaganda has accused Soros of operating a 2,000-strong secret network within Hungary, paying anti-government protesters and being part of a Brussels-based plot to weaken the nation’s borders and endanger its security. 

The movement to dislodge CEU from Hungary began in April 2017, when Fidesz put a new draft law before the Hungarian National Assembly. It stipulated that non-Hungarian universities must be registered as educational institutions in the country where they were first set up and that they must also hold classes there. This policy was clearly aimed at CEU, which was based in Budapest, but officially founded in the U.S.

After the passing of this amendment, CEU embarked on a 20-month legal battle. It included appeals to the Hungarian government from the U.S. State Department and a case in the European Court of Justice. 

In accordance with the new law, CEU established a physical campus at Bard College in 2017. The New York State Education Department drafted a legal agreement stating that the university had met the Hungarian government’s demands. It gave the Fidesz administration until December 1, 2018, to sign and acknowledge CEU’s right to offer U.S. degree programs in Budapest. 

When Fidesz refused to do so, CEU announced its decision to move to Vienna. At the time of writing, the institution plans to maintain a small presence in Budapest, holding onto its buildings, conducting research and hosting public events. However, the removal of its teachers and students represents a huge loss for higher education in Hungary.

According to the university’s rector, Michael Ignatieff, “What has happened to CEU is part of a wider pattern. That wider pattern is to eliminate independent institutions from Hungary and bring everything under the control of a single-party state.”

Tightening grip

Since his election in 2010, Orbán has dragged Hungary further and further to the right. He has waged a war on immigrants, attacked the EU, strengthened the country’s relationship with Russia and made changes to the national constitution, judiciary and electoral system. The government has also tightened control of national theaters and even the school textbook market. This last move, which allows Fidesz to spread its ideas to children, is emblematic of a root-and-branch assault on education.

The latest – and, perhaps, most far-reaching – example of the Hungarian government’s tightening grip on academia is its takeover of the prestigious Budapest-based Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). 

The MTA is a large and complex private organization. It numbers around 5,000 employees, operating in a range of fields, from medicine to the humanities. Its research network has an international reputation for excellence. 

In July 2019, Fidesz moved to take control of its research institutions and divert their funding to the Hungarian Ministry of Innovation and Technology (ITM). Now, they operate under the banner of the newly formed Eötvös Loránd Research Network (ELKH). All 13 positions on ELKH’s board can be personally vetoed by the prime minister. Its chairman, who serves a five-year term, is also officially appointed by him. 

Miklós Maróth, the man who now occupies that position is an advisor and close friend of Orbán. Despite being a professor of Middle Eastern studies, Maróth has written a number of Islamophobic books and was filmed in 2016 saying that Muslims should be deported and “wrapped in pigskin.” 

Fidesz’s program of interference in higher education does not follow one neat pattern. In addition to the government’s commandeering of independent institutions, it has also privatized state-run ones. In 2016, the Orbán administration announced plans to place the formerly public Corvinus University into private hands of a foundation.

One of the most significant results is that Corvinus now no longer automatically offers full government scholarships to candidates from low-income backgrounds. While this is likely to have a potentially devastating effect on student diversity, the university has been hailed by the government as a model for future academic initiatives in Hungary.

The ITM did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

A bleak outlook

In November 2019, CEU held an official inauguration of its Vienna campus. “CEU has steadfastly defended the principle of academic freedom against concentrated attack by the corrupt government of Viktor Orbán, who was hellbent to destroy it,” Soros told the assembled crowd. 

Three months later, Soros doubled down on his commitment to higher education. In February 2020, he used the World Economic Forum in Davos to announce that he would contribute $1 billion to the formation of the Open Society University Network. Led by Bard College and CEU, the aim of the organization is to provide academic opportunities to minorities and scholars threatened by arrest, imprisonment and violence.

However, the outlook for universities in Hungary remains bleak. In June 2018, the pro-government magazine Figyelo published a piece naming a number of MTA academics associated with “liberal” research disciplines, such as gender studies and immigration. It suggested that the government should have much greater oversight of them and their work. Other articles have singled out members of staff and provided links to their personal social media profiles.

