Billboards in Budapest have been plastered with images that would have been inconceivable in a European democracy just five years ago.
From the city’s busy Oktogon Square to its outer suburbs, state-funded advertising spaces were dominated by an AI-rendered image of the Ukrainian President flashing a sinister smile with the caption: “Don’t let Zelenskyy have the last laugh!”
Simultaneously, a coordinated network of anonymous TikTok accounts began flooding feeds with fabricated news reports featuring AI-generated news anchors. These showed Hungarian soldiers returning home in coffins and deepfake versions of opposition leaders promising to drag the country into a wider European war.
The messaging, which could be collectively traced back to Viktor Orbán’sruling Fidesz party, was clear: “They”, the country’s opposition Tisza movement and its international allies, are a menace to Hungarian security.
While the scapegoating of external enemies, such as “communist”, Western financiers such as the financier and Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros, “hordes of migrants” or Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, is nothing new to Hungarian electioneering, these billboards and videos, funded by the state party, signalled a fundamental pivot in Orbán’s tenure.
For the first time, artificial intelligence was being scaled into the country’s statecraft and deployed to transition a struggling election campaign into a state-sponsored psychological operation.
Digital offensives of this scale have been in the offing for some time. Early last year, Fidesz announced the founding of the Fight Club, a nationwide effort to recruit and train its supporters as “digital infantry”. At its first event, Orbán himself made clear that the digital sphere had become a new political battlefield and a sophisticated supplement to a public information space that he has largely captured since 2010.
Already benefiting from traditional media where 80% have an established pro-government bias, courtesy of operations within the media conglomerate KESMA, generative AI is now being integrated across platforms to create an automated layer of influence that operates at a speed and scale that human editors cannot match.
According to the Hungarian Digital Media Observatory, networks allied to Fidesz — including the social action group, Megafon — have increased content output by 400% since January, with “carpet-bombing” across platforms becoming a key strategy in efforts to thwart the reach of critical media.
The sudden intensity of this operation stems from a growing domestic instability that Orbán can no longer ignore. For the first time in 16 years, his monopoly on the national conversation is under threat, and with it the carefully curated reputation he has struck as a pragmatic broker capable of bridging the competing ambitions of East and West.
Whether through his “peace mission” shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv, or his cultivation of the American alt-right, Orbán’s status as a global ideological challenger depends on the image of a unified, compliant Hungarian electorate.
A domestic defeat would almost certainly terminate the “Hungarian Model” as a viable alternative to Western liberalism. This geopolitical vulnerability has forced his government and supporters onto a permanent emergency footing, where any internal challenge is immediately reframed as a foreign-funded plot to drag the nation into a wider European war.
The primary target of this effort is Péter Magyar, the former Fidesz insider-turned vocal critic, whose Tisza party has disrupted the political landscape by capturing the momentum of a disillusioned middle class.
Late March data from Politico Europe’s poll tracker shows Magyar’s Tisza leading Fidesz by 9%-12%, with some independent surveys placing his advantage among decided voters as high as 20 points.
Rather than relying on traditional (and failed) opposition strategies, Magyar’s movement is built on his status as the ultimate defector. A former diplomat, once married to Judit Varga — the ex-Justice Minister whose career imploded in 2024 following a high-profile clemency scandal — Magyar has spent the last two years dismantling the Fidesz system.
By leaking recordings of Varga describing executive interference in the judiciary, he stripped away the regime’s veneer of legalism and confirmed that the most potent threat to a strongman often comes from his own inner circle. For months, Magyar has pushed Fidesz onto the back foot, rendering the party’s old tactics of character assassination ineffective against a man who understands its tactics inside out.
Desperate to arrest his party’s decline in the polls and cling to office, Orbán has recently weaponised the state treasury with a scorched-earth fiscal policy. The February budget report revealed that the government has already exhausted 42% of its 12-month deficit target, with large parts of this directed to critical voter groups as sweeteners.
Massive pay rises for teachers, personal income tax exemptions for multi-child families, and six-month salary bonuses for law enforcement have become fixtures in an attempt to buy back the loyalty of the middle class. It is the economics of desperation, and an admission that Fidesz can no longer survive on its record.
And yet a marginal upswing of Fidesz support would be enough to thwart Magyar, given the lopsided nature of the country’s electoral system. Since 2010, Fidesz has amended this system more than 30 times to ensure that the incumbent always wins.
Recent modelling has confirmed the task at hand for the opposition, with some estimates suggesting Tisza will need 55% of the popular vote just to achieve a simple majority. Fidesz, meanwhile, could win a constitutional supermajority with just 45%. This 55% hurdle has therefore become a key insurance policy for Orbán, and could ensure that even a significant surge for Magyar might not translate into a change of government. This discrepancy stems, in large part, from the redrawing of constituency boundaries, which have diluted urban opposition votes and improved the returns of rural Fidesz strongholds.
As the election approaches, the campaign is becoming increasingly heated. Russian influence and intelligence operations are coming to light, further reinforcing the assumption that Orbán’s party is trailing in the polls and is therefore willing to resort to previously unseen tactics.
The result on April 12 will ultimately decide whether Hungary begins a long process of democratic restoration or continues on its path towards a more authoritarian and repressive form of governance. A Fidesz victory, especially if narrow, would likely trigger mass protests and further isolate Hungary from its European and NATO allies.
If Tisza wins, its problems will only be beginning. Magyar will need to overcome a deep state of Fidesz loyalists embedded in every corner of the Hungarian state, media, and at the top of the judiciary. Removing them will be difficult.
What is clear, less than a week from the election, is that Orbán’s domestic invincibility is at an end. Hungary’s self-proclaimed strongman may still have the state, but he no longer has momentum. The world will be watching to see if his modern, digital-age autocracy can be defeated by a movement that started from within its own walls.
Zsuzsanna Szelenyi is a former Hungarian MP, director of the Central European University’s Democracy Institute, and the author of ‘Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orban and the Subversion of Hungary
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War
Either Europe will continue allowing Russia’s shadow war to set the terms of escalation, or it will act now to prevent a larger war.
CEPA Forum 2025
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
