The pardon scandal that exploded on 2 February tested the Fidesz government's communication. As clear evidence of this, the Prime Minister's usually active Facebook page first completely avoided the issue and then went completely silent for more than a week after the scandal broke.
In this article, we use social media posts to examine how Fidesz's campaign machinery handled the crisis in a way that has not been seen for years:
how the governing party reacted on social media platforms to the resignations of its two prominent members.
Data was provided by CrowdTangle, Facebook's statistics program. For the analysis, we have collected the posts, which were:
posted by Fidesz politicians (members of parliament and local government, mayors, deputy mayors, members of county assemblies) and members of the pro-governing Megafon center
including the names of Judit Varga or Katalin Novák.
and were posted between 1 and 28 February 2024.
On Facebook, more than 450 original posts and shares were analyzed.
1-9 February: Business as usual
Katalin Novák's much-publicized pardon decision was brought to the attention of the media on 1 February by a lawyer. Following a letter sent to "independent media outlets", on the morning of 2 February, the local news site 444 was the first to break the news: the President of Hungary had pardoned Endre K., who had previously been convicted of covering a pedophile crime.
While the case, referred to as the pardon scandal, had been all over the press, the President who had issued the pardon and the then Minister of Justice who had signed the decision did not react to the scandal on their official Facebook pages until 10 February. Novák and Varga were still actively posting but on different topics.
During the first week after 2 February, the former Justice Minister posted about her meetings with the Polish, Norwegian, Irish, and Finnish ambassadors, while the President posted about visiting a cheese factory, and about Hungary's relations with Armenia and Qatar.
These posts were also picked up by several Fidesz politicians who helped to spread the word.
On February 10, shortly before 5 pm the Hungarian public service news channel, M1 announced that Katalin Novák would soon give an extraordinary announcement.
Prominent politician of Fidesz, government commissioner and MP, Péter Hoppál, posted on his Facebook page at 16:47, before the President's actual announcement that:
I will definitely #stand by Katalin Novák! 🙏You are worthy! Thank you for everything, Madam President!
M1 began broadcasting the President's speech a few minutes after 5 pm. Novák announced her resignation, and shortly afterward (at 17:38) she also posted her 6-minute farewell speech on her official Facebook page. This post was shared by only a few of the Fidesz elite, initially exclusively by female politicians.
Although the sharing of Novák's post was spectacularly avoided by the majority, this does not mean that Fidesz politicians did not react to the news of her resignation. But they chose a different, more Fidesz-friendly narrative.
The new line of communication was set by a post shared at 17:36 by faction leader Máté Kocsis, in which he wrote in reaction to Novák's resignation: "On the political right, there are consequences for mistakes, on the political left, there are no consequences for sins". He attached a portrait of Varga and Novák to the post and thanked them for their work so far.
In Fidesz's official circles, this post spread like wildfire.
The post, which went live at 17:36, was shared by 26 politicians from Kocsis' page within 10 minutes, 107 within 1 hour, and 173 in total, all of them members of the Fidesz-KDNP party alliance. The fact that 70 of the 133 MPs in the 133-member parliament forwarded Kocsis' message verbatim within 1 hour and 91 on the same day is a sign of the discipline of the governing party's communication.
The timeline shows posts from a single day, 10 February 2024, in 5-minute increments.
This was not the first time that the government's communication machinery backed Kocsis' Facebook posts. For example, in 2021, during the opposition primaries, the official campaign post against the opposition's leaders first appeared on Kocsis's Facebook page, and then more than 3,500 Facebook accounts shared the original post.
The unchanged, massive, and coordinated sharing of Kocsis' posts guaranteed that the entire pro-government Facebook universe was flooded with the same message.
The only exception to this in the communication of the pardon scandal were a few posts by leading Fidesz politicians.
also published posts in line with the central narrative but did not share the same post.
Kocsis's statement was later picked up by Fidesz: the post was advertised on Facebook (30-35 thousand HUF; 75-85 EUR), and then the quotes about political right and left and consequences mentioned above started to spread in two waves from the party's official website in two different forms. One version, which emphasized the right wing's readiness to accept responsibility, was shared by a total of twelve politicians (including five Fidesz MEPs), while the version comparing the left wing's “crimes” was shared by fifteen.
Source: Fidesz, Facebook
Only Péter Hoppál stuck out from the mainstream Fidesz narrative. On 10 February, the day of the resignations, the politician and MP published three posts in which he stood up for Katalin Novák and Judit Varga. While in his first two posts, Hoppál only indicated this with hashtags, a few hours later he shared a similar post from the Facebook page ”I stand by Katalin Novák”. However, the Facebook page never really grew beyond a core of 4,000 followers, and although it survived a troll attack, no more posts have appeared on it since 26 February.
