Prime Minister Péter Magyar became embroiled in a bitter confrontation with Norway’s public broadcaster NRK, calling its report on Hungarian press freedom ‘full of lies’ and telling correspondent Zofia Paszkiewicz that another interview was unlikely ‘any time soon’ in a Facebook comment.
The dispute dates back to a missed interview in the summer, which is not usually something that would initiate the kind of conflict witnessed on Monday. After being left unanswered for years under former prime minister Viktor Orbán, NRK expected a different approach from the new Tisza government. Magyar had campaigned on restoring press freedom, and his staff did indeed answer NRK’s emails and calls in the summer, strengthening its optimism.
(Don’t) Shoot the Messenger
Yet when NRK travelled to Budapest in late July, its experience changed. The broadcaster wrote that only opposition politicians and Fidesz figures seemed willing to speak with journalists in Parliament. Magyar’s office cancelled an arrangement under which he was expected to answer questions, NRK said, and then could not guarantee the crew a question at a later press conference. A government employee allegedly even warned that continued calls to ministers could mean NRK would never receive an interview.
According to the NRK report, Magyar walked past the crew on his way to the chamber, while parliamentary guards later ordered it to delete footage recorded outside his office. Paszkiewicz wrote that Magyar preferred social media to interviews and that none of the journalists NRK met had secured an interview with him since he became prime minister. She flew home with an ‘uneasy feeling’, asking why ‘Hungary’s most powerful man’ would not answer critical questions.
Responding to the allegations, Magyar said that there was no fixed sit-down interview scheduled—later confirmed by Paszkiewicz as well—and denied that anyone had treated the crew rudely, delivering a blow to the Hungarian media, which picked up the story immediately. ‘Whatever you write about, at least ask first,’ he wrote on Facebook.
When Paszkiewicz appeared in the comment section, asking once again for an interview, Magyar replied that he had read her ‘article full of lies’ and did not expect another interview soon.
‘Magyar inherited severely damaged trust between political power, traditional media and civil society, while retaining a communications style built on bypassing those exact intermediaries between him and his voters’
The same day, Partizán—the outlet whose 2024 interview helped launch Magyar’s political rise—was denied accreditation to Parliament. Parliament cited rules introduced in June requiring the appropriate classification and a website carrying current political news. Magyar said he disagreed with the decision but stressed that Parliament was a separate branch of power.
The two separate incidents brought a wider issue into focus, one that has persisted since the emergence of Péter Magyar and Tisza and became even more visible after the new government took power. Namely, Magyar inherited severely damaged trust between political power, traditional media and civil society, while retaining a communications style built on bypassing those exact intermediaries between him and his voters.
The model was among the main reasons behind Tisza’s landslide victory in April. Magyar’s first Partizán interview drew more than 2.7 million views, after which he increasingly used Facebook and YouTube to reach voters directly. The strategy did not stop after he entered government. Index counted 545 Facebook posts during his first 100 days as prime minister—5.5 per day—while a September survey found that 92 per cent of his comments beneath other pages appeared under media outlets.
In opposition, the direct communication strategy helped Magyar circumvent a media landscape that was rather hostile to opposition politicians. In government, however, the same approach gives personal reactions from the prime minister immediate institutional significance. That is a distinction that Magyar does not understand or, more likely, deliberately exploits.
A clear example came in August, when he wrote simply ‘I don’t think so…’ beneath a report announcing two senior public-media appointments; within hours, both appointments were withdrawn. Magyar later insisted he had issued no instruction, but the sequence showed how a casual comment from the prime minister could function as something considerably more consequential.
The Bird Has Flown, the Fire Remains
‘And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown / So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?’ John Lennon sang in the Beatles’ classic ‘Norwegian Wood’. Paul McCartney later explained that the final fire was conceived as an act of revenge after the narrator had been rejected.
Ironically, that image of a seemingly ordinary encounter ending in retaliation offers a fitting introduction to Hungary’s own long and troubled relationship with Norway. What began 12 years ago as a technical dispute over foreign funding for Hungarian civil society quickly grew into a much broader confrontation over freedom of the press, political influence and, more generally, the perceived state of Hungarian democracy. It ultimately became one of the clearest practical demonstrations of the ideological logic behind Viktor Orbán’s concept of illiberal democracy, giving Norway an unusually sensitive place in Hungarian political and diplomatic history.
At the centre of the initial conflict was the so-called Norway Grants—a funding mechanism through which Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein support development and social programmes in less wealthy European countries. Hungary was allocated €153.3 million for the 2009–14 period, most of it distributed through programmes involving the Hungarian state. A smaller civil-society fund operated separately, however, with grants awarded by a consortium led by the Ökotárs Foundation rather than the government.
