For greater than a decade, Viktor Orbán’s “intolerant” rule in Hungary has appeared ironclad. However current European elections have proven that the Hungarian prime minister and his right-hand man are struggling to include an unlikely challenger from inside.
Antal Rogán, who has been by the premier’s facet for 3 a long time and is dubbed his “Cardinal Richelieu” by opponents, is at the moment answerable for the federal government’s media technique. His wide-ranging ministerial portfolio contains secret providers and checks on international funding obtained by opposition politicians, unbiased retailers and rights teams.
In his first interview with worldwide media, Rogán sought to downplay his social gathering’s setback within the European parliament vote, through which the ruling Fidesz social gathering obtained 45 per cent, its lowest vote share since Hungary joined the EU in 2004.
“You may’t at all times be in a profitable place in authorities,” Rogán advised the Monetary Occasions. “Fairly often another person communicates extra powerfully.”
Rogán was referring to a former Fidesz member-turned-rival, Péter Magyar, who joined a small social gathering known as Tisza this yr and propelled it to 30 per cent on the poll packing containers, a primary indication that the Orbán base is fracturing.
Magyar was by no means a distinguished member of Fidesz, however his former spouse Judit Varga was Orbán’s justice minister. They divorced in 2023. Magyar stop Fidesz this yr on the day Varga was pressured to resign because the social gathering’s lead candidate for the European parliament amidst a toddler abuse scandal.
Rogán dismissed the concept that Magyar posed a severe problem to Orbán. He expressed confidence that the prime minister, who’s Europe’s longest-serving premier after taking workplace 14 years in the past, would keep in energy after the subsequent normal elections in 2026.
However Rogán himself, who isn’t as fashionable because the PM, might flip right into a legal responsibility for Orbán. Magyar has accused the premier’s éminence grise of corruption and poisonous disinformation campaigns, together with in regards to the west’s function in aiding Ukraine.
“That is Waterloo for Fidesz,” Magyar stated after the EU election outcomes got here out on June 9. “All of the billions wasted on propaganda, the conflict psychosis that the prime minister tried to construct with Antal Rogán . . . that is the start of the tip for Fidesz.”
Magyar, 43, advised the FT that he wouldn’t pull any punches with Rogán, who “misplaced his enchantment as a politician” and “is unaccountable . . . a Richelieu”, in reference to the Seventeenth-century political mastermind who served as chief minister to Louis XIII, king of France.
Little identified exterior Hungary, Rogán has stayed out of the limelight, operating what he calls the “authorities again workplace”. However he has steadily amassed energy within the media and public administration, influencing sectors corresponding to banking and knowledge know-how.
His Nationwide Info Centre, an umbrella organisation for intelligence and counter-intelligence companies, was based in 2022. Rogán’s secret providers might additionally feed an investigation into international funding allegedly obtained by Magyar, which Rogán described as “a query that should be answered quickly”. Magyar has known as the probe a joke.
“Secret providers are politicised and subjugated to propaganda,” stated Márta Pardavi, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a rights group, calling the observe “outrageous”.
An economist by coaching, the 52-year-old Rogán defended the Nationwide Info Centre’s work and stated reorganisation of the Hungarian intelligence providers had been prompted by the conflict in neighbouring Ukraine. “The prime minister needed extra direct management over them and reintegrated intelligence and counter-intelligence,” he stated.
Rogán denied the corruption allegations Magyar and others had levelled towards him, noting that no prices caught in courtroom. He additionally disputed being shielded of prosecution underneath Orbán. “No person is indispensable on this authorities,” he stated, “not even me.”
Regardless of the bruising EU election outcome, Orbán has stood by his longtime ally. “Rogán has an uncanny potential to make others rely upon him, and Orbán isn’t any exception,” stated an individual aware of the scenario. “He’s satisfied changing Rogán could be like taking pictures himself in . . . each toes.”
One other one who is aware of Rogán nicely stated that the Richelieu parallel was “spot on” because the Hungarian minister had amassed energy and wealth by making himself indispensable to Orbán.
Rogán rejected the Richelieu comparability as a result of the French minister was a mentor to the king, whereas he’s 9 years youthful than Orbán. “I noticed a person who might renew conservative politics, and he did,” Rogán stated of his first assembly with Orbán within the early Nineteen Nineties.
Rogán grew up close to Hungary’s western border with Slovenia in a Slovenian-speaking household. Described by friends as sharp, bookish and intensely political, he grew to become chief home political adviser when Orbán first received the premiership in 1998.
After spending a number of years as a Budapest district mayor, Rogán returned to parliament in 2010 to guide the Fidesz majority. Among the many first payments he drew up was a media legislation as one of many preliminary steps in the direction of Orbán’s intolerant state — and which set Budapest on a collision course with the EU.
The federal government was alleged to have allotted €3.5bn to public occasions and communications since Rogán grew to become propaganda minister in 2015, in keeping with native media outlet G7. “It’s a cash pump,” stated Gábor Polyák, chair of media research at Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd College. “A very opaque system of random sums spent with doubtful effectivity.”
Rogán stated the ministry had struck tenders price solely €1.8bn on communications and occasions, together with main worldwide sporting occasions— an quantity that, over 9 years, was “defensible once we examine it to our predecessors’ spending”.
Magyar’s success is partly as a result of fallout from a toddler intercourse abuse scandal in a village subsequent to Orbán’s hometown — and the failure of Rogán’s propaganda machine in making an attempt to comb the affair underneath the carpet.
“That is the deepest disaster Fidesz has but confronted,” one individual with data of the occasions stated. “And the identical goes for Rogán.”
Magyar stated Rogán could be considered one of his early targets if he received energy in 2026 and, on the marketing campaign path, advised that the Orbán aide “discover a nation with no extradition treaty with Hungary”.
Rogán declined to debate the kid intercourse abuse scandal however acknowledged that his political profession was tied to Orbán’s tenure.
“I will likely be within the political discipline so long as Viktor Orbán is the prime minister,” he stated.
