The Fidesz party’s election campaign employed narratives suggesting, among other propaganda, that the EU and Hungary give too much to Ukraine. Photo by Elekes Andor, own work, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
This article by Teczár Szilárd first appeared in Hungarian media observatory Lakmusz on May 5, 2026. In it, Director of Mérték Media Monitor Ágnes Urbán, and Director of Political Capital Péter Krekó, who is also an associate professor at ELTE PPK, were interviewed to understand why government propaganda and state-sponsored disinformation did not work in the country’s April 2026 elections. Fidesz, the party led by Viktor Orbán, who had been in power for 16 years, was crushed by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, which received a constitutional majority in parliament. An edited version of the interview is being republished on Global Voices with permission.
Over the past 16 years, it became obvious that the government-controlled media empire and disinformation gave Fidesz a huge advantage. Yet, they suffered a defeat. Did you have to reassess any views you previously believed about the Hungarian information environment?
Ágnes Urbán (ÁU): My reassessment started before the election, prompted by a 444 podcast which argued that election results can be predicted from economic data, and the propaganda machine does not influence this all that much. I have to say these predictions turned out pretty well.
It may be, after all, that we overestimated the role of the propaganda media a bit. We always focused on those reached by propaganda, whose thinking it shaped. We talked about what happens to them, how they can be tipped out of their reality, whether their thinking can be changed, whether the bubble around them can be burst. We did not pay enough attention to the mobilizing effect propaganda has on those who did not fall into its trap. I think this latter effect was much more important. It was not so much the change in the audience reached by propaganda that was worth analyzing, but how seeing propaganda in action nudged the rest of society — especially young people — toward political activity.
Péter Krekó (PK): As a social psychologist, I’m usually wary of economic explanations. I know of much more data that show how public discourse, political argumentation, and disinformation can override the role of economic factors in political decisions. But of course both play a role.
I would say that the information environment the Orbán system created was very important for maintaining it. The system we used to call an informational autocracy successfully created a virtual reality in previous elections, where beliefs radically different from the facts became the basis of political decisions. Four years ago, more than half of voters made their decision in the belief that if they voted for the opposition, men would have been sent to the front. A third of voters believed that if the opposition won, gender reassignment surgeries would have been made easier for minors — if not mandatory.
I think the presidential pardon scandal (in which the former president, an ally of Viktor Orbán, pardoned a man convicted for trying to cover up a pedophile crime) created such a rupture in Fidesz’s campaign logic built on moralizing and moral panic that from then on it was as if the government’s communication lost its magic.
In the end, voters no longer believed even what they received from the government. The same campaign techniques that worked well four or eight years ago did not work at all now; voters were not receptive to messages they had been receptive to in 2022. I was surprised by how quickly the magic of propaganda disappeared.
In this campaign, Fidesz again tried fearmongering about the war or the false claim that the opposition would introduce military conscription. Could their lack of success be explained by the fact that after four years war was no longer as important to people?
PK: Fidesz […] thought that if four years ago they managed to reshape people’s thinking so that fears about war became dominant, they could do it again. Well, they couldn’t. The government had a geopolitical monologue, while Tisza talked about topics that voters cared about.
ÁU: The fact that fear cannot be intensified beyond a certain level also played a part. In the 2022 election, the moment helped Fidesz a lot. In the 2024 EP [European Parliament] and municipal campaign, it was harder to push the message that Europe wanted to go to war, because two years had passed and it was clear that no one wanted to go to war.
PK: Every previous Fidesz campaign dominated the moment. Do you consider high utility prices a problem? Then we offer a solution. You feel uncertain because of the refugees? Then we find a solution. There is war in a neighboring country? We will protect you. This time there was no moment, no opportunity they could exploit, no new topic they could introduce.
Read more: Hungary just held its most consequential election since 1989
Before the election, several press reports appeared about Russian interference, but when we examined concrete disinformation of Russian origin at Lakmusz, we always concluded that these fake news items did not really spread widely in the Hungarian public sphere. How do you assess the impact of Russia’s efforts?
