Fidesz sets out to conquer the digital world ahead of next year’s elections. But is it working?

"By Christmas, I'll have saved up enough money to get in on the internet," the protagonist of the most popular TV show in communist Hungary said in an episode in 1996. At the time, he could not have known how relevant this would be now, nearly thirty years later, when Fidesz, which has been ruling with a two-thirds majority for fifteen years and has been spending billions of forints on advertisements on the internet for several years, decided that the main reason for the challenges of the past period was that they had not yet ventured into the virtual space. If Viktor Orbán listened to Showtek, he could have put it the way the Dutch duo did: analogue players in a digital world.

There are many things one can bring up against Fidesz, but taking lightly anything that is closely connected to them staying in power isn't one of them. In line with this, they've recently thrown all their energy into conquering the internet.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán first proposed in May that digital warriors could be the secret weapon for winning the next election. Then, two months later at the Free Summer University in Baile Tusnad, he announced the launch of the Digital Civic Circles (Digitális Polgári Kör or DPK), explaining that, although they must fight against the "digital aggression of the Tisza Party," some people are fed up with conflict and want peace. Most recently, a new podcast entitled "The Hour of Fighters" was also launched, where leading Fidesz politicians are interviewed every morning. The podcast's host is Balázs Németh, who used to be an anchor at the public television's main news programme and later served as CEO of the company organizing the 2023 World Athletics Championships held in Budapest.

It’s worked before, so it will surely work again

Before we take a closer look at these initiatives and how they have fared so far, it is worth taking a quick glance at Fidesz's community building strategy from a few decades ago. Indeed, the party has a tradition of doing this in the real world, and what they are attempting to do now is to resurrect what they have done before, except that they have added some unnecessary extra steps.

In 2002, after losing the election, Fidesz created the so-called "civic circles" which became a symbol of the party's grassroots approach: “doing” politics in the street, with the average citizens. It was with the help of these that Viktor Orbán reinvented himself as a simple son of the people, so that in 2018 he could tell Chuck Norris, "you know, I'm a street fighter, basically."

Not only did Viktor Orbán strengthen his own power within Fidesz with the civic circles at the time, but he also built a hinterland for the party, mainly in rural areas, which they were able to rely on for a long time. By the time the 2006 election rolled around, this approach became somewhat inconvenient for Fidesz, and the civic circles were slowly set aside. Since then, however, the importance of "going to the countryside" has become an oft-repeated mantra in Hungarian politics. At one point, even the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) tried to reinvent itself along these lines, and Tisza's "islands" (local organizations outside of the capital) were also created based on this idea. Thus, the impact of the original civic circles on Hungarian politics is unquestionable.

The reason why recalling all of this is worthwhile is because on the one hand, it clearly shows that Fidesz is capable of building organic, grassroots communities, while on the other hand, it clearly demonstrates that the current situation is in every way different from that in 2002. This time, Fidesz is not riding the populist wave after having just narrowly lost an election; it has been in power since 2010, basically doing whatever it wants, and until Péter Magyar burst onto the scene last spring, it had no opposition that had to be taken seriously. Now that it has one, it needs to redefine itself, but after governing with a two-thirds majority for the past fifteen years, this is more difficult to do than when the party was in opposition. In this situation, pointing fingers at their opponent is also much less credible than it was back in the day.

Given the ruling party's' extensive media empire, the public media's non-stop spouting of its messages, the billions of forints poured into the pro-government influencers at Megafon, and the more than 100 million forints spent by the Movement of National Resistance on advertisements within a very short period of time, it seems quite absurd that they felt they were not reaching enough people. What makes the whole thing truly odd, however, is that Fidesz is still convinced that all they need to do is conquer the digital space and that's it. And they even believe that it is not their fault that they are at a disadvantage in this area despite the massive amounts of money spent – Fidesz's parliamentary group leader, Máté Kocsis recently attributed this to the fact that "the censors at Facebook are also the henchmen of the liberal world."

Digital freedom fighters

Viktor Orbán announced the launch of Harcosok Klubja or the Fight Club (literally: “The Warriors’ Club”, this was the Hungarian title of the iconic 1999 movie) at a Budapest sports arena in May and straight away said that they would win the next elections with 100,000 digital warriors. As our video team found out, even those present did not really understand what they were doing there or what the whole thing was about, and there were also questions about the initial idea behind the whole venture. At present, there is no evidence that social media can significantly influence the outcome of an election, and it was unclear how this would develop into an organic community capable of bringing about meaningful change in digital space.

