Hungary’s New Government Vows Media Overhaul After Orban Era

After 16 years of Viktor Orban’s rule in Hungary, prime minister-elect Peter Magyar is promising a radical overhaul of the country’s media landscape, which critics have long described as a government propaganda machine.

Magyar’s unexpected electoral victory last weekend has been interpreted by many as a rejection of Orban’s system, which increasingly centralized control over public institutions, including state media. Under Orban, public media outlets were accused of serving as political instruments that marginalized opposition voices and promoted government narratives.

“What we experienced was more subtle curbing of freedoms, which does have an impact on everyday life,” explains Eva Bognar, a media specialist at the Central European University’s Democracy Institute in Budapest. Bognar characterizes Hungary’s current public media as sources of “disinformation” and “a lot of Russian propaganda.”

The incoming prime minister has pledged that Hungary “needs a new media law and a new media authority.” In a move that signals the depth of his reform intentions, Magyar has promised to suspend state media’s news departments until they can be restructured to genuinely serve the public interest.

According to the campaign manifesto of Magyar’s center-right Tisza party, the new government will “immediately seize the operations of the news segment of the public service media” until they can “set up a proper public media where the free flow of information is possible.”

However, some media experts remain cautious about these promises. “We don’t know if this will be the case or there’s a chance that public service media and the media in general would just serve a different government,” Bognar warns. “It would be hugely problematic if it were the narrative that changed but not the structure.”

Such skepticism isn’t unfounded. Bognar points out that Magyar himself “has been highly critical of independent outlets and made some quite problematic remarks when it came to independent media and independent journalists, calling them propagandists when they criticized him.”

The Orban government’s media strategy evolved over time, first using legislative means to reshape the media landscape, then deploying economic levers such as state advertising to reward friendly outlets and financially starve critical ones. Eventually, many independent media organizations were purchased and incorporated into KESMA, a pro-government media conglomerate that dramatically reduced media pluralism in the country.

These practices have contributed to a profound crisis of media trust in Hungary. The 2025 Digital News Report by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute found that only 22 percent of Hungarians trust news content most of the time – one of the lowest levels among all countries surveyed.

“Journalism, journalists are not trusted, journalism in general is not trusted,” Bognar observes. “It will be extremely important for [the new government] to start mending this social fabric that’s been so torn apart.”

Magyar’s pledge to restore media freedom comes as part of a broader reform agenda aimed at resetting Hungary’s troubled relationship with the European Union. Under Orban, the EU suspended billions of euros in funding due to concerns about democratic backsliding and corruption.

The stakes are substantial: Hungary risks losing approximately €10 billion in EU pandemic recovery funds if it fails to implement judicial independence reforms and anti-corruption measures by the end of August.

In a phone call with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen earlier this week, Magyar committed to restoring Hungary’s democratic institutions, including protections for media freedom and academic independence, according to reporting by Politico.

Magyar announced Wednesday that his new cabinet could be sworn in by mid-May, marking the beginning of what many Hungarians hope will be a significant democratic reset after years of increasingly authoritarian governance.