The International Press Institute (IPI) today warns of a looming crackdown by the Hungarian government on independent media in the country, in the wake of recent incendiary comments by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in which he vowed to eliminate all media outlets and other organizations that have received foreign funding.

In recent weeks, Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party have drastically ramped up rhetoric against media and other civil society groups operating in Hungary that receive any form of foreign grant or funding and pledged to draft new legislation to protect national sovereignty.

These latest threats against the media escalated further on 15 March when, during a major political rally in Budapest, the Prime Minister accused journalists of his government of serving the interests of foreign powers and compared them and other groups to insects who would soon be eradicated.

During the speech, the PM told several thousand supporters that in the coming weeks the government would “dismantle the financial machine that has used corrupt dollars to buy politicians, judges, journalists, pseudo-NGOs, and political activists. We will eliminate the entire shadow army”. In widely criticized remarks, he also said: “After today’s celebrations comes the big Easter clean-up, as the bugs have survived the winter.”

The threats to “clean” the media and other sectors by the end of April come after a speech by the Prime Minister at the opening session of Parliament in February in which he said: “The corruption network that rules the entire Western world of politics and media must be eliminated,” adding that his government would “go to the wall” with the new laws.

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Scott Griffen, Executive Director of the International Press Institute (IPI), said: “These recent comments by the Prime Minister mark a worrying turning point in the ongoing and systematic attack on independent journalism. The use of dehumanizing rhetoric to describe journalists and other civil society actors is alarming and dangerous and should be strongly condemned.

“Such open threats to eliminate media critics are shocking from the head of a European Union Member State. IPI is concerned that this language, used repeatedly by leading politicians in recent months, suggests a major crackdown on media that is deemed critical of the government.

“Any development of draft legislation to bolster the work of the already weaponized Sovereignty Protection Office in Hungary, if brought forward, would pose a major threat to much of the independent media operating in the country and should be opposed as strongly as possible by the European Union.”

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Griffen sad that for too long the EU has failed to prevent the Orbán government’s efforts to control the country’s media that has led to an alarming erosion of media freedom and pluralism, with damaging implications for Hungarian democracy.

Hungary already has the most captured media landscape in the European Union (EU), as IPI has long documented. Over the past decade, the ruling party has gained an unprecedented influence over private and public media, allowing it to muzzle the independent press and distort the market to entrench a dominant pro-government narrative.

IPI has strongly criticized the operations of the Sovereignty Protection Office, a supposedly independent body headed by a Fidesz loyalist, which has over the previous year been instrumentalized to dial up pressure on media and others which receive foreign funding.

While the accusations against critical media of serving foreign interests had increased since the global suspension of USAID funding by the Trump administration, they are part of a longer campaign of delegitimization and stigmatization of critical media by Fidesz.