Political Capital in 2023

The Budapest Forum, fake profile hunting, fact relativism, genuine protection of sovereignty, and a new podcast – these five concepts describe Political Capital's focus this year. It is not easy to make a choice, as our activities this year were quite diverse, covering topics within our well-known areas of specialization, such as Hunfluence, Ukraine fatigue, or the Hungarian-EU relationship. In the coming year, we will continue to work towards understanding the events happening around us. Thank you for being with us!

2023 in numbers:

• nearly 850 domestic media appearances
• more than 200 international media appearances in 42 countries and 24 languages
• 320,000 reach on Facebook, 30,000 on Instagram
• 18,000 Facebook followers
• 800 Facebook posts
• nearly 100,000 video views
• 25 events
• 3,500 Twitter/X followers
• the third Budapest Forum, with nearly 470 guests and more than 27,000 online followers

Over the past year, as always since 2001, our analysts have been frequent commentators for leading foreign newspapers. A recurring theme throughout 2023 has been why the Hungarian parliament is delaying ratification of Sweden's accession to NATO and what the Hungarian government expects in return. In connection with this, our director, Péter Krekó, and our analyst, Rudolf Berkes, have been interviewed by Politico, the Financial Times, and Sweden's SVT Nyheter. Our Head of Programmes, Bulcsú Hunyadi, has been a regular voice on the far right this year. Euronews asked us about the 2024 European Parliament elections and CPAC Hungary. We were also interviewed by the Guardian and the New York Times about the Orbán government's role in the European Union, and Deutsche Welle asked Péter Krekó in a video interview about the Hungarian prime minister's political allies. 

This year, for the third time, we organized our major international conference, the Budapest Forum. Focusing on sustainable peace, the event's twelve panel discussions explored topics including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the energy and climate crisis, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, the Hungarian rule of law, Russian influence in the Western Balkans, gender roles in society, and China's foreign policy. The conference was opened by the world-famous Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, a staunch advocate of democracy, who warned the Forum’s audience that the disappearance of the middle class is creating anger and disillusionment in voters. William Browder, head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, was also one of the speakers this year. Mr. Browder has been persecuted by the Russian president for years, and because of this (and Viktor Orbán's close relationship with Vladimir Putin), he felt it safer to join the conference only online. Lo Ping-cheng, Taiwan's Minister without Portfolio, shared with the participants how the Chinese Communist Party is conducting disinformation campaigns  to divide the Taiwanese society. In total, around 100 experts spoke over the two days, including European Commission Vice-President Věra Jourová, two other members of the European Commission (EC) Helena Dalli and Elisa Ferreira, MEP Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, American political scientist and conspiracy theorist Joseph Uscinski and author Dénes Krusovszky.

This year, we have organized a series of online conferences again with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and Jelen. At our event in May and in our study, we examined those crisis areas that could affect the cause of European unity in the context of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. We wrote a study and organized an online event on the balance of the Orbán regime’s foreign policy , its room for maneuver, the future of the Visegrád Group and discussed with our guest experts the situation of Hungarian-EU relations, the conditions for unlocking funds, and how realistic the scenario of Huxit is. 

2023 was an election year in the V4 countries. While in January the Czech Republic elected a pro-Western president, in September, the populist Robert Fico returned to power in Slovakia, in which the Hungarian government had a role to play. In October, Viktor Orbán's main ally Jarosław Kaczyński was defeated to allow his successor, Donald Tusk, to bring a new West wind back into Poland. The regional and European implications of the election were analyzed by our guest author, Edit Zgut-Przybylska. At the same time, we looked at what lessons the Polish election could have for the Hungarian opposition. 

In cooperation with the Hungarian Service of Radio Free Europe, we launched a new podcast series titled ’The Power of Disinformation’. In September, we discussed the disinformation narratives in the Slovak election campaign, in October, we analyzed its emergence in Russian and Chinese geopolitical strategy, and in November, we focused on the Hungarian government's disinformation influence in Hungarian minority communities in neighboring countries.

The phenomenon of disinformation, its manifestations, and its effects continue to be a major focus of Political Capital's work. In the spring, we took a deeper look at Origo's 727 "breaking news" articles, which painted a surreal parallel reality. In the spring, we conducted a nationwide opinion poll to find out how well-armed Hungarians are against the fake news industry and what they think about objective reality. Our results were presented in a video, and we also discussed the topic with renowned journalists and politicians at a public event. 

Since the early 2010s, vast sums of money have been flowing from Hungary to Hungarian communities in neighboring countries, with two main aims: to gain the votes of Hungarian citizens abroad and to influence the domestic politics of neighboring countries indirectly. This particular case of Hunfluence and the situation of the minority Hungarian public were presented in our study and discussed in the context of an online event. 

On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we hosted Mark Galeotti, a world-renowned Russia expert, who analyzed possible outcomes of the war at a public event. "It is inconceivable to achieve lasting peace without restoring the territorial integrity of Ukraine," as stated by Marija Mezenceva, Ukrainian MP, during our roundtable discussion.

