For more than ten years, Fidesz stood completely unrivalled in the Hungarian political scene. Election after election, opposition parties and independent candidates shattered against the invincible political force of a party that was increasingly reluctant to produce a detailed policy manifesto, engage in open, televised debates, or offer their concrete visions about the nation’s future, apart from the occasional promise of “we continue”. It is, therefore, safe to conclude that Fidesz’s dominance was not sustained through policy persuasion alone, but through a political environment in which potential alternatives were systematically delegitimized before they could gain sufficient traction.
Fidesz practically perfected the he-said-she-said game and did not shy away from conducting systematic smear campaigns against any opponent that seemed to challenge their absolute hegemony. During their extensive tenure, Orbán’s party built a massive communications and media machine, one of the primary functions of which was to amplify and endlessly replicate the relevant character assassination claims of any given period. Consequently, Fidesz ended up constructing a political arena of almost permanent character warfare, where civil actors and political opponents were either ruthlessly destroyed or driven to self-censorship.
Fidesz’s smear campaign machine ultimately operated on two levels, configured for the maximization of both long- and short-term political gains. Quickly and intensively circulated scandalous allegations about specific individuals served the effective, short-term elimination and discreditation of particular victims. Simultaneously, Fidesz frequently attacked institutions and individuals as part of their long-term strategies.
While some of these looked like ad hominem offensives on the surface level (e.g., against George Soros or Ursula von der Leyen), the underlying aim was much more complex and systemically motivated. By targeting these individuals (and occasionally, the organizations they represented), Fidesz created durable, overarching frameworks that were consequently utilized to undermine the credibility of even more victims, solely by hinting at their connection or unwavering loyalty to the previously discredited figures.
For example, the reputation of numerous opposition candidates, civil society organizations and NGOs were left in ruins after consistent allegations that they are funded and controlled by George Soros, who was formerly portrayed as the ill-intentioned puppet-master, plotting Fidesz’s and Hungary’s downfall through illegal intervention in the country’s sovereign matters.
The Working Mechanism Behind Smear Campaigns
To fully understand how the character assassination apparatus worked, we must first take a closer look at the contextual framework. Orbán and his party governed Hungary with four successive parliamentary supermajorities between 2010 and 2026, giving them ample time and possibilities to mold the public and media spheres to serve almost exclusively their interests. Their own populist discourse was built on a constantly manufactured, looming presence of a threatening Other, let that be the domestic political opposition or foreign agents scheming against Hungarian autonomy, presented in pre-dominantly negative campaign strategies.
Negative campaigning denotes the political tactic that focuses on an opponent’s flaws, rather than one’s own qualities[1] and can be conceptualized as a spectrum, which ranges from simple disagreements to personal insults[2]. The extreme end of this continuum is often called “dirty/smear campaigning”, as it frequently utilizes distorted narratives, fearmongering, or violations of ethical, social, and democratic norms. Character assassination attempts fit within this category, as they are by nature, violent attacks against one’s persona (i.e. ad hominem assaults), and since their effectiveness does not depend on their truth-value, they are frequently fabricated and in breach of moral standards.
Such narrative techniques fit well into the communication regime and serious information control that Fidesz configured, best understood through Guriyev and Treisman’s theory of spin dictatorships. In the authors’ conceptualization, modern autocratic and hybrid systems abandoned the one-truth informational channel of their predecessors, who employed outright and violent physical oppressive tactics against anyone who dared to challenge their narratives. Rather, leaders like Orbán, opted for the construction of a reality, which is ruled by information noise, distortion and ultimate disregard for the truth.
In these environments, entirely made-up or simply twisted (“spun”), often conflicting stories flood the public sphere to such an extreme extent that societies lose their incentive to assess the verity of news. Character assassinations are, thus, not only powerful because they completely destroy a person’s credibility in the eyes of certain voters, but because they simultaneously invoke doubts even in the sceptical crowds and enhance other contenders’ inhibitions and willingness to perform self-censorship.
