Hungary voted under a flood of AI videos, and the Union's tools mostly watched

The count is not final, but the direction is settled. With 98.89 per cent of votes counted on 13 April, the Tisza party of Péter Magyar had 53.21 per cent of the list vote and a projected 138 of 199 seats. Fidesz-KDNP had 38.26 per cent and a projected 55 seats. The Our Homeland Movement had 5.85 per cent and 6 seats. Viktor Orbán conceded on election night and called the result "painful but unambiguous"[1]. Postal votes may still move a few constituencies, but Tisza already sits above the two-thirds threshold for constitutional amendment[1]. Turnout was close to 80 per cent, a record[2].

We are a generation that has known only one Hungarian government. Many of our members were in primary school when Orbán returned to power in 2010. It matters more because the campaign was the first real test of the Union's new instruments against disinformation, and the test was not flattering.

A free vote on an uneven field

The joint observation mission of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe published its preliminary findings on 13 April. It found a competitive campaign and a genuine choice. It also found "no level playing field"[2]. The statement records extensive misuse of administrative resources, government information campaigns that echoed ruling-party messages, and public service media with a clear bias in favour of the government[2]. The 2024 redrawing of constituencies was not done by an independent body[2]. Election day itself was assessed positively in 99 per cent of observed polling stations[2]. The Council of Europe summarised the verdict in one line: vibrant elections, no equal opportunities for contestants[3].

The result came despite those conditions. Aliz Tóth of the London School of Economics shows that Fidesz lost ground in every type of settlement, with the steepest losses in the east and northeast, where it had been strongest[4]. She calls it "the first truly competitive election since 2010"[4]. The lesson is uncomfortable. A tilted field can be overcome, but only by a turnout close to 80 per cent and a single opposition list. That is civic luck, and it is not a system of safeguards.

The disinformation record

Three streams of manipulation ran through the campaign. The first was domestic and official. The mission observed multiple AI-generated videos posted by political actors, including on the Fidesz account and the Prime Minister's account, and found that they fed fear-mongering narratives about an opposition victory[2]. Hungarian fact-checkers told Euronews that Fidesz-linked AI videos reached "millions of views in some cases"[5].

The second stream was paid. Regulation (EU) 2024/900 on the transparency and targeting of political advertising has applied in full since October 2025. Meta responded by banning political, electoral and social issue advertisements on its platforms in the Union from that month[5]. The ban did not hold in Hungary. Political Capital identified 457 political advertisements on the pages of Hungarian political actors in January and February 2026. Of those, 456 were linked to Fidesz-affiliated figures or organisations, none to Tisza, and one to the Democratic Coalition[5]. Meta said it rejects such advertisements "when we are made aware of them"[5]. A ban that depends on being made aware favours the better-funded side.

The third stream was foreign. On 21 March the Washington Post reported an internal document of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, authenticated by a European service, which proposed a staged attack on Orbán to move the campaign from economics to security[6]. On 31 March a consortium of investigative outlets published audio of calls between Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Sergey Lavrov from 2023 to 2025[6]. The government met each report with a counter-allegation against Ukraine, and the mission records that it alleged interference by the Union and by Ukraine without presenting public evidence[2]. The mission also found that the authorities did not adequately protect the online space, and that oversight responsibilities were unclear[2].

What the Union's instruments did

The Union has built, in two years, a complete legal toolkit against election manipulation. The Digital Services Act gives the Commission exclusive competence over the systemic risk obligations of very large online platforms. The European Democracy Shield, presented by the Commission on 12 November 2025, promises a European Centre for Democratic Resilience, an incidents and crisis protocol under the Digital Services Act and an independent European Network of Fact-Checkers[7].

In Hungary those instruments ran at low power. The Hungarian authorities convened a round table with platforms in early March, and the Commission attended, but its spokesperson Thomas Regnier called it "a purely voluntary initiative" of the Hungarian authorities[8]. The rapid response system under the Code of Conduct on Disinformation was activated in mid-March, so that platforms, fact-checkers and civil society could flag interference quickly[9]. We have seen no public record of a request for information or a formal proceeding directed at a platform in relation to the Hungarian campaign. The Democracy Shield's centre and protocol were announced as plans, and we have seen no record of either being used for Hungary. The Commission's first act after the vote was a message on X from President von der Leyen: "Hungary has chosen Europe. Europe has always chosen Hungary"[10].

We do not doubt the sentiment. We question the sequence. The instruments were designed to protect a campaign while it runs. In Hungary they amounted to a voluntary round table and a flagging channel, in a Member State whose regulator sits inside the government's orbit. Where the national coordinator is captured, the Commission's competence over the largest platforms is the only independent lever, and it was not visibly pulled.

Four things should follow. The Commission should publish, for every national election, a short account of the requests for information and proceedings it opened under the Digital Services Act during the campaign. The Commission should open a formal inquiry into Meta's enforcement of its political advertising ban in Hungary, because 456 of 457 identified advertisements came from one side. The co-legislators should give the Democracy Shield's incidents and crisis protocol a statutory trigger for national elections where the national coordinator is not independent. The new Hungarian government should legislate for domestic non-partisan observation, which the current framework does not provide[2].