Russiagate Redux in Hungary?
The EU-NATO establishment is trying to pull a Russiagate on Hungary — raising unfounded accusation of Russian interference in the upcoming election to pre-emptively delegitimise an Orbán victory
I’ve written for Compact about how the EU-NATO establishment is trying to pull a Russiagate on Hungary — raising unfounded accusation of Russian interference in the upcoming election to pre-emptively delegitimise an Orbán victory:
A few weeks before pivotal elections in Hungary, a familiar narrative is emerging. As reported by the Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda, journalists at the Warsaw-based nonprofit VSquare claim to have uncovered evidence that “Vladimir Putin has instructed a group of political strategists and Russian military intelligence to interfere in the parliamentary elections in Hungary in April in order to ensure that incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wins”. The claim is now being echoed in the Western media as well.
It is a familiar script by now. In the run-up to every significant election in which populist candidates stand a chance of winning, the EU establishment begins raising the specter of Russian “disinformation” and social media manipulation. Recent examples include the 2024 elections in Romania and the 2025 elections in Moldova. In both cases, a media campaign about Russian interference preceded the vote; in both cases, little or no verifiable evidence was produced.
These accusations carry real consequences. They allow Brussels to engage in its own forms of electoral interference, weaponizing locally embedded, EU-funded NGOs and media outlets to amplify establishment narratives while using the Digital Services Act (DSA) to silence critical voices and steer outcomes towards “their” candidate. As I have noted previously, since the DSA came into force in 2023, the Commission has pressed platforms to adopt heightened content moderation measures ahead of elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, and during the 2024 European Parliament elections.
The “Russiagate” narrative also serves to pre-emptively delegitimize the “wrong” candidate, seeding a story of “stolen” or “unfair” elections that can later be invoked to challenge inconvenient results. This is what happened in Romania just over a year ago. The first round of voting, in which independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu finished first, was annulled after authorities alleged coordinated Russian online influence. Georgescu was subsequently barred from candidacy in the rerun. No publicly verifiable evidence substantiating the interference claim was ever produced. Internal documents would later reveal that TikTok informed the European Commission that it had found “no evidence” of a coordinated network. No matter: “Russian interference” has become a catch-all justification for the suppression or delegitimization of political dissent—and for actual electoral interference by Brussels.
None of this is to say that Russian interference in other countries’ elections never occurs. But such allegations demand scrutiny. What is the evidence? And might those advancing these narratives have their own agenda? On both counts, the latest allegations concerning Orbán fall short. The evidentiary basis for the purported plot reduces to this: “Multiple European national security sources have told me”. In other words, no evidence whatsoever is provided. We are simply asked to trust the “investigative journalists” in question. One might be inclined to extend that trust if the outlet in question were genuinely independent. Regrettably, it is not.
Read the rest of the article here.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
If the EU interferes in an election, it is not election interference, but if Russia does not interfere in an election, it is still election interference. Odd how that works.
It worked in Romania.