An intimate video was intended to politically kill Hungary’s opposition leader Péter Magyar. But he resists the indiscretion and meets heads of government at the weekend. After all, he is the only hope of getting rid of the unpopular Viktor Orbán.
Feb 15, 2026, 10:32 p.mFeb 15, 2026, 10:32 p.m
Simon Maurer / ch media
The omens for Hungary’s opposition have rarely been as good as these days. According to the latest Opinion poll As of Friday, Péter Magyar’s TISZA party is ten percentage points ahead of the Orbán camp. All attempts to slow down the rise of Péter Magyar have so far failed – although state-affiliated media alternately try to either completely ignore the TISZA party or to discredit it with biased campaigns. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s camp seems increasingly nervous given this situation.
This week, the election campaign in Hungary took an unsavory turn: opposition leader Péter Magyar appeared before the media and declared that he was being blackmailed with a secretly recorded sex video. Unknown people are said to have filmed him in a private apartment when he met an ex-girlfriend and had sex with her after his party’s summer party. Magyar spoke of a secret service-like “espionage operation based on the Russian model”. He suspects that people close to Viktor Orbán are behind the action.
Since this week, Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar has had to defend his private life instead of talking about political content.Image: keystone
Once again, an ex becomes a political problem for him
The video mentioned has not yet appeared; only individual images of a darkened room have been published on the Internet. However, speculation quickly began on the Internet and in state-affiliated media about what could be seen in the video. Among other things, it was claimed that the recording shows Magyar and his party deputy in an act in a threesome. For Magyar, as a politician from a conservative party, this would be devastating in the election campaign. He quickly warned that parts of the recordings could have been manipulated. His party deputy was not there that evening.
Magyar admitted that several people were using drugs in the apartment. He said he hadn’t taken anything himself; a drug test came back negative. On Friday he announced a complaint against unknown persons.
For the opposition leader, the affair is more sensitive than past controversies such as last November’s data leak scandal, in which party members’ private information appeared online. Because the current incident hits Magyar’s political self-image. The 44-year-old came into Hungarian politics rather unexpectedly just a few years ago: his wife at the time – Orbán’s justice minister – had to resign in the wake of an affair surrounding a controversial pardon (in the context of a child abuse case). Magyar then broke with Orbán in February 2024 and became a politician himself.
International support against the unpopular Orbán
Since then, his most important argument to voters has been his claim to clean up corruption and nepotism in the country and to distinguish himself from the Orbán party as a clean man. With the new allegations, this image is now coming under further pressure. Meanwhile, the Orbán camp is happy that the sex video distracts from the government’s problems. Namely about an environmental scandal surrounding the Samsung battery factory in the town of Göd near Budapest.
Péter Magyar is now trying to ignore the threat about his sex tape as best he can and get on with day-to-day political business. Addressing Viktor Orbán directly, Magyar said: “This corrupt power has exactly 59 days left in office.” He will not allow himself to be intimidated or blackmailed – and announced that he would appear at the security conference in Munich this weekend. There he wants to meet German Chancellor Merz and Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk. It’s an appearance that already makes him seem like a head of government: as if taking power was only a matter of time.
Whether this strategy will work will become clear in the next few weeks: what matters is whether voters give the smear campaign against Magyar a higher priority than the numerous corruption scandals that have accompanied Orbán’s government for years. The only thing that seems certain at the moment is that the tone in Hungary’s politics will continue to brutalize – and that there will be many more attempts at the bottom drawer of political rhetoric before the election in April.