Hungary’s parliamentary election was a hotbed of disinformation, ranging from manufactured party platforms to Kremlin-linked influence operations.
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After Sunday’s polls and landmark result, it is worth unpacking exactly what was done to try to sway the vote.
Peter Magyar’s Tisza party swept to a two-thirds majority of 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament, ousting longtime prime minister Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power.
While concerns about foreign interference, particularly from Russia, drew international attention throughout the campaign, analysts say the vast majority of disinformation circulating ahead of the vote originated at home, not in Moscow.
Szilárd Teczár, a journalist with Hungarian fact-checking organization Lakmusz, estimates at least 90% was domestic in origin — and when reach and impact are factored in, he says the figure could be even higher.
Of that domestic share, Fidesz was the dominant force and not just the party itself.
Teczár points to the wider ecosystem around it, including media outlets under its influence or control and proxy organizations such as the National Resistance Movement and Megafon, a so-called influencer network, which he describes as two of the most important actors in this campaign.
Euronews Next takes a closer look at the overall narrative of this campaign and some of the new trends in political messaging that emerged, both on and offline, as the vote came down.
Domestic disinformation dominates the campaign
Disinformation researchers said that pro-government actors deployed more aggressive tactics during this campaign than in previous elections.
One new tactic included manufacturing news stories built on “complete disinformation,” according to Konrad Bleyer-Simon, a research fellow at the European University Institute.
For example, Bleyer-Simon said Orban’s party created a fake party platform for Tisza and leaked it to indexa Hungarian news site, which published a story claiming that the opposition was planning a major tax hike if it won.
The document was, in fact, a forgery and included fake policy proposals such as taxing cats and dogs, according to Bleyer-Simon. Tisza filed several lawsuits against Index and other media companies for publishing the story.
Orban’s party then used fake policy platforms on campaign posters that they put up throughout the country.
“What I think is different is that now the government is going beyond propaganda and is also creating its own facts on the ground,” he said. “They tried to produce proof for their propaganda.”
Bleyer-Simon said the reason Orban’s camp had to become more “extreme” in their methods is that they were genuinely “afraid they might… lose the elections” — a fear that ended up materializing over the weekend after Magyar’s sweeping victory.
To counter this, Tisza party made an effort to go from “village to village” to gain support throughout the election, which Bleyer-Simon said made them much stronger against Orban’s party despite the attempts to undermine their credibility.
A ‘classic playbook’ of Russian interference
While the Kremlin’s fingerprints were definitely noticed in the campaign, disinformation analysts say its reach was more limited than feared.
Russia ran what Alice Lee, an analyst with NewsGuard, called the “classic playbook” for election interference — falsifying news reports with “egregious claims” against Orbán’s opponents.
One operation, Matryoshka, specializes in producing fake video news reports.
In Hungary, the group manufactured a false video purportedly from French outlet Le Monde, claiming Ukrainian artist Denis Panshenko had been poisoning Hungarian dogs, Lee said.
Another Russian actor involved in the campaign, Storm 1516, published more elaborate articles that mimicked news sites.
One of their major articles said that Orban’s main opponent insulted US President Donald Trump, a claim that received major traction on social media platform X.
Storm-1516 also targeted other Tisza figures, accusing them of dragging Hungary into the Russia-Ukraine war and threatening to worsen US-Hungarian relations, Lee added.
Why the increased Russian activity? Lee has a theory.
“The Russians are interfering more now because they assumed that… Orbán would be pretty safe because he has a strong sort of state media monopoly… [and] “a fairly good hold over the population,” she said.
But much of that interference may have missed its mark.
Lakmusz, the fact-checking organization, found that many of the Russian campaigns were in English rather than Hungarian and were posted on X — a platform that is “not that important” for Hungarian political discourse compared to Facebook, according to Teczár.
“We should be careful not to overexaggerate the effect of… outright Russian disinformation pieces, because when we look at their reach and spread, we found that these were quite limited,” he said.
Advertising restrictions
New restrictions from Meta and Google forced Hungarian political parties to change tactics to get their messages out to the base on the country’s most popular sites, such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, Bleyer-Simon said.
Last October, Meta banned political advertising on its platforms in the European Union due to “legal uncertainties”. Similar restrictions put in place by YouTube last September prohibit ads from political actors that could influence the outcome of an election or referendum.
The restrictions worked to some extent, according to Bleyer-Simon and Teczár, because there was less propaganda on these social media channels than in other campaigns.
However, Fidesz found ways to get ads on social media, both added.
Fidesz created private Facebook groups such as “Fighters Club” with over 61,000 people and the “Digital Civic Circles” group with more than 100,000 people.
A translated description for the Fighter’s Club Facebook group said it was founded by Viktor Orban in 2025 to “effectively represent Hungary’s interests in the online space”.
The group is invitation-only, and it looks for Hungarians who are “actively ready to act for God, homeland and family,” it wrote.
“What Fidesz expects from [the Facebook groups] is to create a structure which can send their supporters to specific social media posts and instruct them to like, share, and comment to boost reach,” Teczár explained, noting that engagement on their posts is not very high.
Both Fidesz-backed groups ran more than 4,000 ads on Meta to encourage users to join them, according to Political Capital, a leading Hungarian NGO.
Other Facebook pages, such as Heart of Hungary — labeled as an equestrian group — published five paid ads using a fabricated article accusing Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi, a Tisza politician, of recruiting Hungarians to fight the war in Ukraine, Lakmusz said.
Those ads reached at least 100,000 people in a week.
Political Capital highlighted Fidesz used AI videos on Facebook for “negative campaigning, discrediting and social fear-mongering”.
For example, Fidesz party candidate István Mohácsy posted a war-themed AI videos that showed the Tisza party taking young Hungarians to the war front.
Other party members, such as Ruszin-Szendi, Tibor Ferenc Halmai and Tamás Cseh were also depicted in military uniforms.
Political Capital said that Tisza members also used AI to push back against pro-government narratives attempting to discredit them.
Magyar and several Tisza politicians posted AI-generated TIME Magazine photos on Facebook where they appeared as the Person of the Year, which Political Capital said builds the “myth of the man who defies power”.
These videos and social media ads are not tracked by Meta Ad Library or other similar tools previously available to researchers, making it harder for them to analyze their spread ahead of the election, Bleyer-Simon concluded.