Some academics I spoke to at the MTA said that these high-pressure tactics have made them consider leaving their jobs. Others said that they are increasingly self-censoring while at work. 

“In the corridors, you hear a lot of talk about what we should not do research on,” said Emese Szilágyi, a junior research fellow at the MTA’s Institute for Legal Studies. “Like, we should not research human rights, or rule of law — these are risky topics.” 

Fidesz has also taken an aggressive stance against women’s rights. Hungary now ranks last on the list for women’s political power in the EU, according to a 2019 report by the European Institute for Gender Equality.

In October 2018, the Hungarian government took this fight into the academic arena, issuing an order that revoked accreditation and funding for gender studies programs in public universities. Earlier that year, another Figyelő article described “homosexual rights and gender science” as “politically suspicious” areas of research and publicly listed the names of professors associated with such fields.

Orsolya Lehotai,  a PhD student in Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York, graduated from CEU’s gender studies department in 2017 and believes that the ban on these subjects reflects a deep-seated fear of dissent within the government.

“Critical gender studies revolves around questions of how power and dominance operate in various contexts and how it affects our everyday life,” she explained via email. “These are exactly those questions that I ask myself when I think about how Hungary’s illiberalism operates.”

The EU’s response

The situation in Hungary also poses a unique problem to the European Union. According to Petra Kammerevert, a member of the European Parliament and former chair of its Committee on Culture and Education, Orbán’s actions are unprecedented within the bloc.

“Hungary is not the only member state of the European Union which is restricting European values and the rule of law,” she wrote in an email. “We can also observe this trend in Poland. However, the Hungarian government is actually transforming so many parts of social life with a view to restrict freedoms that the case is quite exceptional.” 

The EU claims to take responsibility for upholding freedom of expression and academic liberty in its member states. In September 2018, the European Parliament requested an investigation of Hungary, using Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union. Under this clause, the bloc can impose sanctions — including the suspension of voting rights — on member states that violate those principles. 

The investigation is underway, but the EU has yet to take any concrete steps against Hungary.

When asked about the EU’s role in protecting institutions such as CEU, Ignatieff responded, “What role? I don't want to sound all twisted and bitter about it. I'm an optimist, but basically they haven't done very much of anything.” 

He also pointed to a fundamental flaw in the way that the European Union operates. As a body primarily dedicated to trade and economic cooperation between nations, the EU bases most of its decisions on commercial law, which leaves few avenues to address the erosion of rights such as academic freedom.

“There is no clear human-rights based or public-law based defense of academic freedom as a principle to which a university in trouble could appeal,” Ignatieff explained. “That's a problem that Europe's going to have to fix, if it's going to have free institutions in 25 or 30 years.”

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A number of bodies including the United Nations, the Council of Europe and Amnesty International Hungary were quick to criticize the new legislation. In a joint statement, Hungarian NGOs recently responded, “We need strong rule of law safeguards and proportional and necessary emergency measures, not unlimited government rule by decree.” 

Meanwhile, media watchdogs, including Reporters Without Borders, have voiced concerns about how new provisions against coronavirus disinformation could impact journalists in their attempts to report on Covid-19.

Under the new legislation, anyone spreading “false” or “distorted” information that “alarms” the public or undermines its “successful protection” will face up to five years in prison. 

Peter Erdelyi, an investigative reporter and editor at the news website 444.hu, believes that larger Hungarian media organizations are well placed to stand up to the new measures, but adds that smaller independent media outlets without a strong legal footing are in a much more vulnerable position. He also points out that the new legislation will create an increasingly hostile environment for journalism.

“We have lawyers and experienced editors, but we also have young people in our office. When they hear that a new law is introduced, and they turn on the TV and hear that people are calling for their arrest — it will affect them,” Erdelyi said during a Skype call. 

He also noted that journalists at 444.hu have witnessed a spike in harassment from members of the public since the legislation was adopted. These range from insults to death threats. “Between 2014 and 2019, we got one threat every two to three months. Now we get one every second or third day,” Erdelyi said. “Nothing physical has happened yet, but we are getting more threats.”