Self-censorship was only further reinforced through the specific communication tactics that Fidesz decided to adopt. In many instances, character assassinations were not entirely delegated to party-controlled news outlets, but were propagated by governmental actors and ministries. This technique can exert serious deterring effects on civil society actors, who do not have previous experience with ad hominem attacks. Furthermore, adopting smear campaigning narratives into official government communications can increase the perceived validity of the statement and thereby secure the effectiveness of the strategy. At the same time, such administrative approaches undermine democratic values and turn dirty campaigns into blatant dirty governance.
Case Study I: Direct Character Assassinations
The majority of political character assassinations are intended to discredit and immediately neutralize individuals, whose presence and growing popularity pose serious political threats to the perpetrator. This approach is well-suited for significant short-term gains and momentary interceptions in rapidly advancing candidates’ popularization. At the same time, attackers assume certain risks with this method, as the hostile bits might prove ephemeral and unable to mobilize the public for a long time. Victims occasionally manage to survive such assaults on their persona, with particularly skilled candidates even leveraging these offensives as tools for gaining more sympathy and popularity.
One of the first large-scale smear campaigns of the Orbán era was realized in the Fall of 2016, against the then-popular opposition leader, Gábor Vona. His disagreement with Orbán started with simple negative campaigning techniques in parliament; Vona and Orbán kept mutually insulting each other, frequently calling their opponent a liar, traitor, and/or a corrupt politician. Vona’s increasing influence alarmed the then-governing Fidesz party, who ultimately decided to handle the competition through dirty politics.
Fidesz picked up previous accusations made by Terry Black, a famous drag queen, and built a careful narrative that Vona was a regular attendee of homosexual orgies. However, the allegation was not completely randomly selected. In fact, knowing that the target’s party, Jobbik, was an explicitly right-wing, anti-LGBTQIA+ organization, it all feels meticulously tailored and directed to take the wind out of Vona’s sails.
The Fidesz-adjacent news portal, Ripost first unearthed this story on the 29th of October 2016, 5 years after its original, relatively unnoticed emergence. As soon as the article was published, every online and print journal with similar loyalties adopted and circulated the narrative at a never-seen-before speed. After merely a few days, Hungarian public media was completely flooded with Vona’s alleged homosexual relations. A week later, one of Fidesz’s biggest propaganda-news channel, Tények, even approached the original source, Terry Black, compelling them to share the “evidence” (i.e. mere personal recollections) of Vona’s participation at their various gatherings[3].
Black provided detailed descriptions of how Jobbik’s politician became a frequent visitor of their queer-bar, Lokál, as well as their own apartment, where they claimed that Vona commonly stayed alone in a room with Amanda Elstak, a famous transsexual media personality in Hungary. At a later point, Elstak was also interviewed, confirming the validity of these claims. Vona publicly denied all of the above-mentioned allegations, and as the manufactured media attention did not subside, he decided to organize an official press conference around the case.
Vona consistently rejected any association with Terry Black or Amanda Elstak, and announced his wish to pursue legal action on the basis of defamation. The first rulings in the case were only issued after the election of 2018, when the court ultimately stated that the allegations were entirely fabricated with a malicious intent, and as a result found all of the defendants (news portals like Origo, Pesti Srácok, Ripost, and TV2, as well as the witnesses, Terry Black and Amanda Elstak) liable and ordered them to pay Vona a total of more than 6 million Forints[4].
This large-scale character assassination project against Vona marks the instance, when Fidesz realized just how far its smear campaign apparatus can extend and provided a reliable blueprint for countless similar attacks in the following decade. It showed that Orbán’s party did not shy away from instructing its co-opted media partners to spread blatant lies, while consequently proving that dirty campaigns are not battles of truth, but of persuasion.
While Jobbik’s election results only dropped by 1% between 2014 and 2018, this carefully organized media-attack on their leader somewhat halted their rise in popularity and ensured that Vona would be occupied with fighting personal allegations instead of focusing on his substantial political work. This high-intensity, fabricated defamation technique worked well for securing short-term political gains; hence, it was frequently leveraged throughout Fidesz’s years in power. Most notably, the direct character assassination scheme was the first weapon they deployed against Péter Magyar, who eventually defeated Orbán.
