Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar has accused the Kremlin of backing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s election campaign with a series of disinformation videos expected to surface on Thursday.
Orbán, the EU leader closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a key impediment to Brussels’ support for Ukraine, faces the toughest challenge of his political career in Hungary’s April 12 election, where polls place him roughly 10 points behind Magyar.
A former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, Magyar said on Tuesday that he had learned the campaign would involve “14 AI-generated smear videos” produced “with the help of Russian intelligence services.”
Analysts in Budapest and Magyar’s Tisza party have long anticipated a bitter final stretch, and Magyar’s strategy is to pre-emptively alert the public to disinformation attacks, aiming to blunt their effect. In mid-February, he similarly went public to prevent the release of an alleged sex tape, which has not appeared.
On Thursday, as Magyar campaigns along the Danube near Budapest, his team expects Fidesz to target a local candidate and her family with AI-generated videos circulated via fake accounts. Magyar urged Orbán to “immediately halt the planned election fraud and order Russian agents out of Hungary.”
“By advancing what’s going to happen, we hope to neutralize it … whenever we had any information, [Magyar] made it public right away,” said Zoltan Tarr, Tisza’s deputy and longtime confidant.
via Politico
