On 12 April, Hungarians go to the polls in what Politico has called the EU’s most consequential election of 2026: a vote that will determine whether Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year experiment in dismantling democracy, capturing the media and criminalising queer visibility inside a European Union member state can be reversed by a ballot.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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The building sits on the Buda side of the Danube, a brutalist slab in the third district where Hungary’s public broadcasting is supposed to happen. On a Saturday in early October 2024, thousands stood outside the headquarters of MTVA – the Media Services and Support Trust Fund, which manages every state television channel, every state radio station and the news agency MTI – and shouted Ne félünk. We are not afraid. They waved national flags and carried signs reading Stop Propaganda. Péter Magyar, the opposition leader whose Tisza party had emerged to challenge Viktor Orbán’s sixteen-year hold on the country, told the crowd: ‘What is happening here in Hungary in 2024, and calling itself “public service” media, is a global scandal.’ He entered the building to read out sixteen demands. He was told he had no right to be there.
A protester named Balázs Tömpe, who had travelled hours to stand in that crowd, called the building a ‘factory of lies’. A retired teacher, Ágnes Gera, said the public only heard from one side. Neither was being rhetorical. They were describing a system engineered over fifteen years to ensure that Hungary’s six million television households receive a version of reality. Between 2010 and 2025, Hungary plunged from 23rd to 68th out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. Even as the European Parliament voted to affirm trans rights, Hungary was moving in the opposite direction.
None of this happened overnight. It took Orbán fifteen years to bring a once-pluralistic media sector to its knees, and he did not need to imprison a single journalist. The engineering began in 2010, when Fidesz won a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority. Within months, the government overhauled the media law, packed the regulatory authority with loyalists, and began purging the public broadcaster. More than 1,600 journalists and media workers were sacked, according to Human Rights Watch’s 2024 report ‘I Can’t Do My Job as a Journalist’. They were replaced by people who could. Current and former employees told the watchdog that reporters are instructed what to cover and which terms to use. The word ‘refugee’ was banned during the 2015 migration crisis. During the pandemic, leaked emails obtained by Radio Free Europe showed an editor directing staff that the purpose of Covid coverage was to ‘make it seem as though we don’t have as much trouble as anywhere else’.
In a leaked 2019 recording, a senior MTVA editor named Balázs Bende told reporters that anyone unwilling to produce content ‘according to the appropriate narrative’ was ‘free to file their resignation immediately’. Before elections, a minimum of one ‘migration story’ per day was required. The template: brutal footage first, then statistics, then the suggestion that millions more were coming.
The private media was captured by different means. On a single morning in November 2018, owners of eight media companies, all Fidesz-connected businessmen, ‘donated’ their outlets to a newly established entity: the Central European Press and Media Foundation, KESMA. Within weeks, 476 outlets had been transferred. The government declared the merger a matter of ‘strategic national importance’, exempting it from competition review. Reporters Without Borders estimates that around eighty per cent of the media market is now controlled by pro-government interests.
The independent outlets that survived faced a different arsenal. By 2023, a third of independent media had been targeted by strategic lawsuits. In 2024, Orbán personally filed defamation suits against outlets that had cited an Austrian newspaper interview critical of his government. Parliament established the Sovereignty Protection Office, with sweeping powers to investigate anyone deemed to serve foreign interests; it opened probes into Átlátszó, Telex and Válasz Online. In his annual address this month, Orbán pledged to ‘clear out’ media and civil society after the election.
The captured media carried something more than favourable coverage. It carried a social programme. In June 2021, parliament passed Act LXXIX by 157 to 1, a law prohibiting LGBTQ-related content for anyone under eighteen in advertising, media, schools and bookshops. It conflates homosexuality with paedophilia in its legislative structure. Amnesty International documented what followed: bookshops wrapping novels with queer characters in plastic, schools refusing all outside sex educators, and authors shifting their own work to adults-only. One writer was threatened with being spat on at a book signing. The law’s effect on Hungary’s queer community was immediate.
