recommend this episode with Anne Applebaum

by Jay, San Diego, Sunday, April 12, 2026, 13:06 (7 days ago) @ Jack
edited by Jay, Sunday, April 12, 2026, 13:12

Talking about the final weeks of the race.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/anne-applebaum-hungarys-surreal-post

Orban tried to turn it into an anti-Zelensky fear campaign. Magyar stayed with nuts and bolts, quality of life stuff.

Pretty incredible that Magyar was banned from all official media and still won big.

print article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/hungary-first-post-reality-political-campaign...

With that kind of influence, Fidesz, which is well behind in most polls, cannot evade responsibility for Hungarian stagnation, and so neither the party nor its leader is talking much about Hungary, its falling industrial production, or its shrinking population. Instead—backed by Russian propagandists, the European far right, and now the Trump administration (about which more in a minute)—the party is directing a small fortune’s worth of posters and social-media videos toward a different goal: convincing Hungarians to fear sabotage, thievery, or even a military attack from … Ukraine.

This is an entirely false, even ludicrous threat. The Ukrainians have enough to do without starting a second war in Hungary. But Orbán, his government, his party, and many outsiders are now focused on making this threat seem true. Pay attention, because this may be the future of electoral politics: Multiple politicians from several countries are shoveling propaganda at an electorate in order to build terror of an enemy that doesn’t exist at all.

The campaign is not subtle. In Budapest last week, Orbán’s face was almost nowhere to be seen. But posters featuring Zelensky were ubiquitous. Sometimes the Ukrainian president is seen glowering alongside the slogan “Don’t let Zelensky have the last laugh.” Sometimes Zelensky appears with Magyar and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European commission, along with the slogan “They are the risk. Fidesz is the safe choice.” Peter Kreko, who runs a Budapest think tank, told me that this is unprecedented. In 2022, Orbán campaigned on keeping Hungary out of the war. Now he’s telling Hungarians that, as Kreko put it, “we are under imminent threat of attack.”

The same threats reach Hungarians on their phones. On TikTok, where new pro-Fidesz accounts appear every day, AI-created videos of Magyar seem to show him slandering his country—“I stay silent because my masters in Brussels have forbidden me from defending the homeland”—or else singing the Ukrainian national anthem. Another genre of video shows war violence: a Hungarian girl crying as her blindfolded father, wearing a Hungarian uniform, is executed, apparently in Ukraine. Multiple videos also smear Magyar, making personal, sexual, and financial allegations against him, but the fear-Ukrainian-invasion narrative dominates. During a Fidesz march on March 15, a group in the front of the crowd carried a banner declaring We won’t be a Ukrainian colony!