On 12 April, Hungarian citizens will cast their ballots in a historic election between Viktor Orban, the Fidesz prime minister and a Kremlin ally listed by RSF as press freedom predator since 2021, and Peter Magyar, leader of the Tisza party.
The fairness of the election, already weakened by the opposition’s lack of access to public service media, is also threatened by Russian influence. According to the investigative outlet VSquare, Russian intelligence officers have been dispatched to Budapest by the Kremlin with the mission of interfering in the vote.
During Viktor Orban’s 16 years in power, Hungary has fallen from 23rd to 68th place in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index and is now the fourth-worst ranked country in the European Union.
Public broadcasters have been turned into a propaganda outlet for the government and its Russian ally. Independent private-sector media have been weakened, threatened and silenced through the biased allocation of state advertising, arbitrary suspension of broadcast licences, unlawful surveillance, smear campaigns, and takeovers by oligarchs allied with Fidesz, which now control around 80% of the media landscape.
In 2025, the government intensified efforts to silence the remaining independent media. Smear campaigns were institutionalised through Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office, which has been used to discredit around 15 Hungarian journalists and international media actors, including RSF, through public statements. An oligarch close to Fidesz bought the biggest newspaper in the country, the tabloid Blikk.
The limited success of EU measures
In addition to denouncing the deterioration of media freedom in Hungary, RSF has been pressing the European Union (EU) to act. However, this has had limited success in defending Hungarian journalists’ right to inform and Hungarian citizens’ right to be informed.
The procedure that could lead to the suspension of Hungary’s voting rights in the EU Council over media freedom violations, followed according to Article 7 of the Treaty on the EU, has been stalled. The European Commission’s complaints to the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) have been more successful, but it takes years for verdicts to be delivered.
In February 2026, the CJEU condemned Hungary for “infringing freedom of expression and information” by failing to renew the broadcast licence of the independent outlet Klubradio five years earlier. In December 2025, the Commission launched infringement proceedings over Hungary’s failure to comply with the European Media Freedom Act, an EU law Viktor Orban’s government has been challenging before the CJEU. The Court is also examining another complaint brought by the Commission against Budapest: the 2024 referral over the law establishing the Sovereignty Protection Office.