Flick by way of pro-government Hungarian accounts on TikTook, and also you may see an AI-generated model of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, sitting on a golden bathroom, counting his cash, snorting cocaine, and barking orders at a Hungarian soldier. You may also discover an AI-generated Péter Magyar, the chief of the Hungarian opposition, showing to say he’s fantastic with handing Hungarian factories over to foreigners, so long as he’s the one accountable for the nation. Keep going, and one can find photographs of battle, violence, and a SpongeBob look-alike declaring that Magyar “wipes up cocaine with me after he accidentally sneezed and it all fell to the floor.”
You gained’t discover a lot about Hungary itself, which isn’t an accident. In latest years political events round the world have produced surrealist campaigns, comedian campaigns, conspiratorial campaigns, even beer-drinking campaigns. But on any listing of unusual elections, the 2026 parliamentary election in Hungary will stand out—this can be the world’s first post-reality marketing campaign.
In precise actuality, the information for Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, shouldn’t be good. After 16 years in workplace, plus an earlier three-year time period, Orbán has made his nation the most corrupt in the European Union, one in all the poorest, and definitely the least free. His political celebration, Fidesz, now controls most universities, the civil service, the excessive courts, and, by way of a community of oligarchs, virtually all newspapers and broadcasters, in addition to a few fifth of the economy, in accordance with impartial economists. General paranoia about Fidesz spies implies that Budapest, as soon as once more, has develop into a metropolis the place folks decrease their voices when speaking about politics in public.
With that form of affect, Fidesz, which is nicely behind in most polls, can’t evade duty for Hungarian stagnation, and so neither the celebration nor its chief is speaking a lot about Hungary, its falling industrial production, or its shrinking population. Instead—backed by Russian propagandists, the European far proper, and now the Trump administration (about which extra in a minute)—the celebration is directing a small fortune’s value of posters and social-media movies towards a special aim: convincing Hungarians to concern sabotage, thievery, or perhaps a navy assault from … Ukraine.
This is a wholly false, even ludicrous menace. The Ukrainians have sufficient to do with out beginning a second battle in Hungary. But Orbán, his authorities, his celebration, and lots of outsiders at the moment are centered on making this menace appear true. Pay consideration, as a result of this can be the way forward for electoral politics: Multiple politicians from a number of nations are shoveling propaganda at an voters in an effort to construct terror of an enemy that doesn’t exist in any respect.
The marketing campaign shouldn’t be delicate. In Budapest final week, Orbán’s face was virtually nowhere to be seen. But posters that includes Zelensky had been ubiquitous. Sometimes the Ukrainian president is seen glowering alongside the slogan “Don’t let Zelensky have the last laugh.” Sometimes Zelensky seems with Magyar and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European fee, together with the slogan “They are the risk. Fidesz is the safe choice.” Peter Kreko, who runs a Budapest suppose tank, informed me that that is unprecedented. In 2022, Orbán campaigned on preserving Hungary out of the battle. Now he’s telling Hungarians that, as Kreko put it, “we are under imminent threat of attack.”
The identical threats attain Hungarians on their telephones. On TikTook, the place new pro-Fidesz accounts seem day by day, AI-created movies of Magyar appear to indicate him slandering his nation—“I stay silent because my masters in Brussels have forbidden me from defending the homeland”—or else singing the Ukrainian nationwide anthem. Another genre of video reveals battle violence: a Hungarian woman crying as her blindfolded father, carrying a Hungarian uniform, is executed, apparently in Ukraine. Multiple movies additionally smear Magyar, making private, sexual, and monetary allegations towards him, however the fear-Ukrainian-invasion narrative dominates. During a Fidesz march on March 15, a bunch in the entrance of the crowd carried a banner declaring We gained’t be a Ukrainian colony!
