The Fourth Reich will do anything and everything to interfere with the democratic will of the Hungarian people.
Battle for Hungary: How the EU plans to defeat Viktor Orban
Brussels is deploying all of its influence and censorship machinery ahead of the Hungarian election
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/rt-newsroom/
Three weeks out from the most consequential European election of the year, the EU has aimed every weapon in its arsenal at Hungary, as Brussels prepares for its best shot yet at taking out Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Orban’s animosity toward the EU establishment runs deep. For more than a decade, the Hungarian prime minister has often been the bloc’s sole dissident: railing against its open-door migration policies, embrace of LGBT ideology, and
“suicidal” plan to welcome Ukraine into the union. Orban has secured carve-outs from the EU’s anti-Russian sanctions that enabled Hungary to continue purchasing Russian oil, and is currently vetoing a €90 billion loan package for Kiev.
The EU has responded by withholding funds equal to 3.5% of Hungary’s GDP over his banning of LGBT propaganda and refusal to accept non-European migrants. With the future of its Ukraine project now on the line, Brussels has pinned its hopes on Peter Magyar and his Tisza party, which promises to overturn Orban’s domestic reforms and Budapest’s opposition to the EU’s designs in Ukraine and beyond.
After the European Council failed to find a workaround to Orban’s veto at a March 19 meeting, the EU’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, hinted that work was underway on a
“Plan B.” Based on the strategy playing out in Budapest, ‘Plan B’ clearly involves a full-scale campaign of censorship and subversion to influence Hungary’s upcoming elections.
Rapid Response
On March 16, European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier quietly announced that the EU had activated its Rapid Response System (RRS) to
“combat potential Russian online disinformation campaigns” in the runup to the Hungarian election. The mechanism will be active until one week after the vote, Regnier said.
Theoretically, platforms such as Meta and TikTok participate in the system voluntarily. All major social media companies have to sign up to the EU’s ‘Code of Practice on Disinformation’. However, a trove of documents published by the House Judiciary Committee in Washington this year revealed that these companies were threatened – often explicitly – with punishment under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) if they refused to tow the EU line.
A European Commission memo released by the House Judiciary Committee threatens social media platforms with 'enforcement actions' if they violate its election guidelines © House Judiciary Committee
The premise resembles a Mafia-style protection racket, with the deputy chief of the commission’s communications directorate telling platforms in 2024 that refusal to sign the codes of conduct
“could be taken into account… when determining whether the provider is complying with the obligations laid down by the DSA.”
The DSA is now in force, giving Brussels’ fact-checkers the final say over what constitutes
“disinformation” ahead of the election.
Peter Magyar’s allies in Meta
The argument that these fact-checkers favor Magyar is well founded. Over four European elections in which the Rapid Response System was activated, the Judiciary Committee found that fact-checkers
“almost exclusively targeted” right-wing and populist candidates and organizations.
“Moreover, the requirement that these fact-checkers be approved by the European Commission creates a clear structural incentive for the participants to censor Euroskeptic opinion and content,” the committee noted.
Hungarian MEP Dora David, a former Meta employee and member of Magyar’s Tisza party,
boasted last year that
“we’ve seen companies change their behavior” based on the threat of DSA enforcement, citing Meta’s removal of pro-Orban content as an example.
The fact-checkers can count on sympathetic staff within the social media companies. After several members of Orban’s Fidesz party claimed that Meta has already started restricting the reach of their Facebook posts, commentators
Joey Mannarino and
Philip Pilkington identified Oskar Braszczynski as the employee likely responsible. Braszczynski, who works as Meta’s ‘Government and Social Impact Partner for Central and Eastern Europe’, has shared pro-Ukraine, anti-Orban, and pro-LGBT content on his personal social media accounts.
”The European Commission is outsourcing the task of content moderation to so-called external civil society actors, all of whom have a progressive orientation,” Fidesz MEP Csaba Domotor said in Brussels on March 18. Regarding Braszczynski’s role in the censorship program, Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesman for Orban’s office, said that having
“a highly politicized figure overseeing the region undermines platform neutrality and raises questions about potential interference in Hungary’s election.”
How the EU outsources its smear campaigns
In Hungary and Romania – and in elections in France, Germany, and Moldova – the EU has used the threat of
“Russian online disinformation campaigns” to justify its activation of the RRS. When no such threat exists, Brussels can outsource the job of manufacturing it.
Just over a week before Regnier announced the activation of the RSS, journalists at the Polish nonprofit Vsquare
claimed to have uncovered evidence that Russian
“election fixers” were working in Hungary to swing the election for Orban. In a tale reminiscent of an espionage thriller, the outlet claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin had dispatched
“a team of political technologists” from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, to Budapest, where working under diplomatic cover at the Russian Embassy, they are likely running
“vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.”
The report cites
“multiple European national security sources,” without disclosing any further details.
Vsquare's article on alleged Russian influence in the Hungarian election, and a list of the outlet's donors from its website
Almost all of Vsquare’s published work – which includes investigations tying Orban’s government to Russian intelligence, as well as hit pieces on populist leaders Robert Fico in Slovakia and Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic – is based on information provided by European intelligence agencies, and interviews with pro-EU politicians and NGOs.
The outlet is
funded by grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an agency of the US State Department that helped
foment the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine,
sponsored meetings of anti-Beijing officials and delegates in Taiwan, and
financed a UK-based organization working to drive right-wing American news outlets out of business. It is also financed by USAID, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and two EU-backed journalism funds.
Whatever the role these agencies played in concocting the story, it served the dual purpose of giving the EU an excuse to switch on its censorship machine, and giving Magyar political ammunition against Orban.
”Agents of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, are stationed in Budapest under diplomatic cover to influence the elections,” he told supporters at a rally in the city of Pecs on March 8, before leading the crowd in chants of
“Russians, go home!”