Hungary’s election was clean. The campaign was not.

I have just returned from Budapest. As co-head of an independent election observation mission — nearly a hundred observers from fourteen countries across four continents, working alongside Anna Welisz of the Edmund Burke Foundation — I spent two weeks scrutinising the April 12 parliamentary election in Hungary. We met with the Constitutional Tribunal, the Supreme Court, the electoral administration, electoral commissions, political parties across the spectrum, civil society leaders, and media outlets.

Our conclusion on the mechanics of the vote itself is unambiguous: The election was honest, transparent, and technically sound. Viktor Orbán acknowledged his defeat the same evening, congratulating Péter Magyar within hours of polling stations closing. There was no ballot-stuffing, no counting irregularities, no serious procedural complaints from any side — not even from TISZA and Magyar themselves, who had previously and publicly stated that stealing Hungarian elections is simply not possible.

But free elections are more than the counting of votes. They require a free campaign. And on that count, what happened in Hungary over the past months should alarm every democrat in Europe — regardless of which side of the political spectrum they occupy.

The familiar lever of EU funds

Hungary has faced sustained financial pressure from Brussels for years. The withholding of cohesion funds and the leverage exercised through the NextGenerationEU recovery instrument were felt acutely during this campaign. Hungarian voters were left in little doubt that their country’s access to billions in EU money was contingent on political outcomes. This is not an abstract observation. Citizens understood — because they were repeatedly told — that European funds would flow more freely under a government more amenable to Brussels. We saw the same dynamic deployed before the 2023 Polish elections, where the release of frozen NextGenerationEU funds was timed, with striking precision, to benefit the incoming Tusk government. Financial coercion as electoral strategy is becoming a pattern through the use of the EU badly called rule-of-law conditionality mechanism. It should be named for what it is.

Intelligence services in the campaign

Beyond financial pressure, Hungarian voters were exposed to something more troubling still: The confirmed involvement of a European Union member state’s intelligence services in the election campaign. A left-wing investigative journalist publicly acknowledged that he had obtained, at his own request, recordings of private telephone conversations between Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and between Prime Minister Orbán and President Vladimir Putin. These recordings were handed to him by European intelligence services — allies spying on allies, then selectively leaking those intercepts at the most politically damaging moment of the campaign. The conversations were presented as scandalous revelations, though in substance they contained nothing that Orbán and Szijjártó had not already said in public. What matters is not what was said, but what was done: A European state weaponised its intelligence apparatus against the electoral process of a fellow member state. This, too, is without precedent.

The Digital Services Act: Europe’s first electoral censorship tool

Serious as these interventions are, the most consequential development in the Hungarian campaign was something altogether new: The first full-scale deployment of the EU’s Digital Services Act as an instrument of electoral manipulation.

In Hungary, Facebook is not simply one news source among many. It is the dominant information platform for the entire country — used by younger and older voters alike, across age groups and regions, in a way that has no real parallel in larger Western European states. Our mission’s research found that some 65 per cent of Hungarian voters relied on Facebook as their primary source of political information during the campaign. Other platforms barely register: X only has a small domestic user base in Hungary, and TikTok has yet to reach voting-age audiences in significant numbers. Whoever controls the Facebook feed controls the public conversation.

In the first quarter of 2026, the European Commission activated — for the first time — the DSA’s so-called Rapid Response System, declaring that Hungary faced a disinformation emergency requiring urgent intervention. It appointed 44 “trusted fact-checkers” from Hungary and abroad to monitor and flag content, with all known organisations among them being notoriously left-leaning. These bodies were empowered to red-flag content they deemed to be disinformation, and Meta — which has made no secret of its close cooperation with the European Commission in DSA implementation — complied in full.

The consequences were visible and documented. Politicians and public figures associated with Fidesz and the governing coalition began receiving notifications from Facebook informing them that their posts had been demoted — pushed down in the news feeds of users who followed them. Viktor Orbán’s page, that of Foreign Minister Szijjártó, and Fidesz accounts all received such notifications. The smaller sovereignist party Mi Hazánk, led by László Toroczkai, was treated even more harshly: posts that mentioned the party by name were suppressed entirely, and, despite a court decision in his favour, Toroczkai himself could not get to his Facebook account back during the critical final weeks of campaigning. His activists were unable to inform their own followers about campaign events.

At the same time, Péter Magyar — a political figure almost entirely unknown outside Hungary — achieved engagement rates on Facebook that defy organic explanation. Our analysts noted that his posts were generating more active responses per follower than those of French President Emmanuel Macron, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, or Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. For the leader of a party that barely existed eighteen months ago in a country of fewer than ten million people, this statistical anomaly points to only one plausible explanation: Algorithmic amplification. Facebook’s systems were not merely failing to suppress Magyar — they were actively boosting him.

Four years ago, when our mission last observed a Hungarian election, we assessed the media landscape as broadly balanced. Traditional media — roughly half government-aligned, half liberal — gave voters adequate access to competing perspectives. That balance no longer holds, because traditional media now matter to only about a quarter of voters. The battlefield has shifted entirely to social media, and on that battlefield the rules were rewritten mid-game by an unelected body in Brussels.

Poland is next

I do not raise these concerns as a partisan of Viktor Orbán. Our institute’s mandate is the defence of the rule of law and democratic freedoms, and we observe elections precisely because we believe in them. But what was done in Hungary must not be normalised, because it will not stop in Hungary.

Poland holds parliamentary elections in autumn 2027. By then, the DSA’s enforcement mechanisms will be considerably more powerful than they were this spring. The European Commission is already developing tools that would allow the real-time monitoring of content as it is typed — before users even press “publish” — with automatic flags, reach restrictions, and notifications to investigative authorities built into the system. The fact-checkers will not be forty-four humans reading posts; they will be AI-driven systems capable of instantaneous, massive-scale intervention across millions of accounts simultaneously.

In Poland, the media landscape is more diversified than in Hungary. X has a substantial domestic user base, and X has thus far refused to fully capitulate to DSA pressure, paying fines rather than complying with content suppression requests. This provides some buffer. But it would be foolish to treat it as a guarantee. Meta remains fully cooperative with Brussels. And it is worth noting that when the Polish President Karol Nawrocki vetoed the DSA implementing legislation, he blocked its domestic legal effect — but he could not prevent the European Commission from deploying the Rapid Response System against Polish social media users anyway. The regulation operates at the EU level. No national veto applies.

A warning for all of Europe

What happened in Hungary is the proof of concept for a new kind of electoral interference — one that is legal under current EU law, operated by EU institutions, and entirely invisible to most voters. It does not require fraud. It does not leave fingerprints on ballot papers. It works upstream, at the level of what information citizens are able to see, share, and discuss, in the weeks and months before they enter the voting booth.

European citizens who care about democratic integrity — whatever their politics — should be alarmed. An institution that can decide which speech is “disinformation” and which fact-checkers are “trusted”, that can instruct the dominant communications platform of an entire country to suppress one party’s messages and amplify another’s, that can do all of this during the final weeks of a national election campaign without any meaningful judicial oversight, is not protecting democracy. It is replacing it.

Hungary was the test case. Poland may be next. The rest of Europe should be watching carefully.

Attorney Jerzy Kwaśniewski is President of the Board and co-founder of Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture and Attorney and Managing Partner of Parchimowicz & Kwaśniewski Law Firm, Poland. He co-headed the independent election observation mission to Hungary for the April 12, 2026 parliamentary election.