ÁU: We can be very grateful to experts — especially András Rácz — who communicated proactively about the danger and, as it later turned out, outlined possible scenarios with astonishing accuracy. It gave a surprisingly strong immunity to Hungarian society that they started talking about Russian interference in advance. An important lesson is that the cooperation of informed actors — experts, independent media — with citizens can protect a society from external interference.
PK: Europe was visibly involved as well; investigative articles appeared citing European intelligence sources. The fact that information about Russian attempts appeared in Hungarian and international public discourse helped prepare public opinion. This was also supported by Tisza and Magyar’s personal campaign strategy: they preempted almost every story by getting ahead of them and warning people they might be coming.
In our late March survey, we saw that the majority of voters considered Russian interference the main external threat to the integrity of the election, not the interference of Brussels or the EU. The issue was successfully politicized; “Russians go home” became one of the slogans of those advocating for government change.
Recordings made public of phone calls between Lavrov and Szijjártó or Putin and Orbán also played an important role in this. Russian interference not only failed, but turned against Fidesz. They themselves became uncertain whether it would help them. For Europe, an important lesson is that Russian disinformation is not omnipotent; with proper cooperation, previously effective interference techniques can be neutralized.
Read more:Heavy use of AI increases tensions in Hungary’s upcoming election
Another novelty of the campaign was the use of artificial intelligence. This caused some panic in the international press; Fidesz’s war-themed AI videos or the one in which Ursula von der Leyen calls Péter Magyar on the phone went viral. Is it possible that we underestimated Hungarian society’s resilience to AI?
ÁU: I think Fidesz simply made a mistake here. They started using AI too early and in too cheap a way. [Images] came out showing Manfred Weber leading Péter Magyar on a leash — you don’t need to be a very sophisticated voter to feel that this might be manipulated. Judged by Facebook comments, most users, even on the pages of pro-government media, strongly objected to being fed this type of content.
PK: We saw that the majority of voters encountered AI-generated content and disapproved of its use quite strongly. The professional propaganda machine that previously worked well now became one of the sources of the government’s moral and credibility crisis.
It is as if voters grew tired of professional, heavily funded, state-sponsored disinformation. The quantitative logic of the campaign broke down; the political calculation did not work this time — that if we pour more money into propaganda, the results will be better.
In hindsight, how decisive was the decision by Meta and Google to disallow political ads on their platforms from the fall? This significantly reduced the volume of online ads, even though pro-government actors tried to circumvent the new rules.
ÁU: It is hard to overestimate the importance of this policy change. We should give credit to EU institutions for adopting the regulation on the transparency of political advertising, as a result of which Meta and Google decided that instead of investing in transparency mechanisms, they would simply ban ads. This was a fortunate turn for the Hungarian public sphere, because the Hungarian parliament has still not implemented the EU regulation, so transparency rules could not have been enforced. But the fact that platforms themselves decided on the ban and implemented it quite effectively pulled the rug out from under Fidesz’s campaign. The money was there, but without online ads they could not spend it as effectively as they wanted.
PK: In 2024, Fidesz spent more on online ads than anyone else in Europe, and even then, the election result fell short of what they expected. At the same time, it is true that the Orwellian social media environment that characterized the 2022 and 2024 campaigns could not emerge now. I remember when it was impossible to watch a video on YouTube with my kids without a political ad featuring Zelensky or gender affirming surgery jumping in our faces.
This period was ended by the platforms’ decision, and although Fidesz tried to adapt to the new environment with the online activism initiatives, this did not really succeed. Magyar’s most popular posts generated at least twice as many interactions as Orbán’s most popular posts. If there had been more political ads, the messages of Fidesz probably could have gotten more into people’s faces. It is not certain that this would have been successful, but overall, the ban on political ads was an important factor; it created somewhat more equal conditions. The EU regulation brought a favorable change in social media, which is now the most important arena of political communication.