This language and these photographs have been backed up by the actions of the Hungarian state, every one designed to strengthen Fidesz propaganda. In February, Orbán despatched Hungarian troopers to protect the nation’s oil and gasoline infrastructure, allegedly to stop a Ukrainian assault, for which there was no proof. In March, Hungarian counterterrorism authorities seized two vans, owned by a Ukrainian financial institution, that had been passing by way of the nation on a routine cash-transport run from Vienna. They arrested seven financial institution staff, one in all whom misplaced consciousness after they injected him with what might have been fact serum. Later they had been all launched as a result of, once more, there was no proof towards them.
The Hungarian authorities nonetheless confiscated $82 million in gold and money, which it has not returned. The on-line publication Direkt36, one in all a tiny variety of retailers nonetheless doing investigative reporting in Hungary, wrote that Fidesz reckons this ham-handed operation successful: It provoked Zelensky to half-jokingly threaten Orbán, which gave the Hungarian chief one other few days’ value of fabric.
Hungarian state establishments are usually not the solely authorities our bodies looking for to form Hungarian perceptions of actuality. Although Orbán likes to make use of the phrase sovereignty, he now capabilities, in apply, as the most essential Russian puppet in Europe. According to a Washington Post investigation printed final week, Orbán’s overseas minister, Péter Szijjártó, repeatedly calls his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, to maintain the Russians knowledgeable following European Union conferences, and generally to ask for favors. During a 2020 name between the two males, in accordance with a transcript published by a Hungarian journalist, Szijjártó requested Lavrov to rearrange a gathering in Moscow for a pro-Russian Slovak politician, to assist him win an election. The assembly did later happen. Other European leaders way back stopped discussing any safety points in the presence of Orbán himself, who has repeatedly used his veto to dam European sanctions on Russia and European support for Ukraine.
Concerned {that a} key asset may lose energy, the Russians have despatched a crew of propagandists to Budapest to make sure that Orbán wins. The Financial Times has identified the affect group as the Social Design Agency, a Kremlin-backed IT firm whose actions are well-known. In 2023, again when the American authorities was nonetheless interested by unmasking Russian propaganda, the State Department’s now-dismantled Global Engagement Center exposed the company’s position in making a sequence of seemingly native pro-Russian web sites in Latin America. In Budapest, they had been tasked with creating AI movies and utilizing their current community of trolls and bots to move them on. One Russian community has circulated doctored screenshots of the English-language web site Euronews, with pretend quotes attributed to Magyar. The Washington Post investigation revealed that the Russians even proposed to stage a pretend assassination of Orbán, in an effort to construct extra sympathy for him. They referred to as this technique “Gamechanger.”
Tisza, Magyar’s opposition celebration, is anticipating extra. Several folks near Tisza informed me that they feared a false-flag operation, maybe an explosion at a Hungarian pipeline or one other vitality web site. I used to be additionally informed that Tisza has been making ready for a serious hack of their inside communications infrastructure, and has constructed an analog backup system, simply in case. Last week, that appeared prudent, since the celebration’s membership database had already been hacked, with names and personal info of members dumped on-line. Now it appears prescient: This week, Direkt36 printed an article, primarily based partly on materials from a whistleblower, claiming that this was certainly the Hungarian authorities’s plan. In response, the Hungarian authorities mentioned a few of the people concerned had been linked to Ukrainian intelligence, and individually accused a Direkt36 journalist of espionage. The story continues to twist and switch.
Not way back, the U.S. authorities would have vocally defended the democratic course of in Hungary, and might need sought to downplay wild claims about fictional Ukrainian invasions. Instead, the Trump administration is doing its greatest to amplify them. Strange although it sounds, Hungary, though a tiny nation in Central Europe, performs an outsize position in the creativeness of the American and European far proper: MAGA and its worldwide wing perceive that the Hungarian election, the most essential in Europe this yr, may mark a turning level in the battle of concepts that has convulsed the democratic world for the previous decade.
