An Orban loss in Hungary's election could be the turning point Putin fears [View all]
After 16 years in power doing Russia's bidding in Brussels, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party is at risk of losing power in Sunday's parliamentary elections, with challenger Peter Magyar significantly ahead in polls.
The Kremlin appears to have pulled out all the stops to boost its man in Budapest. An internal intelligence report for Russia’s SVR intelligence service revealed in March outlined a strategy dubbed “the Gamechanger”, which included staging an assassination attempt against Orban to “fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the election campaign”.
The Hungarian campaign has seen a major escalation in interference, including “documented influence operations, disinformation campaigns and reports of intelligence-linked activities”, says Edit Zgut-Przybylska, a research affiliate at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University in Budapest and a specialist on democratic backsliding.
Moscow has also been accused of dispatching a team of election "specialists" – linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence – to Budapest to closely monitor these interference operations.
Read More: https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260411-hungary-election-magyar-orban-could-mark-turning-point-russia-putin-fears
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This could be the end of not just the Orban regime in Hungary, but of global Orbanism. A working template that is a plague upon world politics influencing and guiding not just the far right in Europe, but right here in the good old USA. If Orban loses tomorrow, we'll see how the right reacts. Will they stage a military crackdown with Russian help? Could it be 1956 all over again? And importantly, will it be a warning flag to those of us in the U.S. for the up and coming midterm elections?
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