Erdelyi is worried that the legislation could affect access to information and overall public discourse in Hungary. By way of example, he cites a recently published story by Legeza Örs, in which the renowned Hungarian physicist shared his experience of first being misdiagnosed and then having to wait two weeks to be tested for Covid-19. In the article, Legeza wrote, “I hope I will not go to jail for spreading fake news or panic.”

Gergo Saling, an editor at the Hungarian investigative journalism center Direkt36, says that the new laws also shift public attention away from the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and towards a more general debate about media freedom. 

“A lot of the coverage focuses on the law, instead of focusing on medical equipment, and what is the current situation in hospitals,” he told me by telephone.

Hungary is not alone in using the coronavirus pandemic to establish new laws on disinformation. Wide-ranging legislation introduced in both Azerbaijan and Bulgaria has prompted fears for press freedom. The U.K. government has also set up a special unit to counter fake news, while South Africa has criminalized the dissemination of Covid-19-related disinformation.  

The true intention behind these measures varies from country to country and is generally reflective of individual government records on media freedom. Since 2013, Hungary has fallen 31 places on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. 

Attila Mong, a Berlin-based Hungarian who works as Europe correspondent for the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me via email that “in recent years, the government in Hungary has systematically dismantled media independence and used verbal attacks, lawsuits, and other means to harass critical journalists.”

He added that the new legislation “is only vaguely defined and therefore authorities could use it to initiate criminal proceedings” against journalists, even when they are telling the truth.  

“Government officials and pro-government media outlets have accused independent media organizations of spreading false information when they have questioned the government’s approach to handling the coronavirus crisis,” Mong said.  

On March 20, Márton Békés and Gábor Megadja, two Fidesz-aligned pundits took part in a talk show aired by the pro-government news channel HírTV. Békés referred to the independent press as “coronavirus collaborators,” while Megadja said that journalists responsible for articles critical of the state should be “arrested in this crisis situation.”  

Hungarian opposition politicians have accused the government of launching a divisive campaign that aims to blame rival voices for the pandemic.

Anna Julia Donath, a member of the European Parliament for the Hungarian centrist party Momentum told me via email, “They are even saying that some of the members of the opposition are rooting for the virus.” 

Donath also believes that these attacks form part of a longer game plan for Orban and Fidesz, aimed at tightening their grip on power. “They want to win the 2022 parliamentary elections no matter what it takes,” she wrote.

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Deputy editor Marton Gergely remembers vividly that he was making French toast for his children when life as he knew it turned upside down. For a business that thrives on scoops and inside sources, no one in the Nepszabadsag newsroom had any idea if — or when — disaster would strike. Around 8:30 a.m. journalists from his newsroom started making panicky calls. They had been locked out of email and the paper’s servers.

Ten minutes later — at 8:40 a.m. — Nepszabadsag’s website froze, its archive was erased and the newspaper effectively died. “Just like Pompeii,” Gergely recalled. “It was out of the blue, it was sudden, and it was brutal.”

Unlike the ancient Roman city ossified under tons of lava and ash, the swift demise of Hungary’s most widely read newspaper and dozens of other independent media in the country was not caused by natural disaster. Their destruction was man made. For the last several years, a cabal of Orban’s childhood friends and political allies seized control or closed publications and broadcasters which didn’t toe the leader’s political line. Sometimes their moves have been transparent. Some — like the closure of Nepszabadsag — have been more opaque. But without a doubt they have been very effective. Today, almost 80% of Hungary’s media is controlled by the state or friends of Orban, according to the Mertek media monitoring group, and media ownership is more concentrated now than at any time since 1990, when the country moved from one-party rule to democracy.

Now, Hungary’s pro-Orban media moguls, flush with cash and strong political connections, are targeting for acquisition news outlets in other parts of Europe, including Macedonia, Slovenia and even the United Kingdom, that Orban hopes to foster his far-right ideology.

