As Hungary prepares for parliamentary elections on 12 April, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party maintains tight control over much of the country’s media – and concerns are mounting over how free and fair the vote can be.
RFI spoke with Marius Dragomir, director of the Media and Journalism Research Centre at Spain's University of Santiago de Compostela. Dragomir, an expert on media freedom in Central and Eastern Europe, says that while Hungary’s elections may meet formal standards, the flow of information is heavily skewed by years of government propaganda and control.
RFI: How fair is Hungary's election environment at the moment?
Marius Dragomir: There is no indication that the elections will not be fair. But if you look at the various tactics used by political parties – and especially Fidesz, the party of Orban – they try to do anything to win the elections. Think documented use of fake news, think the use of “the enemy” element before any election...
Fidesz assigns an enemy. Sometimes it is [Hungarian-American billionaire] George Soros, who funded various organisations, including the Central European University [which was forced to move the bulk of its operations from Budapest to Vienna after a 2017 law, widely seen as targeting the university, restricted its ability to operate in Hungary].
Sometimes it is Brussels and the EU. Today, Ukraine is the public enemy and the people who want to bring war to Hungary.
Analysing what Fidesz has done to remain in power over the past 16 years indicates that losing the elections is a major problem for them. They have built a media empire over the past 16 years, because they want to make sure they win every election.
If they lose the election, the whole media infrastructure is going to be dismantled. It is not going to be an easy process. They are going to lose access to public resources, which they use to control all their institutions and to take over media companies. So it's essential for them not to lose the elections. That’s why we can expect anything.
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RFI: It's a matter of survival...
MD: It's a matter of survival. I’ve never seen in the European Union a case of financial corruption, where the government has used public resources and often, ironically, EU money to fund projects, with oligarchs then taking over media outlets. It's not only that they will lose access to these resources, but they may be in trouble when some people might judge them for what they did.
RFI: What is the real impact of people being exposed to one-sided media coverage? There are some small independent news outlets such as Direct36, which stand out in their criticism of the government, but how big is the tendency of the larger public to try to find alternatives for the official narrative which they're being fed every day?
MD: When it comes to the impact of the media and the propaganda system that they built, the question is: how effective is it? You have part of the public that is more anti-Fidesz, they are concentrated in large cities, especially Budapest. And then you have all the others, the Fidesz voters, who are very responsive to the nationalistic narrative of the government, that is spread through this propaganda machine, embracing that and voting for them.
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According to data that we have collected, given the high percentages with which Fidesz has won so far, this huge propaganda machinery that they have built over the years has had a massive impact before any election.
The system is very well organised. There is a direct link between the prime minister's press office and MTVA, the public media conglomerate that Fidesz reorganised in 2010 when they returned to power. [MTVA is owned and financed by the Hungarian state, through the National Media and Infocommunications Authority, and has as a subsidiary Duna Media, Hungary’s only public broadcaster.]
So this office calls the editor-in-chief in the morning, and they tell them what stories to cover and how, and sometimes they even give them the title to be used. And this is going through the whole country to all the other media companies, which then republish the same content.
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The country has been flooded with the [pro-Orban/Fidesz] narrative and has seen that for more than a decade. And they embraced that, especially in rural areas, where people have relied on their local newspaper for many years, and this publisher has been taken over also by the oligarchs.
Of course, you have the opposition and their voters who are more critical and have access to other sources of information, but generally this narrative [is] dominant all over the place.
RFI: So is this changing now?
MD: During these elections, something new is happening. There is the economic factor. People are starting to suffer economically in Hungary – and when that happens, the ideological and nationalistic narrative is losing ground. There’s also the difference in generations. Younger people are moving away from the government narrative.