It was therefore no surprise that when we examined the numbers (how many times the FB posts of leading Fidesz politicians had been shared) a week and a half after the Fight Club was founded, there was little indication that the digital freedom fighters had achieved much. They did not substantially amplify the voices of Fidesz politicians, they did not push Fidesz-affiliated channels, and there was no significant disruption in the comment sections under the posts of opposition figures and independent media outlets, both of which Fidesz has portrayed as the devil incarnate.

Just as we had predicted, what the whole thing accomplished at best was to bring together the hard-core Fidesz supporters in a critical situation. This might even be deemed as success, given that the civic circles did something similar back in the day. Except that this time, some of the posts directing members on which emojis they should use or how to correctly spell certain words became memes, and the party had no choice but to go with it – even though these posts didn’t come from the original group (which wasn’t even on Facebook at the time), but from several others who were posing as the real thing. of the memes were a mockery of their posts.

It would be hard to sell this as a major achievement, and even though we later looked at a much larger sample, instead of warriors, we only found pensioners and full-time Fidesz supporters communicating through emojis. Orbán wasn't fazed by this though, and kept saying that it was only because of the whispering propaganda of the Tisza Party that the digital space wasn't abuzz with their voices. Then he moved the Warriors’ Club to Facebook and started recruiting people in a public post into the previously exclusive, invitation-only online community. Since then, they have also used paid advertisements to spread the word about the group. Viktor Orbán himself personally posts in the group about current events, such as Jennifer Lopez's sold-out Budapest concert, but he also promotes propaganda videos generated by artificial intelligence.

It is difficult to understand why they needed to create a group for this instead of just posting the same thing on his own Facebook page. Especially since, according to the Prime Minister himself, there may be "moles hiding behind the darkness of the digital fog," within the group so it cannot even be said that they are only addressing their own. But one could for sure say that, strange as it all is, they are at least consistent in their approach. And then they came up with the Digital Civic Circles (DPKs), and it became really hard to figure out what Fidesz is trying to do on the internet.

Digital citizens, peaceful conquerors

One may describe the Warriors’ Club as strange or ineffective, but at least it was a representation of the idea in Orbán's mind about the importance of defending the digital space from trolls and aggression, and of his conviction that this could be achieved with digital warriors. Then came Baile Tusnad, and the Prime Minister, as if he were the protagonist of Groundhog Day, once again announced that something had to be done about the digital space, which is why they would be establishing Digital Citizens' Circles. The Prime Minister justified this decision by explaining that it had become clear that fighting was not for everyone. However, the question begs to be asked:

If peaceable digital citizens are needed for conquering the digital space, then what the hell were the digital warriors doing so far? And if they are also working on this, then why was it necessary to create another thing for the same purpose?

The first DPK was introduced that same day, with members including Viktor Orbán, opera singer Erika Miklósa, Dopeman (a rapper known for his mysoginist lyrics who years ago kicked a plasterboard head that looked like Orbán's at an event, but had since become a Fidesz supporter), Fidesz's favourite historian Mária Schmidt, and others. A day later, Orbán announced that 30,000 people had joined several DPKs in a single day, a week later he was talking about 55,000 members, and most recently, he spoke of a digital revolution, claiming that they have approved 500 requests for founding DPKs. This means that after the first round, at the time of this writing, there were 343 officially known DPKs with nearly 60,000 members, and it is now clear that despite the fact that many people made fun of them at first, it is much easier to communicate positively about the DPKs than it was about the Warriors' Club.

At this point, the Fight Club essentially functions as the prime minister's messaging board, while the DPKs are built around specific topics and, due to the official registration process, are easier to take seriously than a simple Facebook group. Some of them can also be found there, of course, Orbán has, for example, specifically promoted his own group, so it is no coincidence that it has 43,000 members, which is more than the number of members in the Fight Club. It is also easier to boast about how many PDK's there are, how many members they have, and who the well-known figures in each one are, because these are specific, measurable achievements. This is very different from, say, how many Tisza Party trolls the digital warriors have defeated, which is quite difficult to quantify.

However, with the two existing at the same time, it is likely that it has not only become challenging for the average Fidesz voter to figure out what each group's role is, but for prominent Fidesz politicians too.

Orbán now wants to halt the "spread of online hate culture" and the "ramblings of fake Tisza profiles" with the DPKs, and not the warriors of the Fight Club. Which is strange given that there is likely to be a significant overlap between the members of the two groups. The Fight Club was at least easy to follow, but there are hundreds of DPK groups, one can join several at the same time, and in many cases, their purpose is unclear. And even when it is clear, it is difficult to see why someone would join TV newscaster Anikó Marsi's Women's DPK when they can also join a well-established Facebook group for women.

