Viktor Orbán’s ten-year war on the media in Hungary – VoxEurop

A good part of the international audience only became familiar with the ongoing anti-democratic project in Hungary when the political upheaval of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election broke a narrative barrier: the shift of conservative politics toward the far-right hadn’t really been taken seriously until then. However, Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz foray started as early as 2010, when the party won supermajority on the ruins of the 2008 financial crisis and the ashes of the formerly governing Socialist Party which had collapsed on itself multiple times in the preceding years.

Orbán had openly talked about preparing for 20 years of governing, and his government set out to make good on that promise. In unilaterally sacking the constitution to replace it with a Basic Law, they got rid of established institutions that should have served as checks and balances. An election reform has ensured their towering advantage despite only securing a maximum of 40 percent of the votes. A new media law instated an authority directly appointed and controlled by the government, paving the way for Fidesz’s overwhelming dominance of the media sphere. And the National Media and Communications Council has ever since delivered what was expected of them.

This legal trick was met with concern in the European Union, which Fidesz reacted to childishly by providing the European Commission with a translation that simply left out a few problematic parts. It also sparked the first real mass protests since 1990.

Orbán on air

Public broadcast radio and tv channels were the first victims, brought to their knees by a new leadership who swept out the old personnel despite the fierce resistance of journalists, some of whom kept protesting for months. Orbán has a regular interview spot now on Kossuth Rádió on Friday mornings.

The strive to break down any independent publishing has remained in full force ever since, and it wouldn’t be possible to enumerate all the steps. In part it is because most attacks are quite similar to the takedown of Klubrádió: extremely procedural, posing meandering administrative obstacles and finding obscure excuses to rid outlets of their broadcast rights or bleed them out financially.

The country saw an expedited corporate capture of its publishing, as outlets were gradually acquired by the regimes clientele, who then enforce a political line, or sometimes si…