A senior commander in this media campaign is the same man who Gergely and other Hungarian journalists say helped engineer Nepszabadsag’s closure and has become Hungary’s biggest media mogul: Lorinc Meszaros, a man who grew up with Orban and whose career path charts a reverse arc of Pompeii.

In a few short years, he has transformed from a small town pipe-fitter reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy to one of Hungary’s wealthiest men. In November the owners of 476 media outlets, who — like Meszaros — are friends of Orban “donated” these assets to a foundation which one of his companies now manages and controls.

The nondescript five-story building in the Buda district of the Hungarian capital which was once Nepszabadsag’s newsroom — a building also owned by one of Meszaros’ companies — is now the headquarters for the foundation known in Hungarian as KESMA. Here, the sprawling enterprise works without any legal or political impediment to consolidate the media landscape both at home and across Europe. The goal: to deliver coverage more supportive of Orban’s far-right ideology and less interest in their business and political practices.

“Orban wants some regional allies,” said Agnes Urban, a researcher from watchdog group Mertek Media Monitor. “Hungary is not enough for him; he has more ambitions.”   

Meszaros, Hungary’s most influential media mogul, has summed up his rags-to-riches story as a benevolent mixture of three influences: “God, luck and Viktor Orban.”

In the 1990s, Meszaros had a small gas-fitting company in Felcsut, the village just west of Budapest that most Hungarians know as Orban’s hometown. The two men became friends over a shared love of football and in 2007, Orban named him chairman of football academy in the small town. After Orban’s return to political power in 2010, Meszaros, who was Felcsut mayor until 2018, suddenly saw his business fortunes rise.

By the end of 2018, Meszaros owned or controlled 203 companies and had an estimated wealth of 905 million Euros, according to Forbes and Orange Files, an online site which documents the rise of “illiberal democracy” in Hungary.

In response to news reports stating that his assets had grown faster than the fortunes of Facebook’s founder, Meszaros replied: “Maybe I’m smarter than Mark Zuckerberg.”

Critics of the government, like Gergely and other independent journalists, say Meszaros’ intelligence played little part in his sudden wealth. It was his connections that mattered.

In Hungary the state plays a significant role in the advertising business. Outlets deemed unfriendly to the prime minister have been starved of those advertising funds, while Orban-friendly outlets would be showered with largesse.

Many of the properties under control of Meszaros and later KESMA have profited handsomely from state spending. In 2017, state advertising spending accounted for 83% of ad revenue for media outlets later handed over to KESMA. Also in that year Meszaros’ controlled media companies alone had revenues of 20.41 billion Hungarian forints or 65.7 million Euros.

Several of the media outlets that have been bought up by Orban-friendly businessmen in the past few years had been profitable and financially healthy before they were targeted for takeover by the politically motivated businessmen.

At Nepszabadsag, the paper was still making money when, amid a lot of negative coverage of Orban’s allies, the rumors started about it being closed down, according to Gergely, the former deputy editor. Mediaworks, the company which bought — and closed — the paper in 2016 was headed by an executive who made no secret of his support for the Hungarian leader. That company was later snapped up by one of Meszaros’ subsidiaries.

The perks of belonging to what Gergely, the former deputy editor of Nepszabadsag, calls “the media monster group,” hold allure for many Hungarian journalists. Join the pro-government team and a reporter can raise a family, and maybe even afford to hobnob with pro-Orban businessmen on the other side of the Danube from the Nepszabadsag’s former newsroom.

In the posh Pest district not far from parliament the chichi Japanese restaurant Nobu is one of the expensive new eateries which dot the upscale streets. For those with sophisticated palates, there is yellowtail sashimi with jalapeno and Alaskan black cod de miso on the menu, dishes that most Hungarians have probably never heard of, let alone tasted. The restaurant offers gift cards of up to 50,000 forints (about 155 Euros), about three-quarters of the average weekly national wage.

There is a stomach-curdling irony about the fact that fine foreign cuisine is making inroads into Hungary at a time when Orban and his friends are consolidating power. The media owned by his friendly oligarchs, the presumed targeted customers for these high-end restaurants, rarely cover the benefits of pan-European open borders which including making such high-end restaurants possible.