The law’s reach extended into places no legislation ordinarily touches. David Pressman, a human rights lawyer and the first openly gay man to serve as United States ambassador to Hungary, arrived in Budapest in September 2022 with his husband and two children. Before the Senate had even voted on his confirmation, a rubber dinghy appeared on the Danube near the embassy carrying a skull-and-crossbones banner: ‘Mr Pressman, don’t colonise Hungary with your cult of death.’ He kept a photograph of it behind his desk. During a school visit, a student asked him what it was like to represent the US government as an LGBTQ person. Pressman hesitated; he was not certain he could answer without violating Act LXXIX. An ambassador, silenced in a classroom by a law ostensibly written to protect children. ‘They always want to have the conversation about a culture war,’ Pressman told the Guardian. ‘We want to have a conversation about a real war that exists next door.’ In a January 2025 interview with the New York Times, days after his departure, he was blunter: ‘Hungary is a living example of how vulnerable democratic institutions are and how easy it is for leaders with bad intentions to control citizens.’ Speaker of the National Assembly László Kövér had called him ‘one of the least classy ambassadors ever to set foot on Hungarian soil’. Minister János Lázár, after Trump’s re-election, said Pressman should ‘come nowhere near this country’ once his mandate expired.
The pace quickened. On 18 March 2025, parliament banned any public assembly deemed to violate the ‘child protection’ legislation. Pride marches were now criminal. Organisers faced a year in prison; participants, fines of up to €500. The law authorised facial recognition to identify attendees, one more entry in a record that has already made Hungary a test case for EU human rights standards. On 14 April, a constitutional amendment cemented the ban.
The response was not compliance. On 28 June 2025, despite a police ban, Budapest’s mayor Gergely Karácsony held the city’s thirtieth Pride regardless. Almost two hundred thousand people walked – the largest Pride in Hungarian history and the largest anti-government demonstration in years, a test of whether Orbán’s challenger could unite the country. In January 2026, prosecutors charged Karácsony. ‘I have gone from being a proud suspect to a proud defendant,’ he said. In Pécs, organiser Géza Buzás-Hábel faces charges carrying up to a year’s imprisonment, the first known EU case of a human rights defender facing prison for organising a peaceful march.
Hungary votes on 12 April 2026. Independent polling by Medián gives Magyar’s Tisza party a lead of roughly twenty points among decided voters: 55 per cent to 35. Among voters under thirty, more than sixty per cent support Tisza; fifteen per cent back the ruling party. A government-aligned think tank finds Fidesz ahead. The gap between pro-government and independent pollsters has become, in the words of political scientist Gábor Török, ‘unexplainable on research grounds’.
Magyar is not a lifelong dissident. He is a former Fidesz insider who broke with the party in 2024 after the presidential pardon scandal exposed a cover-up of child abuse in a state children’s home. On substance, Magyar often sounds strikingly similar to the man he’s trying to replace. He has opposed fast-tracking Ukraine’s EU membership, rejected sending weapons to Kyiv, and signalled he would put EU accession to a referendum — which could derail the process entirely. His conservatism is real; he has not taken a strong stance on LGBTQ rights. But he has promised to dismantle the propaganda machinery, restore independent public media, and rebuild the checks Orbán spent sixteen years demolishing. That promise, for many Hungarians, is the whole of it. But, does he really represent a massive shift from Orbán?
The desperation of the incumbent’s position was laid bare on 21 March, when the Washington Post reported that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service had drawn up a plan it called ‘the Gamechanger’: a staged assassination attempt on Orbán, designed to shift the campaign from ‘socioeconomic questions’ into ‘an emotional one’ centred on state security. A separate Financial Times report identified a Kremlin-backed campaign casting Magyar as a ‘Brussels puppet’. Three agents of Russian military intelligence were tracked entering Hungary, according to VSquare. The outlet’s lead investigative editor, Szabolcs Panyi, has since been reported to police on suspicion of espionage after exposing the foreign minister’s Russian contacts. The Kremlin called the reports disinformation.
The domestic dimension may be worse. On 25 March, the investigative outlet Direkt36 released an interview with Bence Szabó, a senior cybercrime investigator at the National Bureau of Investigation. Szabó described being dispatched to investigate two individuals suspected of possessing child pornography. No such material was found. What investigators discovered was that both men worked on Tisza’s IT systems and had been subjected to approaches and threats aimed at turning them against the party. It looked, his account suggested, like an intelligence operation run against the opposition from inside the state. ‘In an ideal system, I would not be here,’ he said. ‘But this is not an ideal system.’
