Hungary’s former prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has accused the judiciary of a politically motivated probe targeting his far-right Fidesz party.
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The claims followed a raid on 21 July at a Budapest data centre hosting servers linked to Fidesz.
The Bács-Kiskun County Prosecutor’s Office said the operation was part of an investigation into alleged irregularities at Hungary’s state-run National Cultural Fund.
Investigators suspect the fund’s decision-making body of unlawfully awarding 1,079 grants worth more than 17 billion forints (€47 million), in breach of funding rules.
But speaking outside Fidesz headquarters, Viktor Orbán said the corruption investigation had been used to justify the seizure of the party’s servers.
“By yesterday, I had come to realise what this was all about,” he told journalists after the raid. “What happened was that this served as a pretext to seize Fidesz’s servers.”
He described the investigation as “a politically motivated legal proceeding” aimed at making Fidesz “legally unviable”.
Orbán also questioned the legal basis for the seizure.
“In my view, if a political party’s server is seized by the government of a rival political force, that is a problem,” he said.
His claims were echoed by political allies abroad. French MP Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Rally party, and Italy’s transport minister Matteo Salvini expressed solidarity with Fidesz on X, accusing the Hungarian authorities of violating the rule of law.
Fidesz alleges political pressure
The operation also prompted similar accusations from Balázs Orbán, Viktor Orbán’s former political director.
He told The Cube, Euronews’ fact-checking team, that the seizure had little to do with the corruption investigation and instead amounted to an attempt to obtain sensitive information about the party.
“They went into the Fidesz party and collected all the information — all the supporters, all the activists, all party communications internally — because that was the fake narrative needed for the investigation,” he said. “But it obviously isn’t. It’s about putting pressure on a political party.”
The prosecution, however, disputes that account.
The Bács-Kiskun County Prosecutor’s Office told us that the search was carried out at a service provider responsible for storing electronic data linked to a political party.
It said the volume of data, combined with a lack of cooperation from the party concerned, meant the information could not be backed up on site.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office therefore decided to seize the data storage devices,” it said, adding that authorities were working to secure access to the devices, back up the data and analyse it.
‘No reason to cry wolf’
Despite the political claims, legal experts told The Cube there is currently no evidence that the investigation itself constitutes a breach of the rule of law.
Tamás Lattmann, an associate professor of law at Tomori Pál College in Budapest and the University of New York in Prague, said the actions described so far appeared to comply with both Hungarian law and European human-rights standards.
“Currently, with these actions and these situations, I don’t see any additional or heightened danger to the rule of law or the safeguarding of human rights,” he said.
He added that the legal safeguards available to those involved in the proceedings remained in place.
“These processes are currently in conformity with the Hungarian legal provisions and with European human-rights standards,” he explained. “All the guarantees are available, and all possible judicial options are open, so I don’t think there is a reason to cry wolf at this point.”
Lattmann said Orbán and his political allies were presenting the investigation as persecution, but argued that this should be understood as political communication rather than evidence of an actual rule-of-law crisis.
“I don’t think that this qualifies as a real and clear and present danger,” he said.
Daniel Hegedüs, deputy director at the Berlin-based German Institute for European Politics (Institut für Europäische Politik), also said the investigation should be viewed in the context of Hungary’s changing political landscape.
He said the prosecution service had been under Fidesz’s political influence for much of the previous 16 years. In his view, the current investigation was an example of the justice system examining alleged breaches of the law.
“What we see is that Hungarian justice is doing what more or less an independent justice system, an independent prosecution service needs to do in cases of alleged violations of the law,” he said.
Hegedüs added that Fidesz’s accusations that the investigation represented a breach of the rule of law followed what he described as a familiar political pattern.
The political context
On 22 July, Prosecutor General Gábor Bálint Nagy announced that he would resign, with his mandate set to end on 25 August 2026.
In a statement announcing his decision, Nagy said that preserving the independence and authority of the judiciary, including the prosecution service, was a fundamental part of a democratic institutional system.
“The prosecution service must not become an instrument serving political struggles, nor the stage for daily political interests or power games,” the statement said.
The resignation was welcomed by Hungary’s new prime minister, Peter Magyar, who defeated Viktor Orbán in April’s parliamentary election.
In a post on X, Magyar said that the prosecutor general’s departure meant that “the country is free of yet another Orbán puppet who was obstructing the political transformation.”
Magyar has described the system established under his predecessor as a “mafia system” and has pledged to dismantle it through what he calls “Operation Purgatory”.