Author: Lakmusz, member of HDMO
Until the elections in April, we closely monitor social media and traditional media, with a particular focus on disinformation related to the elections and false or misleading content spread by the candidates. This is our seventh weekly digest of the digital trends shaping the campaign period.
“What we should be afraid of is not that Russian disinformation will mobilize 500,000 voters on April 12”
Last week we asked the question: how alarming does Russian interference in the Hungarian election campaign actually seem? We concluded: not that much. This week, we spoke with an expert about it: in our interview with geopolitical analyst Botond Feledy , we discussed Russian influence beyond the campaign period. He explained that it is in Moscow’s vital interest to keep Viktor Orbán and his government in power in Hungary, but that does not mean the Russians are behind every disinformation campaign. Not least because domestic actors are doing much of the work anyway. Feledy also believes that the direct impact of Russian disinformation operations on the vote is often overestimated:
“The assumption that people can be manipulated through disinformation into voting in a specific direction on election day is far less substantiated than the sad fact that disinformation campaigns play a major role in dividing societies and spreading conspiracy theories. And this division, along with the spread of conspiracy theories, ultimately benefits the parties that the Russians support. In other words, what we should be afraid of is not that on April 12, Russian disinformation AI videos will mobilize 500,000 voters, but rather that, thanks to years of dedicated work, Russian influence will have a long-term impact on the various camps. We underestimate the latter effect and overestimate the impact on the election alone.”
Meanwhile, we found another suspicious webpage, this time spreading false information about Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi, an opposition politician from the Tisza Party, and even about his cousin, Zsolt Ruszin. An article and accompanying video state that the two men is being involved in recruiting young Hungarians to fight in the war in Ukraine. The only “evidence” the article shows is an alleged leaflet featuring the politician’s email address and a phone number of his cousin’s company. We’ve verified that the phone numbers are real, but the flyers are not.
This smear campaign closely resembles another one we discovered previously: when a priest, knowingly critical of Viktor Orbán was accused of paedophilia. In both cases, defamatory content was published on a website that appeared to be an online news portal, and this content was then shared on social media via videos. Just as before, we found many telltale signs indicating that the site and the news published on it are fake. The Gnida Project connected both operations to the Russian Storm-1516 disinformation group.
We also discovered a Facebook page spreading the fake article and video about Ruszin-Szendi. The page was registered in September 2025, renamed in March of this year, and only started posting a few days ago.
The page also ran ads on Facebook: four out of their five ads ran without interruption; one remained active for an entire week and reached nearly 100,000 people. Meta removed only one ad because it identified it as a political ad.
Are Manfred Weber and Péter Magyar fighting on the front lines for Ukraine?
At least that’s what some Fidesz politicians claimed on Facebook earlier this week. What we’re seeing here is a classic case of news falsification. Did Weber really talk about Ukraine and Péter Magyar? Sure, he did. Did he mention Ukraine and Péter Magyar in the same context? Of course not.
Weber’s words were edited to make it seem as though the President of the European People’s Party (EPP) was saying that he and Péter Magyar were fighting on the front lines alongside Ukraine. However, upon listening to the original recording, it is clear that the EPP President’s words were manipulated in the video posted by Fidesz politicians. He mentioned Magyar when he spoke about the EPP taking up the fight against right-wing populism, just as Magyar did in Hungary.
A very expensive toilet, or just a mistake?
Anita Orbán (who is not related to Viktor Orbán), the foreign policy expert of the Tisza Party, allegedly uncovered a case of misuse of EU funds involving the construction of a 1.8 billion HUF toilet. János Bóka, the Minister of EU Affairs corrected her: he said the amount does not apply solely to that toilet, but to a much larger project. When we looked into the matter, we found that neither politician got it right.
It turned out that the toilet has been there for over 15 years and has nothing to do with the planned EU project, a part of which would have financed a new facility replacing the toilet. The information sign indicating the amount of EU funding was put on the walls of the original toilet, and when the project ultimately fell through it was left there. The town’s mayor told us: it has since been removed.
The number of postal voters and behind the scenes of opinion polls
There are two more important and rather technical topics circulating in connection with the elections these days. One is the number of Hungarian citizens who do not have a registered address in Hungary and will cast ballots by mail. We have received the data from the National Election Office, so for the first time we can compare the list of absentee voters from four years ago with the current one. We found that the number has increased by 40,000 since 2022, but the majority of this increase did not come from neighbouring countries.
The other topic is opinion polls: a pro-government influencer accused one of the main polling firms of falsifying its data (which showed the Tisza Party in the lead) and, to prove this, published their unweighted raw data. We explained the full story of why it cannot be considered fraud that the poll data leaked by the influencer showed different results than those published by the polling firm.
That’s all for today, see you next Friday. Stay tuned, share this article and tell us what you think!
Cover Photo: Annamari Dezső/Lakmusz