Political Capital was also part of the Ukraine War Disinfo Group, an international collaboration that tracked the spread of pro-Kremlin disinformation about the war against Ukraine in 12 Central and Eastern European countries in traditional and social media. 

In our analyses and events, we regularly discussed the intensive dissemination and impact of the pro-China, pro-Russian, and anti-Western positions of the government and government-controlled media, as well as its ’Eastern Opening’. 

Hence, it is hardly coincidental that the National Information Centre (NIK), the central intelligence service in Hungary,  has also recognized our efforts, as stated („the PC takes an active role in shaping the Hungarian public's position on the war”) in a declassified report published this summer.

We have revealed that, since June, centrally coordinated fake profiles have been disseminating government propaganda in Facebook groups across Budapest and its suburbs. In our first reports, we provided details on how fake profiles, using images sourced from Russian social networking sites, spread government propaganda in local Facebook groups. Our further investigation has identified hundreds of fake profiles with much longer histories and activities across the country. Our exposure was not in vain: they quickly changed the previously unfamiliar URLs of the fake profiles to align with the stated Hungarian names, inadvertently confirming that the fake profiles are centrally coordinated. 

Our institute continuously monitors and analyses the activities of far-right parties and organizations in Hungary. We have summarized what the government's far-right opposition to the system can and cannot do, but we have also written about the relationship between Fidesz and the far right. 

In the summer of 2023, in the framework of the Budapest Pride Festival, we organised a roundtable discussion entitled "Minorities in the Hungarian Public Sphere", which focused on the public representation of minorities and hate speech against minorities. We held a full-day conference in early autumn on "Hate speech in Hungary". The conference consisted of four round-table discussions, each focusing on a different aspect of hate speech, highlighting dilemmas, issues, gaps, and good practices in the field. 

This year, we held our third Summer University, where we held panel discussions, workshops, and world cafe-style talks on different public issues with experts, journalists, politicians, and diplomats over three days. This year, our guests included Péter Felcsuti, economist; Julia Gross, Ambassador of Germany to Hungary; Claire Legras, Ambassador of France to Hungary; Bálint Ruff, political advisor; Ágnes Urbán, economist; Zsuzsanna Végh and Dániel Hegedűs, researchers of the German Marshall Fund; Adrien Ujhelyi, Associate Professor at ELTE PPK; and Márton Ugrósdy, Deputy State Secretary in charge of the Office of the Prime Minister's Political Director. 

At the end of the year, Political Capital conducted its third survey of public opinion on NGOs and found that both awareness and support for NGOs have increased. We organized a public event where we presented the results of the survey and then held a panel discussion to assess the results and the situation and prospects of civil society.

In the framework of the HDMO project, the fight against misleading and false information in Hungary has started under the coordination of PC. Our first study presented the evolution of two types of disinformation and their spread. The study was presented by our colleagues Csaba Molnár and Ráchel Surányi in the Lakmusz podcast. In a joint research project of Mérték Media Monitor and Medián, we investigated news consumption habits in Hungary, where we found that there is a demand for fact-checking in Hungarian society, but few people use it. In our November research, we focused on doubts related to the existence and understandability of the facts. 

Less than six months before the municipal elections, Parliament has approved a new system for electing the members of the Municipal Assembly. Although the official initiator was Mi Hazánk, it is evident that Fidesz’s current electoral interests motivated the rapid amendment. We published a quick analysis on the very next day of the submission, and on the day of the final vote, Róbert László summarized the lessons of the case in an article published on 24.hu. 

During the local government elections, the fate of a mayoral seat can literally depend on just one or two votes, which is why, if possible, it is even more crucial than the parliamentary elections to periodically observe how many people are changing their residence from one municipality to another in the remaining period until the elections. Political Capital has long been active in uncovering and preventing potential voter tourism. This autumn, in partnership with the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, we managed to achieve that the National Election Office publishes population data on a weekly basis, broken down by municipality, starting from a date preceding its legal obligations, on this platform. 

In 2023, Political Capital was also a partner of the Forum 2000 conference, where our director, Péter Krekó, participated in a roundtable discussion on the repercussions of the elections in Slovakia. In addition, Political Capital was honored to be the Hungarian institutional partner of this year's NATO Public Forum in Vilnius, organized jointly by the Eastern Europe Studies Centre, the German Marshall Fund, the Munich Security Conference, and the Atlantic Council.

We believe that Hungary's sovereignty is under increasing threat from countries hostile to our federal system, especially Russia and China. Therefore, we have formulated a 21-point package of proposals that will effectively protect Hungary's external sovereignty and security. Of course, we would be most pleased if our proposals were considered by the majority of the government. Still, we were also delighted to see that the Momentum parliamentary group submitted our proposals to the National Assembly as a draft resolution. We have responded to the government's so-called anti-sovereignty legislation, which, in fact, protects the arbitrary exercise of power, with a joint statement from six organizations, showing what is wrong with it. We also wrote about how the logic of the law could easily be turned against Hungarian organizations beyond the borders. 

Next year will be an election year, so similar to Fidesz's election programs, we can promise nothing else but that we will "continue"!