“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”: How four Hungarians are countering anti-Ukrainian propaganda

Ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for April 12 in Hungary, political advertisements have flooded the Hungarian capital and the streets of many other cities. The most common theme is the portrayal, in a negative light, of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Sometimes, European People’s Party leader Manfred Weber and Viktor Orbán’s main opponent, Péter Magyar, are “joined” on the posters.

A significant portion of these posters are a government initiative and are dedicated to a “national referendum,” meaning they are paid for with taxpayer money. This causes additional irritation among some segments of Hungarian society.

However, in the progressive student city of Pécs, which has a population of 145,000, residents have decided to tackle the intrusive political advertising in their own way. “Repair crews” are pasting on parts that, according to the activists, are missing. These include references to Viktor Orbán’s father’s estate in Hatvanpuszta, mentions of the zebras on that estate, and references to his childhood friend Lorincz Meisros, who became the richest Hungarian according to Forbes during Orbán’s premiership.

The initiators of this campaign—four like-minded individuals—a writer, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a puppeteer—use humor, glue, rollers, and a ladder to “refine” more and more billboards almost every day.

One of the members of the “renovation crew” is Viktor Horvát, a writer from Pécs who was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2012. He is familiar with Ukraine not just from the news, as he visited Kyiv during the ATO, and in November 2024, as part of a literary delegation, he visited Bucha, Irpin, and Borodianka, which had been liberated from Russian occupation. He currently gives lectures using his own photos from Ukraine to students and faculty at the University of Pécs and writes reports for Hungarian independent media.

We asked Viktor Horvat about this unusual initiative, how ordinary Hungarians view the situation in Ukraine, whether there are currently bridges between Ukrainian and Hungarian society, and what he would like to say to his own people and the Ukrainian people to restore trust.

– The situation with the anti-Ukrainian billboards in Hungary isn’t the first campaign of its kind by Fidesz ahead of an election. Why did you decide to take action this time?

I need to clarify something first: this is the first anti-Ukrainian campaign. On March 1, 2022, the foreign minister was still saying that Hungary supported Ukraine’s EU membership and was urging the EU to accelerate the accession process. He also said that Hungary stood in solidarity with Ukraine and supported its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Even Orbán was still supporting Ukraine’s accession in July 2022. From 2024–25 onward, he most likely received stricter instructions from Moscow, and from that point they fully adopted every element of Russian propaganda and disinformation.

The entire staff of the state television and radio channels had already been replaced with their own people in 2010, as soon as they came to power. From then on, the population was shown a parallel reality. In this world, the government is responsible for nothing, and someone else is always to blame for every problem: George Soros, the European Union, and most recently Ukraine.

Ukrainians can best understand the Hungarian media situation if they know that this absurdity, which has been raging for sixteen years, has distanced a significant part of the population so far from reality and raised their threshold of disbelief so high that they no longer notice even the greatest absurdities. They know that Ukraine wants to join the EU and NATO — in other words, it wants to join us — and at the same time they believe that Ukraine wants to attack us, which would mean attacking NATO, the very alliance helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia. They believe that Ukraine wants to attack Hungary, a NATO member, while Ukraine is fighting with all its strength to defend itself in the east.

So we have been living in this madness for sixteen years, and if from the very beginning I had devoted myself only to fighting it, I would never have had the chance to be a writer. It is not only time-consuming; the greater burden is the mental occupation. Constant and intense attention to politics drives us mad, drains our soul, and the filth of politics rubs off on us.

There are two reasons why I started correcting the billboards now.
First, elections will be held on April 12, and for the first time in sixteen years there is a real chance to drive Orbán’s people out of power.
Second, the anti-Ukrainian campaign is such a vile act that I could no longer bear not doing something beyond writing.

Ukraine is now in exactly the kind of situation we were in in 1956, when thousands of civilians fought Soviet forces in the streets. And now we are stabbing them in the back.

So when one of my friends called me earlier this year and asked whether I would help them, I joined without a second thought.

– You’re a writer, among your like-minded allies are a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a puppeteer. What brought such different people together around a bucket of glue and a ladder?

The puppeteer and I have been friends since our teenage years. I met the lawyer thirty years ago through our workplaces at the time. The entrepreneur moved to Hungary from the Netherlands back in the 1980s, and we are also connected by our cultural interests.

There are others as well who help from time to time.

But people also come together in times of danger even without prior friendship or acquaintance.

– Billboards depicting the Ukrainian president as a threat to Hungary paint the entire country as an enemy of Hungary. How do you explain to yourself and other Hungarians who drive past these posters every day why this is dangerous for Hungary itself?

I can, of course, explain it to myself: Orbán will do anything to remain in power. To achieve this, he needs to manufacture an enemy and make the people believe that only he can protect the country from that enemy, while anyone who disagrees with him is branded a traitor. Permanent conflict is also useful because it distracts attention from the mass of crimes committed at home.

