The long-running British newspaper The Times (established in 1785) has recently published a profile piece on Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar. The article is distinctly favourable to Magyar, with some very friendly omissions and the inclusion of some very dubious statements by Magyar without any challenge.
The headline reads ‘Meet the biggest threat Hungary’s Viktor Orban has faced in 15 years,’ which is technically a true statement. However, the subtitle is already doing a little bit of manipulation by omission, saying ‘He is ahead in the polls—and the dirty tricks have begun’.
As we pointed out in a review of a TLDR video about Hungarian politics, polling means very little in this country of 9.9 million people, a small sample size of potential voters. Prior to the 2022 parliamentary election, the opposition coalition was leading some polls by as much as eight to nine points nationally in the fall, yet it ended up losing by 19 points in the following spring, giving Fidesz a fourth consecutive constitutional supermajority. So, some surveys showing Magyar’s TISZA party in the lead is not much of an indication of his electoral chances.
Especially given the fact that in the European Parliamentary election in the summer of 2024, TISZA did not outperform the 2022 ill-fated opposition alliance by all that much. Magyar and his party ended up losing the election by 15 points instead of 19. Furthermore, in an EP election, he can hardly blame the Hungarian electoral system, something he critiques as unfair in The Times’ profile on multiple occasions…
It seems that Magyar himself is more in agreement with our assessment of his electoral chances than The Times. There are two by-elections held for vacant parliamentary seats in 2025 in Hungary: one in Tolna County (which already concluded with a massive Fidesz victory in January) and one in Budapest (taking place in late March), and TISZA did not even bother fielding a candidate in either. The article makes no mention of this odd strategy of not competing in elections by TISZA.
To the author’s credit, he does bring up the fact that Magyar’s ex-wife, Former Minister of Justice Judit Varga has accused him of domestic abuse. They have printed Magyar’s response to the accusation, which is evidently denial. He even purports that Varga had been blackmailed by Fidesz to make the claims; and that the police report from 2020 about a domestic incident between them was falsified.
However, The Times stops short of mentioning that Magyar’s recent ex-girlfriend Evelin Vogel has also come out with accusations of abuse against him—at that point, Magyar probably would have lost the support of many of their more open-minded readers.
Vogel, or ‘an ex-girlfriend’, as the article refers to her, does come up, in connection with the secret recordings she leaked of Magyar. In it, the TISZA leader can be heard belittling his own supporters, complaining about their bad odour and stupid requests. According to the article, Magyar ‘believes his voice has been parroted in social media clips by an artificial intelligence programme’. That is not only a very dubious claim, but something that can be verifiably disproven. Magyar claimed that AI detection software flagged his recordings as false, but even the opposition-aligned news outlet Telex could not reliably recreate those results after trying with multiple software. While the author does preface the statement with ‘he believes’, an honest journalist probably should have provided some pushback on that wild claim.
Magyar also could take his case to court for a clear case of defamation—despite what this article may have you believe, Hungarian courts routinely rule against Fidesz and its sphere of influence. But just like with the by-elections, Magyar is not taking on that challenge for some particular reason. The article also makes another one of its ‘friendly omissions’ to Magyar: that is, that he himself had published secret recordings of his ex-wife, just as his ex-girlfriend has done to him after.
Here’s a list of other facts about Magyar’s shining political career that The Times could have included for a broader perspective.
In his first, highly publicized, highly watched ‘tell-all’ interview that he gave after breaking with Fidesz, he was asked if he was thinking about a political career of his own, to which he answered: ‘That is a bad joke’. Evidently, he announced he was running for office shortly after. According to leaked messages, he has described being an MEP as ‘the fakest job in the world’. Publicly, he has stated that he would not serve in the European Parliament even if he was elected—yet he is serving in the EP to this day. Also, there is footage of him dancing with noticeably much younger girls at a public nightclub. Once he noticed he was being recorded, Magyar grabbed the phone in question and threw it into the Danube River. He was facing minor criminal charges for the incident, but the EP refused to revoke his political immunity.
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