Hungary's Tisza government moves to dismantle Fidesz media empire with new public broadcasting law

Hungary's new government has fired the opening shot in what amounts to a systematic dismantling of the media apparatus built by Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party over fifteen years. On Thursday, the administration of Prime Minister Péter Magyar submitted legislation that would abolish the existing public media organisation outright, replace it with new institutional structures, and install an Independent Public Media Board designed to prevent any single political force from capturing state broadcasting again.

The bill, presented by Zoltán Tarr, the minister responsible for social affairs and culture, is framed in deliberately simple language: its purpose, he said, is to "return public media to the public, to the Hungarian people". But the mechanics reveal a far more ambitious attempt to rewire the relationship between politics and broadcasting in a country where the distinction effectively vanished under Fidesz.

The architecture of the new board

The centrepiece of the proposal is a nine-member Independent Public Media Board. Six members would be nominated by parliamentary groups and elected individually by parliament for four-year terms. Three would be nominated by media professionals and elected by their peers for five-year terms. Government and opposition parties would nominate in equal numbers. Anyone who has held a party-political role during the previous five years is barred from membership.

This structure is a direct response to the way Fidesz operated. Since 2010, the party placed loyalists at the helm of the Media Council, the body that supervised public broadcasting, and used budgetary control to turn the public service broadcaster, MTVA, into what international press freedom organisations repeatedly described as a party mouthpiece. The new board's staggered terms and professional quota are intended to make a repeat capture mathematically difficult.

The legislation also ends the mandates of current media leaders immediately. A government audit of the Fidesz-era system has already begun, and open competitions for senior management positions are expected to be announced in the autumn. For the first time since 2010, the people running Hungarian public television and radio will not be chosen by a single party.

The financial scale of the Fidesz machine

The numbers illustrate why the reform matters. This year alone, more than 150 billion forints in public funds were allocated to the public media system, an exceptionally high figure by regional standards for a broadcaster financed by taxpayers. That sum sustained not just programming but an entire patronage network: production companies, technical contractors, and editorial staff whose loyalty was transactional.

Parallel to the state broadcaster stood the Central European Press and Media Foundation, known by its Hungarian acronym KESMA. Created in 2018, KESMA consolidated hundreds of pro-government outlets, newspapers, websites, radio stations, television channels, into a single holding company, Mediaworks, exempted from competition law on the grounds of 'national strategic importance'. The foundation's board was stacked with Fidesz loyalists. Its outlets received a steady stream of state advertising, which in Hungary functions as a de facto subsidy for friendly media.

Collapse of the pro-Fidesz business model

That model is now unravelling. Mediaworks ended 2025 with revenue of 57.9 billion forints but a loss of 14 billion forints. Since the April election, state advertising revenues have dried up. Without them, the holding company's finances are unsustainable. Mass layoffs have begun across KESMA outlets, particularly those that functioned as instruments of party propaganda, participated in smear campaigns against opposition figures, and focused almost exclusively on amplifying government messaging.

The speed of the collapse is striking. In authoritarian-adjacent media systems, the financial umbilical cord to the state is usually the last thing to be cut. Magyar's government has severed it within weeks of taking office. The layoffs are not merely a commercial adjustment; they represent the disintegration of a political infrastructure that Fidesz spent more than a decade building.

International context and domestic resistance

International press freedom organisations, including Reporters Without Borders and the International Press Institute, have for years ranked Hungary near the bottom of EU member states for media pluralism. The European Commission's annual rule of law reports consistently flagged the capture of public broadcasting and the opacity of state advertising distribution. The new legislation, if implemented faithfully, would address several of the Commission's specific recommendations.

Fidesz has not yet mounted a detailed public response to the bill. The party retains a blocking minority in parliament and controls the constitutional court, whose judges were appointed during its tenure. Any legislation can be challenged there. The government will need a two-thirds majority for certain provisions, which may require negotiation with smaller opposition groupings beyond Tisza's own parliamentary strength.

Magyar's Brussels debut

While the media bill was being drafted in Budapest, Magyar was in Brussels for the European Council summit on 18 June. The agenda, Ukraine's accession, the next seven-year EU budget, competitiveness, migration, the Middle East, was the standard fare of a leaders' meeting. But the subtext was Hungary's return to the mainstream of European politics after years of confrontation under Orbán.

Magyar participated in a gathering of European People's Party leaders and in a revived consultation among the Visegrád Four countries, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He is also expected to meet Volodymyr Zelensky in person for the first time since becoming prime minister. The symbolism is deliberate: the Visegrád Four format had atrophied under Orbán's veto-heavy approach to EU unity on Ukraine; its revival under a pro-European Hungarian leader signals a shift in regional dynamics.

The audit and what follows

The government audit now underway will determine how much of the 150 billion forint annual budget was spent on actual public service content versus political propaganda, patronage contracts and inflated management costs. The findings, expected before the autumn recruitment round, will shape public perception of the reform's legitimacy. If the audit reveals systematic misappropriation, the political pressure for criminal investigations will be intense. If it finds mere inefficiency, the reform risks looking like a partisan purge rather than a structural correction.

The autumn competitions for senior posts will be the first real test of the new board's independence. The legislation requires open, merit-based selection. But the pool of experienced Hungarian media executives who have not worked within the Fidesz system is shallow. Many of the country's most capable journalists and managers either left the profession, emigrated, or were marginalised. The board may face a choice between appointing untested talent and recruiting people with compromised pasts.

For the European Commission, the legislation offers a concrete benchmark. The next rule of law report, due in 2027, will assess implementation, not intent. Magyar's government has moved faster than many in Brussels expected. Whether it sustains that pace once the technical difficulties of building a pluralistic broadcaster from the ruins of a partisan one become apparent is the question that will define Hungary's media landscape for the next parliamentary term.