Besieged by growing evidence of meddling by Hungary’s security service and Russia in a high-stakes election next month, the right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Thursday said it had opened an espionage case against a prominent investigative journalist who has chronicled dirty-trick operations by Russian intelligence agencies.
The government’s accusations against the journalist, Szabolcs Panyi, came 17 days before a general election that opinion polls indicate could end Mr. Orban’s 16-year tenure.
Mr. Orban, who has been endorsed by President Trump as a “true friend, a fighter and a WINNER,” is Europe’s longest-serving head of government and the standard-bearer for nationalist political forces in Europe and beyond.
He has also been a staunch friend of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, consistently blocking European Union efforts to support Ukraine and impose sanctions on Moscow for its full-scale invasion. Mr. Orban’s government has pursued an escalating campaign against critics in the news media and political rivals as opinion polls show no sign of turning in his favor.
After a series of recent revelations that upset the government, Gergely Gulyas, Mr. Orban’s chief of staff, told a weekly news briefing in Budapest on Thursday that Mr. Panyi had “engaged in spying against his own home country in cooperation with a foreign state,” without specifying which. The Justice Ministry, he added, was opening a case for espionage.
Mr. Panyi dismissed the government’s claims as a “false” and “completely unjust accusation,” lamenting in a post on Facebook that Hungary, a member of NATO and the European Union, was adopting methods that “really belong in Putin’s Russia, Belarus and similar regimes.”
“I am a Hungarian patriot; I serve the Hungarian public,” he added, deriding what he called “political theater” by the government.
Mr. Orban, who has won four elections in a row, faces a tough challenge before the April 12 balloting from the opposition Tisza party of Peter Magyar, a conservative former Orban loyalist who split from the governing Fidesz party in 2024.
The prime minister has put hostility to Ukraine at the center of his election campaign, branding Mr. Magyar as a warmonger who, if elected, would put Ukrainian interests first and drag Hungary into war against Russia.
Mr. Orban used the same tactic during the previous election, in 2022, and won a landslide victory, as his Fidesz party, deeply entrenched in towns and villages across the country, demonstrated its ability to spread fear and mobilize voters in great numbers.
This time, most opinion polls give Tisza a wide lead over Fidesz despite a relentless campaign by television stations and news outlets controlled by the government that accused Mr. Magyar of being a crook and drug-addled womanizer.
Hungary’s febrile atmosphere ahead of the election grew even more feverish this week, when a police officer, Bence Szabo, went public with a detailed insider account of a secret operation by the domestic intelligence service to disrupt and obtain data from the opposition party’s IT system.
Mr. Magyar jumped on the police officer’s account to accuse Mr. Orban of dragging Hungary back to its authoritarian past, telling supporters on Thursday, “This case is reminiscent of the worst communist times.”
Mr. Gulyas, Mr. Orban’s chief of staff, did not address the substance of Mr. Szabo’s claims, but suggested that the Tisza IT specialists targeted in the operation were Ukrainian spies and that “it is a crime to make a counterintelligence operation public.”
Mr. Szabo’s account of security service skulduggery against the opposition followed a report on the operation by Direkt36, an investigative news outlet where Mr. Panyi is a reporter.
Mr. Panyi also reported recently in VSquare, an online outlet he runs, that the Kremlin had sent a team to Budapest to interfere in the April election. He said the team, comprising members of Russia’s military intelligence agency, was focused on spreading disinformation and on news media manipulation, following a pattern set by similar Russian operations ahead of parliamentary elections last year in Moldova. Pro-Russian political forces in Moldova, nonetheless, lost.
This week, Mr. Panyi released the transcript of a 2020 phone conversation between Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, which he said had been recorded by the security service of a European Union country.
In that phone call, the Hungarian foreign minister asks for Russia’s help to boost the election chances of a right-wing political party in Slovakia aligned with Hungary.
The Washington Post, citing a European security official, reported earlier that Mr. Szijjarto had made regular calls to Mr. Lavrov during breaks at European Union meetings to give “live reports” on what was being discussed.
The Post said that Russia’s foreign intelligence agency had suggested staging an assassination attempt against Mr. Orban to rally sympathy and votes for the Hungarian leader.
Mr. Szijjarto initially dismissed the reports as “fake news” but later told journalists that he “coordinates about decisions made” or “about to be made” in meetings of European foreign ministers with other countries, including Russia, which he described as “an important partner for Hungary.” Talking with foreign governments, he said, “is one of the essences of diplomacy.”
The espionage case against Mr. Panyi followed an order on Monday from Mr. Orban that the authorities investigate what he called the wiretapping of his foreign minister.
Deploying the security service to undermine a political rival is “a desperate measure” by a government worried about losing power, said Andras Racz, a senior fellow in the Center for Security and Defense at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Not since the collapse of Hungary’s Soviet-imposed Communist system in 1989, he added, has a Hungarian government “used state security agencies to disrupt the functioning of a major political party.”
This, he said, “shows the complete lawlessness of the ruling party and that they are ready to cross any line” to win the upcoming election.
Mate Halmos contributed reporting.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw, on temporary assignment in Shanghai.
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