For him, the EU — of which Hungary is a member — has been an enemy from the beginning, and after 2022 Ukraine became the new enemy at Putin’s command. Either Putin is blackmailing Orbán with something, or he has promised him Western Ukraine, and it may well be that both possibilities are in play. But even without this, Orbán’s natural interest lies in the guardianship of the Russian Empire, because his authoritarian system is a foreign body within the EU.

Orbán is a sophisticated tactician. He exploited the weak points of Brussels’ institutional system and for more than ten years was able to pump money out of the EU that should have been spent on the country, while stealing a large part of it for himself and his clan.

Now the possibility of his downfall is seriously looming over him, and this is making him increasingly desperate and chaotic. The gap between reality and the image projected by state media is growing wider, and he is trying to resist the awakening popular movement with ever wilder ideas.

As for explaining it to others: most of the population does not need it explained because they can already see it, while it cannot be explained to his supporters, because Orbán’s media has built a virtual universe around them. It consists of countless elements, all of them lies, yet carefully fitted together into a coherent whole, much like the elements of a novel support one another within the text. If you try to rationally refute one element, a hundred others seem to validate it from different directions. If you cut one thread of the spider’s web, a hundred others still hold it together — and meanwhile the spider is still at work. These people can only be freed once the state channels become independent again and the current criminal politicians are brought before the courts.

– The average Hungarian in the provinces, just like a Ukrainian from the central or eastern regions, may have never been to the neighboring country and doesn’t know a single Ukrainian or Hungarian personally. Instead, Hungarians see a billboard with the “hostile” Zelenskyy every day, while Ukrainians hear statements that Hungary is blocking European integration and funds for Ukraine. How can we build bridges between people when politicians are building walls?

Exactly like we are doing now. You asked me, and I am trying to help your readers understand that something is happening here that they can scarcely imagine — and people in other countries also stand bewildered before this extreme situation: when an extraordinarily talented but sick-souled and evil man perfectly copies the protocol of Hitler’s movement:

1. Seize power through the discrediting of your opponents and staged attacks. 
2. Place your own loyalists at the head of every institution and dismantle the independent media. 
3. Turn yourself into a father figure for the people, infantilize them, remove responsibility from them, make them forget that they are masters of their own lives, make them believe they depend on you — and then they will believe anything you say and do anything for you. 

Orbán’s sophisticated and persistent tactics are shown by the fact that even as ruler of a small country he managed to become a factor in world politics. In short-term power techniques he is brilliant; in long-term strategy he is heading toward the abyss just as Hitler did.

We can mitigate the destruction carried out before his downfall, and build bridges, only by communicating with one another — as we are doing now. So I thank you for this interview, and I thank the Ukrainian organizations that in recent years invited me to Kyiv and Lviv, and took me to Irpin, Bucha, Borodyanka, and Yahidne.

Bridge-building happens naturally when both neighboring peoples choose a system of shared power in their own lives. Then no tyrant can obstruct the natural state of human relations: movement, cultural exchange, cooperation, and friendship. Only leaders who concentrate power can incite peoples against one another. So we should always strive for personal relationships and institutional ties independent of governments.

– Transcarpathia is a part of Ukraine where Hungarian and Ukrainian identities coexist daily. Have you spoken with people from there? Have you been to Transcarpathia? Do you know how ethnic Hungarians live there, given the pressure the Hungarian government claims they face?

Yes, I know people from Transcarpathia. Some of my students came from there, and I also see people from the region speaking online about how much damage the Hungarian government’s incitement is causing them. There are three times as many Hungarians in Slovakia as in Ukraine, and eight times as many in Romania, and Orbán tries everywhere to stir tensions between the majority nation and the Hungarian minorities so that he can appear as their protector and secure their votes. And this works. Many of Orbán’s supporters still dream of regaining the old territories. These are ideas that lead with certainty to destruction. Even if such territorial restoration were successful, it would still be destructive — even more so. Anyone who wants to bring back the past will indeed get it back, but that past brings with it all of its horrors.

Hungary and Ukraine are neighbors with a thousand-year-old shared history; a Hungarian community lives in Zakarpattia, Transcarpathia. How do you think Fidesz’s anti-Ukrainian campaign might affect real people on both sides of the border – not abstract states, but specific families and communities?

I do not have personal friends from Transcarpathia, only former students from there.

They are clear-minded and see how destructive this campaign is.

– Do you think the threatening billboards and the hostile rhetoric will disappear after the election? How should society act to keep the public’s attention focused on the issue of good neighborly relations between Hungary and Ukraine after the election, when it ceases to be a hot topic?

That depends on the election result. If Péter Magyar wins on April 12 and takes power, then naturally this nightmare will come to an end. There is no perfect politician; he also has flaws. But he is committed to Europeanness. We know he comes from an intellectual family where he learned principles, values, and morality. Based on his gestures and communication, he appears to be a straightforward character. He has surrounded himself with experts rather than the riffraff that surrounds Orbán.

