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The leader of Hungary’s Tisza party, Peter Magyar, during a demonstration marking the 69th anniversary of the outbreak of Hungary’s 1956 revolution. Photo: AP Photo/Rudolf Karancsi/Alamy This is an edited version of an article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illiberal vision is seducing the Western world, published on 2 April 2026. It has been updated to reflect the outcome of the Hungarian elections on 12 April 2026. About a year ago, I opened a new email account. It was an encrypted Proton Mail address that journalists are advised to set up early in their careers. I did it rather late, and not because I had suddenly become more reckless with the safety of my sources. On the contrary: for years, there had been so few of them that an extra layer of digital security felt almost unimportant. Then the messages started arriving. In a few months, the number of emails from people who thought they had something to say reached a level that had to be dealt with. People sent me documents, stories or just tips they thought important. The inbox filled up so quickly that I had to ask myself the question: what had changed? It is, of course, a fair question to ask how a journalist can work without sources close to power. They cannot. But there is a difference in the kind of sources we have. I am not saying that Hungary does not have its fair share of investigative journalists, but it can be tough for a political journalist working on daily events as I do. Let me explain. For years I have argued that Hungary is neither a classic dictatorship nor a fully-fledged democracy. The system that Viktor Orbán proudly describes as an “illiberal democracy” has been carefully engineered to reward loyalty and apathy in equal measure. The deal offered by the state is simple and widely understood: you may live comfortably, pursue your private ambitions and be left alone – as long as you do not interfere with ours. Those who accept this bargain rarely encounter trouble. Those who do not are reminded of the limits of dissent. In theory, freedom of expression and the right to protest are guaranteed by the constitution. In practice, the price of speaking out rises sharply once your voice carries beyond the private sphere. This is not about heated arguments at family lunches or angry comments left under Facebook posts. It is about teachers who participated in acts of civil disobedience and lost their jobs. Judges whose rulings displeased the government and who subsequently found themselves the subject of orchestrated smear campaigns. University lecturers and civil servants who pointed to structural injustices and were quietly dismissed. It is also about ordinary employees summoned by their managers and warned that their political views, expressed online, were not appreciated. Silence is survival In smaller towns and villages, where everyone knows everyone else, the consequences can be even more immediate. Access to public employment schemes is a lifeline for many families, and they often feel that it depends on the goodwill of a mayor aligned with the ruling party. Under such conditions, political neutrality becomes a survival strategy. The effect of these experiences has been profound. Over the past decade and a half, Hungary has developed a political culture in which self-censorship is not imposed by law but internalised by habit. People do not remain silent because they are forbidden to speak but because they have learned that silence is safer. For journalists, this climate has had predictable consequences. In a system built on fear, loyalty and informal punishment, ordinary citizens are understandably reluctant to contact the media. Some do, and their courage should not be underestimated. Most, however, choose discretion. Hospital staff, teachers and employees of state-owned companies are far more likely to endure abuses of power than to report them. As a result, Hungarian journalism has long relied less on whistleblowers and citizens than on leaks from within political and economic elites – sources that are themselves increasingly scarce. This is why the sudden surge of messages mattered. About a year ago, something began to shift. My colleagues and I noticed it almost simultaneously. Emails arrived from people we had never spoken to before. Old landlines started ringing again. In one case, an envelope arrived by post, handwritten, containing detailed suggestions for investigations. Large numbers of Hungarians, many of them previously invisible to the press, were reaching out. In a media environment where the government does everything it can to restrict access to information, this felt like an unexpected privilege. Independent journalists are routinely excluded from press conferences, denied interviews or simply ignored when they submit questions. At times the situation has bordered on the absurd. There have been moments when we have had to publicly ask our readers to inform us if the prime minister is visiting their town because official channels no longer bother to tell us. Stepping into the light So what changed? The short answer is Péter Magyar, the leader of the Tisza Party, appeared. The longer answer is more complicated. Magyar’s arrival on the political scene was abrupt. A former insider, once a beneficiary of the Orbán system, he had worked as a lawyer at Hungary’s permanent representation to the EU and was married to Judit Varga, then the justice minister. When Varga was forced to resign over a presidential pardon granted to a well-connected figure implicated in a child sexual abuse case, Magyar did not retreat into private life. Instead, he stepped into the spotlight, publicly broke with the ruling Fidesz Party, and founded the Tisza Party. From last autumn, that party led opinion polls by double digits. [That lead in the opinion polls has since turned into an electroal landslide for Magyar on 12 April.] Few would have predicted such a rapid rise. Fewer still would have predicted the tone Magyar would adopt. Compared with Orbán’s carefully managed appearances, Magyar is restless, confrontational and informal. He mixes arrogance with humour. He has walked out of a television studio when he disliked the questions. When a senior Fidesz official shouted at him aggressively in front of cameras, Magyar replied that the man should brush his teeth because of his bad breath. At another event, he offered tea and biscuits to pro-government journalists who had been left waiting in the cold. On Facebook, he comments personally under articles