For Gergely and the dwindling numbers of independent Hungarian journalists, life is not so luxurious. After Nepszabadsag was shut down, he and several former colleagues tried to set up another paper, but failed miserably as they didn’t have the finances or know-how.

He later landed a job at an established alternative weekly media called HVG, where he earns 30% less than he did at the paper and manages six people instead of 60. Still, he says, “I was very lucky and very happy. There weren’t many good jobs.”

In December 2018, Hungary’s waning liberal activists tried blocking KESMA’s operations, citing anti-competition laws. Hungarian courts were blocked from ruling on their challenge when Orban declared the foundation a “national strategic importance in the public interest.” The EU has an investigation underway into whether KESMA violates any free market laws, but the European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager has signaled that little action should be expected.

Orban’s protection of KESMA has opened the field for Meszaros and his cronies to aggressively hunt for more take-overs beyond Hungary’s borders.

One of the first foreign targets of the pro-Orban oligarchs occurred back in 2017 when two former executives at Hungarian public television opened Macedonian companies intending to invest in local media, according to documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

The Hungarians used those vehicles to acquire controlling stakes in more than a half dozen local outlets supporting Macedonia’s former ruling conservative party, allies of Orban’s ruling party. Under new ownership, the outlets became known for publishing fake and critical news targeting civil society and political opposition groups, similar to how Hungarian media orchestrated their campaign against George Soros, the OCCRP reported.

Slovenia was their next beachhead. There, three Hungarian media firms — one of which is was also involved in the Macedonian purchases — spent a year gaining control of NOVA24TV.sl, which boasted a television channel, an online news portal, and a radio station founded by the conservative Slovenian Democratic Party. The Hungarian companies’ boosted their original stake in the company from 45% to nearly 88%, according to the OCCRP.

In April, the Hungarians crossed the English Channel with the launch of London-based online news agency V4NA which publishes current events, sports and light features in Hungarian, English and French, many of which parrot pro-Orban views.

V4NA says it has a 50-strong newsroom in London and in Central Europe, but so far it does not appear to have gained much traction in England’s saturated media environment. The content is behind a paywall, and it’s unclear how many subscribers the site has.

What has recently become more transparent, however, is the identity of V4NA’s owner.

The company was originally registered in London by Hungary’s ambassador to the United Kingdom in December 2018. In April, Arpad Habony, Orban’s main spin doctor, acquired a 40% stake in the company via his London political advisory firm, Danube Business Consulting Ltd. Then, the Porsche-owning son of the central bank governor, acquired a 57% stake from the ambassador via his business called New Wave Media, or NWM.

NWM was one of the assets “donated” to the KESMA foundation last fall.

Back in Budapest, Gergely says he has mixed feelings each time he passes the nondescript building where his longtime newsroom was once located. From the outside, the communist-era edifice exhibits a bland exterior, with nothing more dramatic outside then a limp Hungarian flag. But what’s going on inside is what matters.

Prior to its closure, Nepszabadsag was covering critical stories on Orban allies like the central bank governor and the man dubbed the propaganda minister Antal Rogan, Few Hungarian outlets are doing that kind of reporting anymore. Even neutral coverage of foreign affairs is a dwindling commodity.

KESMA, the Meszaros foundation, is busy churning out pablum, instead.

The contrast is dizzying and depressing, says Gergely. Similar to his feelings about Orban himself.

Thirty years ago, when the Iron Curtain fell, the younger politician represented hope of a fresh start for many young Hungarians, including Gergely. Now, the country is suffering from Orban’s own ideological blinders as well as the sheer banality of the men he has around him.

Gergely believes that many of Hungary’s media takeovers and closures were part of base transactional calculations, a sport that earned oligarchs something akin to a hunting trophy each time a critical news outlet was put out of business.

The fact that journalists like him are on the verge of extinction puts his nation – and other countries in Europe – in jeopardy.

“Hungary has become a model illiberal state. And it feels like one,” Gergely said.

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