In almost every respect he is the opposite of Orbán, the chaotic actor and adventurer.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine Orbán voluntarily handing over power after defeat. Many of us also believe that as long as he remains in power, he will do everything possible to ensure the country collapses under the next government so that he can return.

Even if he stays or somehow returns to power, it is in Hungary’s fundamental interest that Ukraine wins the war. Otherwise Orbán will lead us out of the EU, and the country will sink back into Asia; we will once again become a colony of Russia, just as we were before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once the dictator is removed, we can return to Europe together.

– Once the war ends, Ukraine and Hungary will remain neighbors, just as they have been for hundreds of years. What do you think the first joint initiatives of the two countries should be to restore trust at the societal level, and not just among governments?

At the social and personal level, good relations still exist just as they did before: when people know one another personally, politicians have difficulty driving a wedge between them. In fact, it was precisely because of the war that I formed Ukrainian connections: I have been to Ukraine three times for international conferences or at the invitation of PEN Ukraine.

The current tension is the work of the Hungarian political elite; it will be the task of the next government to normalize this, and it will do so. Hungarians should help Ukraine in every way with its EU accession and reconstruction, while Ukrainians can help by supporting the Hungarians living there. Minorities are an asset for every country.

The oppression of a minority only strengthens fascists everywhere, while a minority treated as brothers and sisters becomes a bridge between countries.

– Transcarpathia is a part of Ukraine where Hungarian and Ukrainian identities coexist daily. Have you spoken with people from there? Have you been to Transcarpathia? Do you know how ethnic Hungarians live there, given the pressure the Hungarian government claims they face?

Yes, I know people from Transcarpathia. Some of my students came from there, and I also see people from the region speaking online about how much damage the Hungarian government’s incitement is causing them. There are three times as many Hungarians in Slovakia as in Ukraine, and eight times as many in Romania, and Orbán tries everywhere to stir tensions between the majority nation and the Hungarian minorities so that he can appear as their protector and secure their votes. And this works. Many of Orbán’s supporters still dream of regaining the old territories. These are ideas that lead with certainty to destruction. Even if such territorial restoration were successful, it would still be destructive — even more so. Anyone who wants to bring back the past will indeed get it back, but that past brings with it all of its horrors.

Hungary and Ukraine are neighbors with a thousand-year-old shared history; a Hungarian community lives in Zakarpattia, Transcarpathia. How do you think Fidesz’s anti-Ukrainian campaign might affect real people on both sides of the border – not abstract states, but specific families and communities?

I do not have personal friends from Transcarpathia, only former students from there.

They are clear-minded and see how destructive this campaign is.

– Do you think the threatening billboards and the hostile rhetoric will disappear after the election? How should society act to keep the public’s attention focused on the issue of good neighborly relations between Hungary and Ukraine after the election, when it ceases to be a hot topic?

That depends on the election result. If Péter Magyar wins on April 12 and takes power, then naturally this nightmare will come to an end. There is no perfect politician; he also has flaws. But he is committed to Europeanness. We know he comes from an intellectual family where he learned principles, values, and morality. Based on his gestures and communication, he appears to be a straightforward character. He has surrounded himself with experts rather than the riffraff that surrounds Orbán.

In almost every respect he is the opposite of Orbán, the chaotic actor and adventurer.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine Orbán voluntarily handing over power after defeat. Many of us also believe that as long as he remains in power, he will do everything possible to ensure the country collapses under the next government so that he can return.

Even if he stays or somehow returns to power, it is in Hungary’s fundamental interest that Ukraine wins the war. Otherwise Orbán will lead us out of the EU, and the country will sink back into Asia; we will once again become a colony of Russia, just as we were before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once the dictator is removed, we can return to Europe together.

– Once the war ends, Ukraine and Hungary will remain neighbors, just as they have been for hundreds of years. What do you think the first joint initiatives of the two countries should be to restore trust at the societal level, and not just among governments?

At the social and personal level, good relations still exist just as they did before: when people know one another personally, politicians have difficulty driving a wedge between them. In fact, it was precisely because of the war that I formed Ukrainian connections: I have been to Ukraine three times for international conferences or at the invitation of PEN Ukraine.

The current tension is the work of the Hungarian political elite; it will be the task of the next government to normalize this, and it will do so. Hungarians should help Ukraine in every way with its EU accession and reconstruction, while Ukrainians can help by supporting the Hungarians living there. Minorities are an asset for every country.

The oppression of a minority only strengthens fascists everywhere, while a minority treated as brothers and sisters becomes a bridge between countries.

A cikk magyar változata az alábbi linken olvasható: „Amit magadnak kívánsz, azt kívánjad a szomszédodnak is”: hogyan cáfolják meg négy magyar az ukránellenes propagandát

Українську версію статті можна прочитати за посиланням: «Бажай своєму сусіду того, чого бажаєш собі»: як четверо угорців виправляють антиукраїнську пропаганду

Text: Vitalii Diachuk,
Regional Coordinator of the Re:Open Ukraine Initiative
Photos provided by the speaker