The internal electronic communications of Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party were reportedly seized by criminal prosecutors on Tuesday, in a move the party has compared to the former communist regime in the country.
According to Budapest’s Blikk newspaper, the IT system of the nationalist-conservative Fidesz party was raided by prosecutors, who are reportedly set to examine the entirety of the opposition party’s electronic communications.
The paper reported that the party’s email system and website have been taken over by authorities and are currently inaccessible to party officials.
Blikk said that the raids on Tuesday are believed to be connected to an investigation into alleged misallocation of the National Cultural Fund (NKA), with claims that starting in 2024, some 17 billion forints ($53 million) were inappropriately handed out, allegedly including to members of Hunary’s artistic community with ties to the former Orbán government.
The raid came just days after the recently elected neo-liberal Tisza Party government of Prime Minister Péter Magyar forced President Tamás Sulyok, a political ally of Orbán, to resign from his office despite having three more years left of his term.
While Sulyok agreed to sign the amendment mandating his resignation, the former constitutional judge warned that the move by Magyar represented a “watershed” moment for Hungarian democracy.
“By removing public office holders in a manner that openly violates the rule of law… it sets a negative precedent that inflicts a deep wound on the constitutional values of democracy, the separation of powers and the rule of law,” he said per The Guardian.
The move to remove Sulyok from office came in the wake of the Magyar-led parliament passing legislation to impose term limits on the office of the prime minister.
Opponents noted that the legislation would bar only one person in the entire country from standing in the next election: former Prime Minister Orbán, the only living leader to have served multiple terms in office since the fall of the Berlin Wall. While Orbán was frequently accused of being a dictator by Western legacy media and establishment politicians, he stepped down peacefully from power on two occasions as well.
Commenting on the raids on Tuesday, the former prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán, said: “Nothing like this has happened in Hungary since the end of communism in 1990.”
“It is becoming increasingly clear that Hungary’s Brussels-backed liberal authoritarian Prime Minister intends to eliminate his democratic political opponents, crush all resistance to his arbitrary actions, and use the country’s law enforcement authorities as instruments to achieve that goal,” Orbán claimed.
“The question is simple: Will there still be free elections in Hungary, or will anyone who dares to run against the Tisza Party simply end up in prison? Aren’t the enlightened Western politicians and opinion leaders who support this even remotely ashamed?”
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