I feel like I need to explain this about the Hungarian election: Tisza won without any presence in the mainstream media, and barely anything you could call a "political ad." And it's not just that they couldn't afford it: they couldn't access certain types of publicity even if they had the money. Over the last sixteen years, Fidesz has come to dominate our national media infrastructure. We don't have hardline censorship, it's just that all of the means to speak and be heard belong to Orbán.
An opposition party can no longer place full-size billboards anywhere in Hungary: the private companies renting out billboard spaces are also under Fidesz control. Fidesz can fill the city with billboards, on walls, next to roads, in every bus stop, etc etc, Tisza had none, except for smaller cardboard ones ziptied to traffic signs.
There are free, state-run TV and radio channels that lots of people use to get their news, and those are 100% Fidesz propaganda. Free newspapers are handed out: Fidesz propaganda. Private, for-profit media exists, but a lot of it is owned by Fidesz puppets and echoes the party line, a lot of it is technically free but self-censors to avoid trouble, and the remainders of truly free media remains struggled to have the same reach as the media propped up by the whole state infrastructure. Fidesz used financial and political means to break multiple dissenting newspapers and online news sites, replacing them with zombie propaganda creatures. Some things no longer appear in mainstream media, for example, opposition politicians do not appear in mainstream media. There could be no televised debate between candidates because that would have meant giving free air time to enemies of Fidesz.
The opposition has access to social media, and they have access to crowdfunded alternative news/journalism sites, which also disseminate information via social media, and that's basically it, while Fidesz also pushes their own agenda via the same social networks. Shoutout to gen Z and A for being online in the right way and amplifying true information, shoutout to some surprisingly ethical influencers, shoutout to Tisza for being good at maintaining an engaging social media presence that could rival state-funded television, but an especially huge and humbled shoutout to the investigative and documentary journalists who did not stop, and who spent the last decade uncovering the scandals that finally brought the regime down. But that still would not have been enough, because not everyone is on the internet, and not everyone on the internet is already reading the same four independent investigative outlets.
It is only in retrospect that I understand how much of this campaign was won the old, low-tech way, on foot, door to door, face to face. Telling people what was going on, and asking them what they wanted. I used to think it was just a silly gimmick that Péter Magyar walked from Budapest to Nagyvárad (ca. 300 km), but if a guy can't get on television, he has to go to fifty different villages and convey the news like a town crier. And of course it wasn't just him, Tisza candidates and volunteers have put in a truly impressive amount of footwork.
The party having a TWO-THIRD SUPERMAJORITY was basically silent and invisible in any mainstream outlet. They didn't need that shit, and apparently their voters didn't either. This is incredibly impressive.
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