Orbán has been actively engaged on this battle, combating towards liberal democracy and the rule of regulation, advocating for authoritarian populism and one-party rule. He grew to become a beacon for different leaders who search to change their very own democratic political programs, who additionally need to twist the guidelines in an effort to make sure that they by no means lose. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, as soon as mentioned Orbán’s Hungary was not simply “a model for modern statecraft, but the model.” Orbán pioneered a type of campaigning too, spending years convincing Hungarians that existential threats—from migrants, from so-called decadence, from the European Union—required the radical institutional modifications which have saved his celebration in energy. Americans will probably be accustomed to these ways, which have been adopted, and tailored, by Trump and Vance.
Now the political leaders who’ve lengthy admired Orbán’s strategies are gathering to assist him. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Budapest in February to endorse Orbán, even seeming to offer monetary assist “if you face things that threaten the stability of your country.” Vice President J. D. Vance is about to go to Budapest, most likely after Easter. President Trump himself appeared on video at the Budapest assembly final Saturday of CPAC, the previously mainstream-conservative group that now organizes pop-up rallies on behalf of the worldwide radical proper. In his message, Trump supplied his “complete and total endorsement” for Orbán, Russia’s closest European ally.
Other members of the European far proper confirmed up in particular person. Alice Weidel, head of the far-right Alternative for Germany, made a speech attacking the European Union for allegedly sending billions of euros to Ukraine, “the most corrupt regime on Earth,” as if she weren’t talking on a podium inside the most corrupt state in the EU, and weren’t echoing the rhetoric of Russia, which could authentically be the most corrupt regime on Earth. She was adopted by Santiago Abascal, the chief of the Spanish far proper, who mentioned that Orbán’s Hungary—repressed and impoverished after years of ersatz populism—is a “shining beam of light in the darkness.” Marine Le Pen of France, Karol Nawrocki of Poland, and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands have additionally made appearances. Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed Orbán by video. Even the libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, got here all the manner from South America to laud Orbán, a person who has constructed one in all Europe’s most centralized and repressive societies.
All of them have their very own motives. Maybe Weidel is attempting to assist out the Russians, who fund a few of her celebration members and amplify her personal on-line campaigns. Milei might reckon it prudent to again an ally of Trump, who gave him $20 billion to shore up his nation’s forex simply earlier than his personal latest election. Perhaps Abascal or LePen hope for a lift of their campaigns too. But largely they had been there as a result of the return of a special authorities in Hungary would invalidate the declare that the far proper represents Europe’s future.
In Budapest, Orban’s language and ways already really feel like they belong to the previous. His outdated threats aren’t working anymore, maybe as a result of actuality is reasserting itself. There is, in actual fact, no wave of migration difficult the survival of the Hungarian nation. Brussels doesn’t pose an precise menace to Hungarian well being and happiness, however the poor state of the nation’s hospitals very nicely may. And, in fact, Ukraine shouldn’t be going to invade, however Russia may. Hungary was truly invaded, in any case, in dwelling reminiscence—by tanks despatched in by Moscow, not Kyiv: In 1956, the Soviet military got here to Budapest to crush the anti-Communist Hungarian revolution.
To counter Orbán’s post-reality marketing campaign, Tisza has centered on constructing a grassroots marketing campaign that reaches precise folks in the three-dimensional world. Magyar provides no interviews however as a substitute makes marketing campaign speeches in a number of completely different cities and villages day by day, totally on subjects folks perceive: the financial system, well being, corruption. Usually he stays away from the geopolitical themes Orbán a lot prefers. But at a big rally in Budapest earlier this month, Magyar did begin chanting “Russians go home.”
That chant, and the historic reminiscence behind it, additionally helps clarify why Budapest feels so feverish, and why Orbán’s post-reality marketing campaign is so fraught. To win, Orbán has to deprave that searing nationwide reminiscence, and to substitute concern of Ukraine. That means waging cognitive warfare on a scale nobody else has tried earlier than. Emotions are excessive as a result of the stakes are excessive. If he succeeds, he’ll as soon as once more blaze a path that others will comply with. And if he loses, an period involves an finish.
