Viktor Orbán’s Hail Mary
I was editor in chief of Hungary’s most-read independent daily until a pro-government media network bought the newspaper. It’s the fifth time in thirty years that politics has cost me my job—and it’s all about Orbán holding on to power.
On October 28, I boarded a flight from Budapest to Zürich to attend the yearly editorial summit of international media conglomerate Ringier, the Swiss parent company of Blikk, the tabloid I had edited since April 2025.
When I landed and checked my phone, I saw a calendar invite from Blikk’s CEO summoning me to an “emergency meeting” three days later. The meeting was labeled “obligatory.” My colleagues back home didn’t know what was happening, so I desperately called our legal counsel, who said: “Iván, I’m not allowed to tell you anything.”
Sixteen years into the regime of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, a notorious enemy of independent journalism, muscle memory kicked in. I soon learned that Ringier, which owned Glamour’s Hungarian edition and numerous other women’s magazines as well as Blikk, had received an offer it could not refuse from a pro-Orbán group called Indamedia.
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