By Krisztina Than and Anita Komuves
BUDAPEST, April 15 (Reuters) – Hungary’s election winner Peter Magyar said on Wednesday he will suspend state media news broadcasts, which critics at home and abroad say became a government mouthpiece under Viktor Orban, and restore media freedoms after his cabinet takes power.
Magyar’s TISZA (Respect and Freedom) party won a landslide victory in Sunday’s election, ending Orban’s 16-year rule that became a prototype for “illiberal” conservative rulers across the western world.
“Every Hungarian deserves a public service media that broadcasts the truth,” Magyar said on Kossuth state radio, where Orban had been a weekly guest while opposition politicians rarely got invited.
“We will need a little time to pass a new media law, a new media authority and setting up the professional conditions for state media to actually do what it is meant to do,” Magyar added.
“We have just witnessed the last days of a propaganda machine. After the formation of the TISZA government, we will suspend the news services of the “public” media until its public service character is restored,” he wrote on X after he was interviewed on state television.
Orban has denied eroding any democratic standards and said his government had aimed to protect Hungary’s Christian character against liberal ideas fielded by the European Union.
His extensive defeat gave Magyar the constitutional majority he needs to overhaul many of Orban’s reforms.
Critics said Orban presided over a gradual disappearance of independent media with dozens of newspapers and broadcasters critical of Orban changing hands in recent years.
The Central European Press and Media Foundation conglomerate created by Orban loyalists in 2018 has more than 400 outlets, from Echo TV and Hir TV, to news sites and regional newspapers.
(Reporting by Krisztina Than and Anita Komuves; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Philippa Fletcher)
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