Source: Facebook
Only a few Fidesz politicians joined Hoppál's initiative and stood up for the President. And one of them later deleted his post.
However, even those who seemed to be out of consensus did not oppose the central directive of the party. Indeed, Péter Hoppál, in addition to being the most vehement in his commitment to the two resigning politicians, also shared Fidesz’s central narrative that treated the resignation as fact.
Megafon, which broadcasts pro-government messages and also excels in discrediting opposition politicians, took over the baton on social media from Fidesz on 10 February. In the first few days, the so-called "influencers" of Megafon were still following the lead of the Fidesz parliamentary group leader, repeating the narrative of “taking responsibility” for the resignation of Novák and Varga, for which they spent a total of more than 7 million HUF (18k €), according to the Facebook ad library.
However, three days later, on 13 February, Megafon took up a new topic, shifting the spotlight from Judit Varga to her ex-husband Péter Magyar. After the departure of his wife from public life, Magyar publicly turned against the Orbán regime, to which he had previously been linked by his family and his positions in state-owned companies. After his interview with the YouTube channel Partizán on 11 February, he was attacked by the “digital army” of Megafon.
Source: Dániel Bohár, Facebook
Dániel Bohár, a well-known face in the influencer community, came up with the most viral video. In a video compilation posted on 13 February, he juxtaposed the words of András Fekete-Győr, former president of Momentum, an opposition party, and that of Péter Magyar. From the hours-long interviews on Partizán's YouTube channel, Bohár edited out the phrases “I don't know” and “I have no idea” without context, suggesting that Magyar - whom he refers to in the post as Peti - doesn't know what he is talking about.
However, the majority of pro-government politicians have conspicuously stayed away from circulating Bohár's character assassination video.
The negative message was shared only by Fidesz's regional organizations and ten municipal councilors.
However, gray zone Facebook pages and groups that are not officially affiliated with the governing party backed Megafon and a total of 113 of them shared Bohár's post, some of them several times.
The timeline shows posts for a single day, 13 February 2024, broken down by hour.
The gray zone social media pages can be broadly divided into four groups:
Although we often cannot identify the actors behind these obscure Facebook pages, it is a sign of the site's purpose that it also sponsors paid political advertising during major political events such as parliamentary elections.
The visibility of the video, which had over 1.3 million views, was also boosted by the fact that Megafon spent around 3 million HUF (7,6k €) on advertising the video discrediting Péter Magyar.
However, the Megafon content producers did not stop there: on 15 February, another 600,000 HUF was spent on another video by Bohár, who was joined by his fellow-influencers Dániel Deák and Szilveszter Szarvas, whose videos were funded with a total of 2.5 million HUF (6,3k €). However, in mid-February, Megafon suddenly stopped attacking Magyar, who was called a "traitor" in several posts. According to Political Capital's analysis, after 17 February, the messages aimed at discrediting him disappeared completely.
Throughout the scandal of the pardon case, Viktor Orbán was careful not to mention the names of Katalin Novák and Judit Varga. The Prime Minister did not deviate from this even in his annual state of the nation address on 17 February. In the first block of the nearly one-hour-long speech, Orbán called the resignation of the “President of the Republic” a right decision and great loss, and the departure of the “Justice Minister” an inevitable but unjust consequence.
Fidesz politicians immediately started to spread the message of the Prime Minister that: “the two women who are leaving their posts have more dignity than all the leaders of the left put together”. Unlike Orbán who only referred to them by their official positions, the influencers of Megafon called the two resigning politicians by name.
Overall, however, by this time, the unpleasant affair for the party was winding down in the online space. Orbán's statement – quoted as a catchphrase – was shared by only a few politicians. Instead, they continued to talk about how the “left” does not take responsibility for its crimes.
The final, thinly-voiced wave of thanks swept through the pro-government corner of Facebook on 26 February, the day Parliament adopted Katalin Novák's resignation and decided on the election of Tamás Sulyok as president.
However, the Fidesz political elite hardly took notice of Novák's farewell video on Facebook, which summarized her activities as president: only three politicians of the ruling party took the opportunity to praise the outgoing president's work.
In addition, Péter Hoppál and János Hargitai (Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Committee of Legislative Immunity), were again the most prominent among those who expressed their gratitude towards the President.
Hargitai even expressed his hope that Novák might one day return to public life.
Data visualization by Mihály Minkó
Cover photo by Bence Kiss
Translated by Benedek Totth
