Orbán’s Hungary Defeat Shows Disinformation is Not a Political Magic Trick

When a politician seen as spreading more disinformation than their opponent wins an election, it’s tempting to conclude that the falsehoods made the difference, and that fact-checking failed. When an election produces the opposite outcome, the temptation runs the other way.

We should resist both reflexes. The goal of counter-disinformation work is not to determine electoral outcomes. It is to give voters reliable information and the tools to evaluate suspicious claims — whatever they then decide to do with that information. Hungary’s April 2026 parliamentary election illustrates the point.

On April 12, the state-backed disinformation machine of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party competed against the political newcomer Péter Magyar and his party, Tisza.

As fact-checkers, we check statements from both sides according to the same standards, but in our analysis, we should avoid false equivalences. Fidesz falsely accused its opponents of intending to reintroduce military conscription and send young Hungarians to fight in Ukraine, using manipulatively edited videos as “evidence”. Tisza, in its program, presented the price increases of some commodities misleadingly. These are not the same kinds of disinformation, and not only because the claims of Fidesz were echoed by dozens of government-controlled propaganda outlets and government-aligned influencers.