That arrangement became politically troubling for Orbán. Budapest argued that Norwegian public money was being distributed to Hungarian NGOs involved in domestic political campaigns while the elected government had little oversight over how the money was spent. Norway took the opposite view: keeping the civil fund outside government control was necessary precisely because it was intended to support an independent civil society.
The dispute broke into the open shortly after Fidesz’s 2014 election victory. Prime Minister’s Office chief János Lázár accused the NGOs running the fund of favouring a narrow ideological circle and questioned their links to opposition politics. Norway rejected the allegations. The conflict then quickly spread beyond the NGO programme itself: on 9 May, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein suspended most payments to Hungary after Budapest transferred management and monitoring of the wider grants from a ministry to a state-owned company without donor approval. The independently run civil society fund was nevertheless allowed to continue.
Then came Orbán’s landmark Tusnádfürdő speech on 26 July, in which he outlined the era-defining concept of illiberal democracy. Orbán explicitly invoked the Norway Grants controversy, arguing that Hungarian civil society contained not genuine NGOs but ‘paid political activists’ financed by foreign interests seeking influence over Hungarian public life. Norway later described foreign-funded NGOs as organizations Budapest treated as obstacles to establishing that illiberal state.
The dispute crystallized two fundamentally different concepts of institutional independence. Oslo regarded, according to the classic liberal understanding, distance from elected government as a safeguard allowing publicly financed civil organizations to operate autonomously. Budapest focused instead on the political influence created by foreign financing, arguing that organizations participating directly in political activism could not simply be treated as neutral because their funding operated at arm’s length.
‘The confrontation…was the first long-running bilateral dispute emerging from the ideological confrontation that characterized the coming years of Orbán’s time in power’
Hungarian authorities subsequently investigated the fund operators, and police raided Ökotárs in September 2014—an action later found unlawful by a Hungarian court, with the criminal investigation subsequently terminated. The wider political argument, however, survived, feeding into constant confrontations over foreign-funded NGOs, the 2017 NGO law and the 2018 ‘Stop Soros’ legislation.
Similar disputes have since appeared elsewhere: after returning to office, Donald Trump froze US foreign assistance and later cut more than 80 per cent of USAID contracts as part of an ‘America First’ review, reviving the same debate over whether taxpayer-funded support for foreign media and NGOs strengthens independent civil society or amounts to political intervention. That being said, the confrontation between Hungary and Norway marked the first such instance in contemporary Western politics and was the first long-running bilateral dispute emerging from the ideological confrontation that characterized the coming years of Orbán’s time in power.
There is another unusual personal connection linking Monday’s events to 2014: Partizán founder Márton Gulyás was head of one of the NGOs receiving funding under the Norway Grants at the time. Fidesz even used his statement to prove foreign interference through the scheme, as Gulyás admitted that the money had helped finance protests directed at the government.
He gave his last interview to Hungarian public media at the time, after which he did not receive another invitation until last month, when he appeared on a radio programme after 12 years. Gulyás himself mentioned that during the September appearance. On Monday, the circle closed: Partizán, the outlet that kicked off Magyar’s political career, was barred from entering Parliament at the same time as the new government engaged in a bitter dispute with Norway’s public broadcaster.
The Reflex Magyar Never Left Behind
That circularity helps us understand NRK’s expectations and disappointment after its treatment by the Magyar government. Tisza promised to provide the institutional framework for a more open Hungarian media landscape, yet the prime minister’s own approach frequently works against the trust those changes are supposed to rebuild.
Magyar came to power after spending much of the previous two years attacking precisely this approach to the media. He denounced Orbán-era public broadcasting as government propaganda, criticized the exclusion of opposition voices and promised that political power would no longer determine who received access or favourable treatment. His own conduct, as highlighted by NRK, sits uneasily with those promises.
‘Magyar came to power after spending much of the previous two years attacking precisely this approach to the media’
The methods Magyar developed in opposition—bypassing journalists, communicating directly with supporters and publicly confronting outlets he considered hostile—carry very different consequences from the prime minister’s office. Refusing a future interview after critical coverage, or making comments followed almost immediately by personnel changes at public media, raises questions about whether the old relationship between political power and media has really disappeared or merely changed form.
That is why the NRK controversy matters beyond a missed interview. Magyar inherited a country in which trust between government, media and civil society had been badly and consciously damaged. He built his political career criticizing that system. By treating critical media with the same suspicion and hostility he once condemned, he risks preserving that legacy.
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