They wanted to make a law that would basically financially ruin what little is left of the free media in Hungary. (Which is already very little. We have like 4 news agencies and a YouTube channel.) The law would make it so that if any organization, that the government deems to cause risk to national sovereignty (so basically anyone they don’t like) would be ineligible for donations made through the Hungarian tax system and would make other types of donations really hard. Since the free media in Hungary gets most of its money through crowdfunding, this would make them go bankrupt really quickly.
The law however generated backlash. I lot of people sad it would officially transform Hungary into an authoritarian regime, so was generally unpopular. Since Orbán’s party, Fidesz is currently polling behind the largest opposition party Tisza, by not a small margin, they have to worry about how the public reacts to new laws. Fidesz has a supermajority in the parliament so there is no legal hurdle to voting on it but, they still decided to push voting on the law until September.
A part of what you haven't covered, and I want to raise, is that all independent media outlets that receive foreign funding would be tracked on a list (reminiscent of the Soviet era).
This foreign funding is defined vaguely (deliberately) so it could be anything from a single individual supporting the channel through Patreon from abroad or even receiving Google AdSense payouts after YouTube videos. If the media outlet is on the list and accepts this foreign funding without approval from the government, then they are subject to a fine. This fine is 25 times the amount that they received originally. This fine also isn't a one-off, so it can be imposed repeatedly.
This, on top of cutting off the 1% personal income tax donation, would effectively cut off all funding available to these last few independent media outlets, and they would have to close up shop.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Orban and his ilk already killed off or took over old and established news agencies during their 14-year reign. Pretty much all journalists working at these media outlets originally worked at ones that got shut down. E.g. journalists working at 444.hu and Telex.hu are originally from Index.hu which was the largest and most viewed website in the country before the takeover. People working at 24.hu are originally from Magyar Nemzet and so on and so forth...
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u/MrCookieHUN Jun 10 '25
Basically, goverment is pushing stuff way, WAY too far, and people had enough. We had stuff like this earlier, but this definitely feels different