It took Viktor Orbán 16 years of relentless, meticulous work to morph Hungary's media ecosystem into a formidable organism designed to perpetuate his unchecked power and serve the interests of his associates.

Now, incoming prime minister Péter Magyar has made dismantling that very apparatus a central priority. The semi-autocratic regime at the heart of Europe was swept away in a landslide on April 12, when Hungarians, no longer persuaded by omnipresent propaganda, overwhelmingly rejected Fidesz's entrenched corruption and mismanagement, before more contentious questions such as Orbán's conspicuous closeness to the Kremlin.

IntelliNews spoke with Gábor Polyák, a media researcher and head of the Mérték Media Monitor watchdog, in Budapest in the days following Orbán's historic defeat, to make sense of the scale of what lies ahead.

Polyák describes a clientelistic, mafia-like state that, through financial and regulatory means, captured both public and private media outlets, accounting for up to 80% of the national media landscape. "These outlets, in the hands of Orbán-affiliated figures, were funded primarily from public money," Polyák says. "Even though they were formally private media companies, they received enormous sums in the form of state advertising, as well as credit from state-owned banks. They had privileged access to every public resource: frequencies, information, financing. It was an extraordinarily privileged position."

The main instrument at their disposal is a concept that sounds alien to Western European ears: state advertising. This bears no resemblance to the public service announcements on healthcare and social issues routinely broadcast by European outlets. It was, rather, "a steady drumbeat of political campaigns against those cast as enemies of the Hungarian nation: migrants, George Soros, the LGBTQ community, Ukraine," says Polyák.

"These enemies were displayed on television, radio, and on street billboards. The campaigns were funded with public money channelled through nominally private media." That system, Polyák argues, must be abolished entirely, along with other instruments of political control such as the Sovereignty Protection Office, whose mandate was to harass government critics under the guise of protecting national interests.

The placement of state advertising was entirely centralised through an entity called the National Communication Office, whose sole function was to award a single media agency a vast framework contract: the exclusive right to place all state advertising for the next five to ten years. The sums disbursed were unusually large, creating a further dangerous distortion in the private advertising market. Orbán-affiliated media could offer advertising slots to private companies at artificially low rates, starving the few remaining independent outlets of essential revenue.

These practices are in clear violation of EU media regulation, yet they largely flew under the radar. "Hungary is a small market, and most of the media acquisitions were too small to trigger the thresholds that would require European Commission review," Polyák says.

The media scholar has few kind words for Brussels, which displayed a troubling pattern of inaction stretching back to 2010, when Orbán came back to power after nearly a decade in opposition. "For everyone at the European level, it was already clear by 2011 where this was heading. Media freedom was being dismantled in plain sight. The EU did nothing, and it was late even when it finally did act,” Polyák says. “Locking up the €20bn to €30bn in frozen funds was ultimately the right call, and it was a contributing factor in the collapse of the Orbán regime. But it came very late, only after Orban started vetoing sanctions against Russia amid the war in Ukraine."

Despite the state's overwhelming grip on public and private media, a handful of independent outlets retained strong audiences: the Luxembourg-owned RTL television channel, the news website Telex, and the investigative outlet Direkt36, along with other smaller media outfits. In recent months in particular, these organisations uncovered a succession of corruption scandals and exposed the full extent of the government's accommodation with Moscow, playing a key role in Fidesz's crushing defeat at the polls.

Yet a pressing question remains: how will mainstream audiences traditionally aligned with Orbán — less educated voters and residents of smaller towns, people effectively living within a separate media ecosystem — respond to sudden change? Polyák is cautiously optimistic.

When Fidesz voters are finally exposed to reality, when Péter Magyar is presented not as a devil figure, as Orbán's omnipresent billboards still portray him alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy with ominous warnings of war, but as a prime minister actually doing things, minds can change, he argues. "But it will take time. If the corruption is made visible in a way that is genuinely compelling to Orbán voters, there is a real possibility of something like an awakening. It will not happen quickly, though. This society needs time to heal."

During his first appearance on state television last week, the newly elected prime minister blasted journalists as servants of propaganda and pledged to suspend public media broadcasts as soon as he takes office in May.

"I am certain they will build an entirely new public media from scratch. What exists now cannot simply be repaired, it was not a public service media in any meaningful sense. It was wholly loyal to Orbán," Polyák says. "And after 16 years, it has produced almost nothing in terms of valuable cultural output. A vast amount of public money was spent on nothing, on biased, propagandistic content. That cannot continue. We need a brand new institution."

IntelliNews also spoke with several journalists from a leading state media outlet, who declined to be identified, and who confirmed the existence of pervasive editorial controls, particularly on topics such as domestic politics, the EU and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. They now fear for their jobs, as Magyar may opt to shut down their outlets entirely and start afresh.

"I never supported Orbán or his policies, but I worked for them for nearly three years because I needed to make a living," said one young journalist, who said they were paid just above €1,000 a month for full-time work. "The culture in the newsroom was extremely toxic, and meetings with the top brass often felt like top-down directives on pure propaganda."

A further open question concerns the fate of the network of Orbán-affiliated private outlets, among them the popular news website Index, bought up by Orbán's allies over the years and repurposed as mouthpieces, following a well-oiled playbook already observed in dictatorships such as Russia and Venezuela. "I am sure that some will collapse. Not all of these outlets can be sustained without unlimited access to public resources," Polyák says.

"That said, I believe significant amounts of money have already been siphoned off and set aside through these companies, so theoretically it would be possible to run some of them on reserves for another four years." The huge shock of the election result, however, makes it far from certain that loyalty will hold: former allies may well turn against the once seemingly invincible thorn in the EU's side, driven by straightforward commercial logic.

With a two-thirds majority enabling constitutional amendments, Magyar and his Tisza party now have a rare opportunity — and an enormous responsibility — to use the sweeping executive powers that Orbán himself engineered to rid the country swiftly of its toxic media environment and begin again from a blank slate. "That is extraordinarily rare in political history," Polyák says.

As he notes, it is not typical in Western Europe, and it is what distinguishes Hungary from Poland’s previous government, Slovakia, or the United States under Trump. “In those cases, the populists did not have unlimited power, so they could not make such comprehensive changes to the legal system, the economic system, the media."

Autocrats beyond the democratic world will, however, be watching Budapest closely as a test case, reaching very different conclusions. For all the damage done to its media, Hungary was not Russia, albeit dangerously heading in that direction. Journalists were harassed through legal channels but did not fear for their lives, and some truly independent outlets remained in operation. Elsewhere, that restraint may now be read as a fatal mistake, not least in neighbouring Serbia.

"I fear that President Aleksandar Vučić has learned from Orbán that soft autocracy without violence is ultimately not sufficient to hold power. Allowing any independent journalism to function is a long-term threat to an autocratic system, because independent journalism, given time, will eventually bring the system down."

For other would-be autocrats — including in Georgia, where the ruling Georgian Dream party is steering the country away from Europe and towards Russia — the lesson being drawn will likely be the opposite: crack down harder, and do not leave the democratic space that Orbán, to his ultimate cost, left intact.