that mention him, often arguing directly with readers. This behaviour would be unremarkable in some political cultures. In Hungary, it was something new. Magyar appeared unafraid of ridicule, retaliation or scandal. For many, that fearlessness was contagious. What followed was not simply a surge in public support for a new opposition figure but a subtle loosening of social restraint. People who had long kept their views private began to speak more openly. They attended rallies, shared articles, corrected misinformation and – crucially for journalists – they started to communicate. Tips that would once have been suppressed out of caution now found their way into newsrooms. This matters because Hungarian journalism has been under sustained pressure since 2010, when Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP coalition returned to power with a constitutional supermajority. The transformation that followed was immense. Media laws were rewritten, regulation was restructured and oversight bodies were staffed by loyalists. What appeared at first as technical reform laid the groundwork for political control. The independent media Ownership proved even more decisive. Once-prominent independent outlets were closed, weakened or absorbed. Népszabadság, for decades a defining voice of Hungarian public life, disappeared overnight. Online portals such as Origo and Index underwent editorial takeovers that ended their independence. In 2018, nearly 500 pro-government outlets were merged into the Central European Press and Media Foundation, a vast conglomerate that now dominates print, broadcast and online media while getting the majority of state advertising. The result has been a distorted media market. Independent newsrooms operate with fewer resources, shrinking staff numbers and limited reach. Access to official information is restricted, freedom-of-information requests are delayed or ignored, and journalists are routinely excluded from government press conferences. Critical reporters are portrayed in pro-government outlets as foreign agents or enemies of the nation, and some have been put under surveillance using Pegasus spyware – a revelation that further deepened the sense of vulnerability. But independent journalism has not vanished. It has adapted. Subscription models, reader donations and new digital platforms have allowed a fragile ecosystem to survive. From inside these newsrooms, the past 15 years have felt like a permanent state of emergency. Another Fidesz victory would have almost certainly confirmed the effectiveness of the government’s media strategy. With public broadcasting firmly under its control and regional media largely aligned, the ruling party faced little resistance in shaping the narrative on issues ranging from domestic opposition to the war in Ukraine. The financial imbalance is staggering. In the first six months of 2025 alone, Hungary’s public broadcaster received roughly 80 billion Hungarian forints ($250 million) in state funding. There was little indication that this flow would slow. There were, however, darker possibilities. A draft law on “transparency in public life”, periodically revived, would allow the state to blacklist or financially cripple outlets receiving foreign funding. For some independent organisations, that would mean extinction. The closure of Radio Free Europe’s Hungarian service last year and the transfer of the most popular tabloid paper, Blikk, to a pro-government publisher were warnings that the process of taking over the media sphere is not finished. A time of transition? Tisza made opposition to this media system a central part of its platform – unsurprisingly, given that Magyar has been one of its main targets. Billboards across the country depicted him as a puppet of Brussels. Pro-government outlets circulate false stories about his party’s policies, including fabricated claims about tax reforms that courts have since ruled to be untrue. Even the prime minister has joined in, sharing AI-generated videos attacking his rival. In early February, Tisza published its official programme, devoting an entire chapter to public media and access to information. The promises are ambitious: a new media law, restored editorial independence, balanced reporting, transparent standards and the rebuilding of a rural correspondent network. Most controversially, Magyar has pledged to suspend public media news services immediately upon taking power, restarting them only once conditions for impartial reporting have been created. Whether such promises are realistic now that Magyar has won is another matter. Poland’s recent experience suggests that dismantling a captured public broadcaster without violating rule-of-law norms is extraordinarily difficult. Hungary’s situation will also be closely monitored by the EU, particularly given the billions of euros in frozen funds tied to democratic safeguards. A radical overhaul would also involve dismissing large numbers of employees, a move fraught with political risk, and finding replacements in a media landscape where independent journalists number only in the hundreds. There is also a generational dimension to consider. Many people working in Hungarian journalism today have no memory of a freer media environment. Some of my colleagues were still in school during Orbán’s first years in power. They have never experienced a government that treats the press as a partner rather than an enemy, that invites critical journalists to press conferences, or that answers questions without obstruction. A transition, if it comes, will not be instantaneous. The new political leadership will have to relearn a basic democratic lesson: the role of the press is not loyalty but scrutiny. Society, too, will have to relearn how to trust journalism. That has been systematically eroded. According to the Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report, Hungary has the lowest level of trust in news media in Europe. Just 23% of respondents say they trust most news most of the time. Rebuilding that confidence will take years. And yet the messages keep coming. In that encrypted inbox, amid the noise and uncertainty, there is a fragile sense that fear has loosened its grip. People are testing the limits of speech again, cautiously. For a journalist in Hungary today, that may be the most hopeful development of all. READ MORE

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This is an edited version of an article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The…

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