The shadow campaign to swing the Hungarian election against Viktor Orban has escalated with the wiretapping of Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto. The case offers a rare look into how bureaucrats, journalists, and spies run a regime-change operation in real time.
Three weeks out from the April 12 elections, the political opposition to Orban scored what seemed to be a win over the weekend, when Politico and the Washington Post ran articles alleging that Szijjarto had phoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with “live reports on what had been discussed” at multiple EU meetings. The reports cited anonymous “European security officials.”
Neither Orban nor Szijjarto make any secret of their desire to maintain cordial relations with Moscow, particularly on matters of energy security and the peace process in Ukraine. However, when bundled with more outlandish claims – that Russian “election fixers” are already embedded in Budapest, for example – the reports paint a picture of a government compromised by the Kremlin.
Orban’s leading opponent, Peter Magyar, has repeated these claims in his speeches. After the Szijjarto story broke, he accused the foreign minister of “betraying Hungarian and European interests,” and threatened him with “life imprisonment” for treason, should his Tisza party win the election.
All it took was one leaked audio file for the scheme to unravel.
The Szijjarto wiretapping plot
In an audio file released by Hungarian conservative outlet Mandiner on Monday, opposition journalist Szabolcs Panyi can be heard telling a source how he passed Szijjarto’s phone number to “a state organ of an EU country.” Once they had this number, he explained, agents of this country were able to extract “information about who that number spoke to, and they see who is calling that number or who that number is calling.”
Hellbound and Down 