However, this ‘explanation’ begs as many questions as it appears to answer. For example, it ignores the extent to which public sentiment has been cynically manipulated in Hungary since 2015, with a succession of massive, mostly government-funded propaganda campaigns calculated to create and sustain a full-blown moral panic about the existential ‘threat’ to Hungary posed by migrants and by the EU’s alleged efforts to prevent Hungary from controlling its own borders. In recent weeks, the Fidesz-KDNP government has placed whole page advertisements in ‘sympathetic’ newspapers and paid for thousands of billboards falsely accusing the Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist, George Soros, of wanting to “settle millions of migrants from Africa and the Middle East”. If ordinary Hungarians fear large-scale immigration from outside Europe and believe that only Fidesz will protect them from the supposed machinations of Soros that is because government propaganda has succeeded in convincing them that such fears are reasonable and well-founded.
The weakness of Hungary’s opposition parties is only partly due to their political ineptitude, their inability or unwillingness to form effective, long-term alliances or their alleged failure to promote policies that are genuinely popular with the electorate. Quite simply, Hungary’s opposition parties lack the resources or the means to counter the insidious anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-globalist and anti-opposition propaganda, which projects Fidesz-KDNP as the ‘saviour’ of the Hungarian nation at a time, so Hungarians are constantly warned, of unparalleled crisis. One of the latest advertisements placed by Fidesz, now appearing in newspapers and on billboards, shows a grinning Soros in front of a partially destroyed fence. Several of Hungary’s leading opposition politicians – Bernadett Szél of LMP, Ferencz Gyurcsány of DK, Gábor Vona of Jobbik and Gergély Karácsony of Párbeszéd – are pictured standing on either side of the financier. In this carefully crafted advertisement, each of the politicians is brandishing giant wirecutters. The message to Hungary’s electorate could not be clearer or more deceitful – a vote for some of Hungary’s most popular opposition figures would lead to the rapid dismantling of Hungary’s border defences, resulting in a potential onslaught by ’alien hordes’.
The robust performance of Fidesz-KDNP in opinion polls – together with the continuing weakness of the opposition parties – also stems from the growing control exerted by Orbán and his allies over Hungary’s print and electronic media. Marius Dragomir, Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society at the beleaguered Central European University, estimates that ’some 90% of all media in Hungary is now directly or indirectly controlled by Fidesz. That will indisputably give them a major lead in the elections’. In addition to public sector radio and television, which have been transformed into a platform for government propaganda, the bulk of supposedly ‘independent’ print and electronic media outlets in Hungary are now owned by business interests aligned with Fidesz. As emphasised by Dragomir, ‘Hungary is a classic case of media capture where the government’s head honchos, hand in glove with the country’s oligarchs, have used policy and public funding to turn independent media into a mere government establishment.’
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