Other than, of course, because they want to express their support for Fidesz, which is not nearly as trendy in 2025 as it was in 2002. What's more, they could even join all of them, because it's not really about the theme anyways, but this way, having so many of them makes the whole thing pointless. It's a bit like kids starting fifteen different clubs during summer break and then telling their parents which ones they joined that day. There is no better proof of Fidesz politicians essentially doing exactly this, than the video in which Orbán spoke about contemplating that he might join Máté Kocsis's fake news hunter Zebra DPK (launched with an actual piece of fake news), and other Fidesz politicians enthusiastically talking about which circles they were going to join.

By now, Fidesz is involved in so many “fights” (sometimes peacefully) in the online space on so many interlinked fronts that it is becoming difficult to follow it all. The only question is whether there is a point to any of it.

What is the point of it all?

Apparently, Fidesz believes that all they need to do is conquer the online space with their Digital Civic Circles, The Warriors' Club, and Fidesz politicians, including Orbán himself, constantly running from one podcast to the next. As we recently wrote, this is dangerous self-delusion that could easily backfire at next year's elections, but at the moment it does not at all seem that Fidesz is operating according to a well-thought-out plan. It increasingly looks like they are panicking because spending all that money on internet ads no longer seems effective and they no longer have any tangible results to show for it, so

anything that comes to their mind is getting approved in the hope that one of their ideas will actually work or will at least distract their supporters from the fact that their grip on power has never been under as much threat as it is now.

On top of that, Fidesz has now reached the point where they are organizing in-person meetings for the members of the Warriors' Club and for those in Digital Civic Circles, which were created specifically with the goal of "taking over the digital space". Given all the effort, they might as well have skipped clowning around with the digital sphere, which doesn't seem to have achieved much anyways, other than to make them the laughing stock of the nation for months on end. They do have experience in face-to-face community building – not only through the civic circles of 2002 but also through the Free Summer University in Baile Tusnad, and over the past year they have watched Péter Magyar make waves on the internet by physically touring the country and mobilizing large numbers of people in real life. However, all Fidesz managed to deduce from this was that even Facebook is against them – along with Brussels, the American Democrats, the independent press, and the Ukrainians, to name just a few.

They needed a new method

A few years ago, Facebook introduced a new policy in the EU, and naturally in Hungary as well, requiring political advertisements to be approved through a special procedure and requiring that it be indicated who ordered and paid for them. Although the Hungarian State Audit Office has ruled that political ads published on Facebook do not count as political advertising, this transparency isn't advantageous for the ruling party, as it makes it clearly visible how much Fidesz or one of its mouthpieces is spending on ads each week (spoiler: a whole lot).

Since the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has been very careful to ensure that political ads commissioned from other countries do not appear anywhere during campaign periods. In the US, for example, it has repeatedly imposed a complete restriction on political advertising, most recently ahead of the 2024 presidential election. This is relevant because this will also be the case in Hungary ahead of next year's elections, as Facebook announced in July that it would not even attempt to comply with the relevant EU regulations and would instead ban political ads in the region starting in October. This could be particularly painful for Fidesz, which has invested a lot of money into replacing the old-fashioned press with Facebook propaganda, so it is logical that they are trying to switch from this approach as quickly as possible.

This change of pace was also present in a document detailing the plans leading up to the 2026 election, leaked by opposition leader Péter Magyar in early July. Although the governing party disputed its authenticity, the fact that it included a reference to the change we’ve seen take place since, suggests that it could have indeed come from Fidesz's inner circle.

In addition, it is evident that Fidesz has tried to borrow already proven ideas for its digital conquest. One example of this is that the first DPK meeting will be held at the Papp László Sports Arena, while the Warriors' Club was born in the BOK Hall – having such bombastic events organized in arenas clearly evocative of American politics, and Donald Trump in particular.

The tactical use of digital noise, amplified by the DPKs and the Warriors' Club, is also characteristic of the American president, although he dominates the internet much more drastically, and we are by no means at the point where Orbán would post something crazy in all caps almost every minute.

The fact that Orbán's staff, and even Fidesz politicians themselves are trying to use each meme as if their original intention with these had been to entertain all along, also bears some similarities to what the White House is currently doing. However, while the White House has evidently hired people for the communications team who are already chronically online and spend 14 hours a day scrolling through TikTok, here in Hungary, we are lagging several months behind the trends and then end up producing awkward videos.

More importantly, Hungary lacks the online community of young people who embraced Trump even before 2016 and who were creating memes independently, simply because they found it funny that a guy like him was running the country. In Hungary, these same young people have been randomly breaking into chants of "Filthy Fidesz" at concerts for months, and neither the pensioner Facebook-warriors nor all the Fidesz politicians and celebrities mutually patting each other on the back online will be able to change that.