For 16 years, Viktor Orbán’s government poured millions of euros of public money into thinktanks, institutions and media outlets sympathetic to its illiberal views – not only in Hungary but beyond its borders. In Slovakia, for instance, where a sizeable Hungarian minority lives, Budapest is alleged to have sent millions of euros to favoured media organisations. Many independent newsrooms survived on only a fraction of what these outlets received.

These government-fattened channels were never truly called “media” by Hungarian colleagues, nor their content producers “journalists”. If Hungarians were asked to recall ever hearing from these outlets a piercing human story, an investigation exposing abuse of power or a facts-based analysis that brought clarity to chaos, they would search their memory in vain.

What they do drag in their wake is a long list of people whose lives they embittered – or outright destroyed. Critics of Orbán’s regime were turned into terrorists, sexual predators, paedophiles, thieves, tax fraudsters, domestic abusers. One headline even claimed that billionaire philanthropist George Soros would kill his own mother. Sometimes all it took was a manipulated photograph, a sentence from a bought source; at other times merely an instruction from the appropriate ministry.

Over the years, the articles began to resemble one another: the same characters and casting, the same phrases and formulations, endlessly repeated. As if everyone were being served lunch from the same factory canteen.

The fact that Orbán lost power on 12 April shows that even propaganda........

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