Eight reasons for the collapse of Orbán’s informational autocracy
This study explains why the informational autocracy built under Viktor Orbán lost its persuasive authority in the 12 April 2026 parliamentary election. It focuses on how Fidesz lost agenda-setting power, why its disinformation strategy ceased to persuade beyond its core electorate, and how TISZA established itself as a credible governing alternative.
- TISZA won 55.8% of the domestic list vote and 141 seats, ending sixteen years of Fidesz rule. The central lesson is that the persuasive authority of an informational autocracy can collapse faster than its institutional infrastructure when communication can no longer override voters’ everyday experience.
- A credible challenger with a competing governing alternative: The collapse of Fidesz began when Tisza undermined their claim to political inevitability. TISZA’s rise from 2024 undermined Orbán’s image as the only plausible prime minister and ended Fidesz’s self-reinforcing advantage based on expected victory, governing competence and the absence of a viable alternative.
By June 2025, Péter Magyar was seen as a more competent potential prime minister than Viktor Orbán (53% to 44%), and more respondents expected a TISZA victory than a Fidesz victory (42% to 38%).
- The battle of narratives: Fidesz progressively abandoned positive performance-based campaigning and concentrated on an existential “war or peace” message. Fidesz narrowed its campaign to fear of war, Ukraine and Brussels, but these messages remained largely confined to loyal voters and met strong skepticism among the wider public and undecided voters. TISZA offered a hopeful, domestically focused alternative centered on declining living standards, corruption, failing public services and “regime change.” It succeeded in turning the election into a referendum on the Orbán system.
The “war or peace” narrative failed to dominate the election: the share perceiving an immediate threat of war fell from 46% in 2025 to 29% in 2026, while 62% rejected the claim that Ukraine and Western actors sought to draw Hungary into the war.
- Losing the Digital Freedom Fight: Fidesz’s digital advantages no longer translated into attention. Fidesz retained centralized message discipline and published two to three times more content on some platforms, but its staged, repetitive communication generated less engagement than TISZA’s livestreams, longer videos, comment interaction and broader presentation of candidates.
Péter Magyar’s 50 most popular Facebook posts generated 4.8 million interactions, compared with 2.8 million for Viktor Orbán; in the final campaign week, Magyar received about 50% more Facebook interactions despite posting less.
- AI-driven fearmongering: It reached saturation rather than expanding support. Fidesz-aligned actors used synthetic media asymmetrically to fabricate war, security and opposition-related scenarios, including highly realistic violent content. The campaign achieved extensive reach but mainly reinforced existing partisan attitudes and may also have increased skepticism among Fidesz voters.
Although 73% of social-media users encountered manipulative AI content, 90% considered its political use unacceptable.
- Campaigning after the advertising ban: The suspension of political advertising on Meta and Google substantially reduced Fidesz’s advantage in terms of paid amplification and visibility. Pro-government actors exploited weak filtering through proxy pages, stylized or fictional formats, and AI-generated content. However, loophole-based evasion did not compensate for the loss; the online environment became substantially more competitive and less asymmetrical.
Before the ban, Fidesz-affiliated actors had spent EUR 9.2 million – 87% of all political advertising expenditure – on the two platforms in Hungary.
- Successful preemptive communication: Preemptive exposure of smear campaigns and Russian influence operations further weakened propaganda. Péter Magyar, investigative journalists and experts anticipated and publicly exposed likely smear narratives and foreign influence activities. This “informational immunization” lowered the credibility and emotional impact of later attacks and reduced the stealth of hybrid operations.
- The pro-Russian narrative turned against Fidesz: Its long-standing pro-Russian and anti-Ukraine messaging turned from an electoral asset into a strategic liability. Anti-Ukrainian messaging still mobilized the Fidesz base but failed as persuasion. Warnings about Russian interference, reports on Orbán–Putin and Szijjártó–Lavrov contacts, and TISZA’s counter-frame recast Fidesz’s Russia policy as dependence and a threat to Hungarian sovereignty.
- Propaganda turned inward: Fidesz was deceived by its own disinformation. Fidesz increasingly internalized its own claims of inevitable victory and opposition weakness. Government-aligned polls provided reassurance instead of diagnosis, limiting the leadership’s capacity to recognize danger, assess TISZA realistically and adapt its strategy.
The full study is available here.
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