THE forthcoming Hungarian election on April 12 is a tightly-fought affair. In Hungary, where voter turnout tends to be higher than in Western Europe, all elections are tightly-fought. This time, however, Hungary’s election has piqued the interest of more international media outlets, and as a result the amount of ignorance on display has risen.
From Britain, the Daily Telegraph published an article ostensibly providing insight into the election. Sadly, if predictably, it succeeded in painting a picture of the political scene and candidates that few in Hungary would recognise.
Viktor Orbán’s challenger, Péter Magyar, is wholly misrepresented. According to the report, this is a right-wing politician who’s based himself on incumbent Prime Minister Orbán in order to beat him at his own game. Magyar is nothing of the sort. He has repeatedly proved that he is unable to control himself in public, and has managed to set and then spring a trap for himself which ensured that he is now controlled by Manfred Weber, head of the EPP (European People’s Party). For the uninitiated, the EPP was once a conservative group in the European Parliament, but has been steadily moving to the left under Weber’s leadership. A right-wing politician doesn’t qualify as such if he’s the puppet of a left-winger.
Magyar’s trap of his own making reveals much about a man who avoids questions and traditional media. Preferring to ignore or talk over journalists’ questions, Magyar went through a stage in which he sang a melancholy song, badly, about the view from his prison cell in response to all questions. His explanation was that he was merely foretelling what Orbán could expect. At best, he speaks in soundbites which have little if anything to do with the questions posed. He has flounced out of many an opposition TV studio, growing irate at questions posed. He does not speak to what he sees as government media, preferring to dismiss them as propagandists. As a result, not a lot is known about him, his proposed programme or his party’s candidates.
What of his political background? In 2024, Magyar won a seat in the European Parliament. He immediately stated that due to the EP being the biggest waste of time known to man, he’d never take up his seat. But shortly after winning Magyar was filmed cavorting and writhing on the dance floor with women young enough to be his daughters. His behaviour was deemed to be unacceptable and he was ejected in a chokehold by bouncers. Apparently not content with behaviour scarcely befitting a candidate for prime minister, Magyar took objection to a young man filming his premature exit from the nightclub: he relieved the young man of his phone and threw it into the Danube. He was prosecuted for theft and criminal damage. But as a member of the European Parliament, Magyar has legal immunity and Manfred Weber supported his cry for immunity when Hungarian authorities tried to strip him of it.
So Magyar, who faces criminal charges which should make it impossible for him to run for prime minister, now sits securely in Weber’s pocket. And Weber, a confirmed and outspoken Hungarophobe, is anything but a conservative.
It matters not what the Daily Telegraph thinks of Magyar’s politics; the information it prints relates to the time when Magyar was present in Brussels, accompanying his ex-wife and mother of their three children, former Minister of Justice, Judit Varga. As the Telegraph reports, at that time, when Magyar was in awe of Orbán, it is possible that he wanted to be just like his idol. That time, however, has passed and Magyar has proved himself unworthy of the role of prime minister, and has enabled Weber to place him over a barrel. It doesn’t matter what he thinks, it doesn’t matter that he has yet to release a political programme, it doesn’t matter what his party proposes about economics. Weber and the EU will control Magyar if he gets into power, and they are fully supportive of federalism and Ukraine, two things Orbán has fought hard against.
It’s disturbing that Magyar’s ‘explosion’ on to the Hungarian political scene is not documented in the Telegraph’s article. He gained his foothold in Hungarian politics by secretly recording conversations he had (and some would suggest guided by) with his ex-wife when she was Minister of Justice. Magyar then went public with the information and delivered the recordings to the police (in a veritable media circus), making himself available for hours of explanation regarding them. Western media don’t appear to find this distasteful. I find that insulting. Nigel Farage was hauled over the coals for something he may or may not have said 50-odd years ago as a teenager. The British media and public then eagerly discussed whether such a man should even has a role to play in British public life. Compare that with Magyar who, even now, is presented in the West as some sort of wunderkind to replace the incumbent Orbán.
Magyar, when still married to the Minister of Justice, constantly pressured her to arrange seats for him on various boards of directors. At government events, Magyar had to be seated in the front row, close to Orbán, protocol be damned. Magyar, jealous of his wife’s career, regularly interfered with her police protection officers, preventing them from completing their duties. By his own account, he attended an all-night party in a hotel room recently where other people, not him, were taking drugs in the bedroom he was in.
The list of reasons to eject this man from public life grow by the day. He won’t talk to the press, repeatedly encourages, or at least refuses to discourage, his more aggressive supporters from intimidating journalists, and has chosen as a potential defence minister a man dismissed as head of the Hungarian armed forces when it became known that he punctuated the end of Nato meetings with the cry ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ That man, now a Tisza candidate, faced a police investigation for attending public meetings armed with a pistol concealed under his shirt.
Even today, the list of reasons to drop this man like a hot potato has grown with the leaking of Tisza’s economic plan which consists of bankrupting Hungary, partly by removing cheap Russian energy from the mix, thereby putting an end to economic growth and lumping Hungary in with the EU, which is doing its utmost to destroy itself.
If I were related to this man, I’d disown him. I can’t think of a single reason to vote for him, but of this, too, the Telegraph seems blissfully unaware. That, too, is disturbing.