On 29 March, John Oliver devoted the main segment of Last Week Tonight to the election, calling Orbán’s rule a coup accomplished with lawyers rather than tanks, and noting that JD Vance was reportedly planning to visit Budapest ahead of the vote. ‘For them,’ Oliver said of American conservatives, ‘Orbán is not a cautionary tale – he’s a blueprint.’ The European far right has taken note.
The international solidarities hardening around Orbán are no longer merely ideological. On 21 March 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared at CPAC Hungary in Budapest, rallying behind Orbán weeks before the vote. His son, Yair told the conference that Israel had ‘no better friends in Europe’ than Hungary. Netanyahu’s visit was his second in a year to a country still formally bound by an ICC arrest warrant for alleged war crimes in Gaza; Hungary has refused to execute it and announced its withdrawal from the Rome Statute, effective June 2026. The mutual benefit is plain: Orbán gets the prestige of hosting an international far-right leader no other EU capital will receive; Netanyahu gets a platform inside the bloc and a reliable veto on EU foreign policy. The pattern extends south. In Slovenia, which held its own parliamentary election on 22 March, the intelligence agency SOVA confirmed that operatives from Black Cube, a private Israeli firm founded by former Mossad officers, had visited Ljubljana and met opposition leader Janez Janša, Orbán’s closest regional ally, in the months before covertly recorded material began destabilising the pro-Palestinian government of Robert Golob. Janša’s SDS, which backed Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ legislation and launched a parliamentary Israel caucus in 2025, lost by fewer than 25,000 votes. The machinery, it turns out, is exportable.
The European Union watched this unfold for fifteen years. The EU-funded Media Pluralism Monitor has flagged Hungary as ‘high risk’ since 2014. The Commission’s Rule of Law Reports have issued warnings since 2020. It took until December 2025 for the Commission to open an infringement procedure for systemic violations of EU law relating to media freedom. By the time it acted, the damage was structural, and the consequences were no longer confined to Hungary: the political climate Orbán helped normalise has fed a growing network of far-right violence across Europe.
Donald Trump’s pledge to use the “full economic might” of the U.S. to help the Hungarian economy comes as Orban trails in the polls going into Sunday’s election. Vance was in Budapest to rally support for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the days before the elections to redouble his involvement in a different conflict: the global culture war.
Back at the MTVA building in Óbuda, nothing has changed. The newsroom still produces its Hirádó bulletins. The editors still issue their directives. Opposition voices remain absent from the airwaves, despite being paid for by the citizens who gathered outside, demanding to be heard. But the arithmetic has shifted. The machinery of silence – the captured courts, the packed media council, the KESMA empire, the constitutional amendments drafted to pre-empt dissent – was built on the assumption that the public would never organise an alternative. Almost two hundred thousand people were on the streets of Budapest in June. A twenty-point polling deficit twelve days before the vote. A factory of lies with its lights on, and a country deciding whether to walk inside and change the frequency. ■
Update 12.04.2026, 19:00 CEST
Fidesz tried to pay voters; Tisza told voters: ‘If you sell your vote, they will take your child!’ — journalists report from Tarnazsadány.
The most hallucinatory elections in the European Union are being projected by major independent newspapers, with Tisza as the winner and Fidesz as the loser, based on the 21 Research Centre. Turnout was almost 80%, a record for Hungary. Exit polls in Hungary do not exist. Pollsters are prohibited from being within 150 meters of voting sites, and the complexity of the electoral system makes such polls difficult to execute accurately.
Viktor Orbán appears to have lost the election, and MAGA supporters around the world are crying fraud. The final results will be known next week.
Orbán’s supporters are already gearing up for a confrontation once the results come in, with experts warning that the outcome could be challenged in court no matter who wins.
Update 13.04.2026, 01:00 CEST
Viktor Orbán admitted defeat and congratulated his opponent. Tisza landslide victory offers them a majority in Parliament. Péter Magyar is set to win a supermajority in the 199-seat parliament and become the new prime minister of Hungary. That would allow Tisza to deliver their promises and no excuses.
The 16-year reign of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is at an end after a crushing election loss on Sunday that will send political shockwaves from Washington to Moscow. MAGA lost their king. Donald Trump lost his ally.
The Guardian made an excellent, sober portrait of Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz member.
For the LGBTQ+ micro-society, we project no victory.
*This article has been updated to include news developments. Here you will find the results of the elections.
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