Hungary

Hungary’s parliamentary election of 12 April 2026 ended 16 years of government by Viktor Orbán and Fidesz-KDNP. The Tisza Party won 141 of the 199 parliamentary seats, against 52 for Fidesz-KDNP and six for Mi Hazánk. Péter Magyar became prime minister on 9 May. The change of government was followed by reforms affecting media regulation, public service broadcasting and the institutions that had channelled public assets to politically connected foundations.

A constitutional amendment adopted on 15 June, followed by implementing legislation, enabled the abolition of the special status of public-benefit asset-management foundations not performing higher-education functions. Fourteen foundations, including the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Foundation and the Kék Bolygó Climate Protection Foundation, were removed from the register at the end of August. Their assets, contractual rights and obligations passed to the state, with ministries taking over designated public functions. The Batthyány foundation had received approximately HUF 66 billion in state support between 2022 and 2026, according to the government.

Hungary ranked 74th of 180 in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index, scoring 59.85, down from 68th and 62.82 in 2025. Its political indicator ranked 128th, at 33.89 points. These assessments principally reflect conditions before the April election and do not measure the effectiveness of the subsequent reforms.

Following a public selection procedure, Parliament elected Gábor Polyák, founder of the Mérték Media Monitor, to chair the Media Council on 22 September, together with four members. The reconstituted regulator held its first meeting on 6 October and adopted new procedural rules providing for published decisions and reasoning, named voting records, dissenting opinions and verbatim minutes within three working days. Máté Tóth, elected on a Mi Hazánk nomination, resigned following his election to party office, and the regulator announced that his membership had ended on 5 October. As of 9 October the seven-seat body comprised Polyák and three members, Márta Bencsik, Bea Bodrogi and Krisztina Nagy; the Fidesz-KDNP nominees had not been elected. Polyák has proposed annual assessments of media impartiality by independent experts.

Preferential public advertising remains a central legacy of the previous system. The European Commission’s 2026 Rule of Law Report cited monitoring that placed state advertising at more than 30 per cent of Hungary’s total advertising market and as high as 75 to 80 per cent of KESMA’s revenue, and found no progress on transparent, non-discriminatory allocation rules. Records obtained for fifteen Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office campaigns from April to December 2025 showed about HUF 9 billion gross in online and print advertising, HUF 7.1 billion on television and HUF 1.1 billion on radio. In the reported press allocations Origo received HUF 557 million, Mandiner HUF 390 million and Index HUF 2.9 million. Those figures cover the specified campaigns rather than all state advertising.

A Mérték content analysis of the 2026 campaign coded 1,828 news items from seven outlets between 16 March and 10 April. Of 5,271 recorded narrative occurrences, 91.4 per cent were pro-government, an imbalance driven particularly by Magyar Nemzet. The percentage describes coded narratives across the sample, not the proportion of articles or a result for every outlet.

The withdrawal of preferential advertising after the election accelerated the contraction of Fidesz-aligned media. Mediaworks suspended printed editions of Bors and several regional newspapers and discontinued Ripost.hu and Metropol.hu; Magyar Nemzet was converted from a daily to a weekly. The staff of Pesti Srácok were dismissed and Megafon sharply contracted. Mandiner ended its print weekly in July and ceased new online publication in September, leaving its archive accessible. Following the end of Népszava’s print daily, Hungary had no nationally distributed political daily in print; Népszabadság relaunched on 8 October as a website and weekly publication, not a daily.

Act XXI of 2026 replaced Hungary’s earlier public media governance system. MTVA was absorbed into Duna Médiaszolgáltató Nonprofit Zrt. on 26 July, and as of 8 October the regulator still identified Duna as the service provider. Draft parliamentary resolutions submitted on 7 October would complete its renaming as Magyar Rádió és Televízió Nonprofit Zrt., with a single state-held share of HUF 230 million nominal value, and establish an independent MTI Nonprofit Zrt. as the national news agency. Those corporate steps had not been completed at this update.

The new Independent Public Media Board is operating with six of its nine positions filled: three government-party nominees and three media-professional nominees, but no opposition-party nominees. Leadership of the broadcaster remains interim pending an open competition. The institution was allocated HUF 154.7 billion for 2026; statutory public service financing is to operate from 2027 and the first separate three-year budget law from 2028. The new rules provide for a Public Service Charter and independent annual assessments of content.

The broadcaster remains State-Controlled (SC), provisionally. The classification reflects extensive evidence of political direction of editorial output under the Orbán-era system, continuing through the April 2026 campaign. The new leadership suspended M1’s news service from 7 July to 20 August and introduced new institutional safeguards, but no systematic assessment of editorial output since its return had been completed by 9 October. The changed statutory framework therefore requires further evaluation rather than an automatic finding of editorial independence.

The 2026 review also removes eight previously Captured Private (CaPr) entries from active mapping: KESMA, TV2, Magyar Hirlap, Demokrata, Index, FWD Affairs, Friends of Hungary Foundation and V4NA. The changes reflect a reassessment of the evidence connecting those private outlets to incumbent state authorities, not a finding that they have become independent. Their ownership and partisan alignments frequently remain unchanged, and some earlier public funding agreements or other commercial relationships have not been fully resolved. Historical classifications and past dataset totals are preserved; a future demonstration of state-linked editorial control could lead to renewed mapping.

With those eight removals, Hungary’s active count is revised from nine entries to one. The separate MTI company is not yet mapped while its incorporation remains incomplete.

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