Case Study II: Character Flaws, Institutionalised
While character assassinations are quite common devices of dirty campaigns, they mostly resemble the above-described category of deeply personal, thoroughly crafted and often completely made-up narratives about individuals, aimed at discrediting the target themselves. By mere association, their parties or colleagues might occasionally take part of the hit, but their involvement is more of a collateral than an explicit goal. Fidesz, however, created a novel modus operandi, still directed at individuals in name, but leveraged to construct institutionalized scapegoats and thereby facilitate future dirty campaigns.
These schemes function through slightly different mechanisms and across much longer time frames. Since their victims are generally not domestic political actors that would actually threaten the incumbent’s chances at re-election, the narrative can be built and reinforced gradually, thereby ensuring significantly higher chances for large-scale social uptake. Moreover, while the assaults are ad hominem in nature, their main aim is to create an overarching, delegitimizing framework, fit to accommodate quite a few personae. Ursula von der Leyen, Max Weber and Volodymyr Zelenskyy were targets of such systematic attacks, yet the most notable, and the longest sustained institutionalised character-target of Fidesz was George Soros.
Orbán’s party started its first large-scale campaign against Soros in 2017, after the famous entrepreneur publicly criticized the Hungarian government. Fidesz swiftly securitized the issue and began a (rather one-sided) crusade against Soros. Billboards, online and printed journals, the evening news and all official governmental communication channels were suddenly flooded with Soros’ portrait and his alleged plan to force Hungary to allow vast numbers of immigrants into its territory. Only a few months after the first charges, Soros already became the main subject of the “National Consultation”, in which the population of Hungary was fed leading questions, distorted truths and pure lies. On the surface level, the whole campaign was aimed at Soros, but it was actually building up towards a much more complex discreditation machine.
By coining the terms of “Soros-network” and “Soros-soldiers”, Fidesz created the illusion that Soros is an evil oppressor, who suddenly turned his sights on Hungarian autonomy and hired an extensive web of domestic civil society organizations, as well as private and public actors to do the dirty work for him. Consequently, Fidesz’s main aim was not to undermine Soros’s own legitimacy, but to convincingly communicate that the Hungarian opposition is completely homogenous and in agreement that foreign interests override national considerations.
This seemed highly effective, as most already existing or emerging opposition figures could easily be discredited by associating them with Soros without having to spend excess resources on devising an individual character assassination framework from scratch. This empty signifier scheme worked exceptionally well for organizations, against which ad hominem attacks were by nature off the table. These structural delegitimization attempts, however, made certain groups of society sceptical of these institutions’ work, research findings and campaigns, as well as justified their conscious governmental underfunding.
These two cases are merely a tiny fraction of the countless attempts at character assassination carried out during Fidesz’s 16 years in power, yet they are particularly representative of the mechanisms of the party’s dirty campaigning techniques. The dual-front smear assaults, both aimed at individuals, but intended for two distinct purposes, ensured that Fidesz could easily defeat most of their swiftly rising opponents or civil critics without having to engage in policy persuasion. Orbán and his party built a system, where character assassination was not just an election tactic, but the very engine of governance, optimized to ensure that serious challenges to the regime were quickly and effectively discredited and neutralized.
The recently elected Tisza party built their election campaign on a blend of positive and negative messages; offering a meticulous party programme while aggressively confronting Fidesz’s wrongdoings, including institutional corruption, manipulative communication and fearmongering. Tisza supporters generally agreed that defeating Orbán’s regime on such a tilted, democratically backsliding playing field warranted the adoption of the incumbent’s own tactics. However, there is now a growing public demand to move past the Orbán-era’s governmental culture of character warfare and restore professionalism in the Hungarian political sphere.
[1] Ming M. Boyer et al., ‘Negative Campaigns, Negative Votes? Meanings of Voting and Political Campaigns’, The International Journal of Press/Politics, 16 October 2025, 19401612251376808, https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612251376808.
[2] Martin Haselmayer, ‘Negative Campaigning and Its Consequences: A Review and a Look Ahead’, French Politics 17, no. 3 (2019): 355–72, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-019-00084-8.
[3] https://index.hu/kultur/media/2017/01/04/egy_lejaratas_anatomiaja_vona_gabor_meleg_jobbik/
[4] https://24.hu/belfold/2018/11/30/milliokat-fizet-vonanak-terry-black-es-a-jobboldali-sajto-egy-resze/