Colour Revolution in Hungary
By Franz Pokorny
While Britain’s last remaining postliberals rage on about OnlyFans, their friend Viktor Orbán is facing down an unholy stew of sex scandals at Hungary’s residential institutions that threatens to implicate senior ministers in his government. This has been simmering in the opposition media for over a year now (the libs at investigative journalism website Átlátszó have compiled a summary), but, as April’s election nears and every few weeks unpalatable new disclosures appear in the press, the pot appears ready to boil over and drown the government of the world’s only „family-friendly country“ in a tidal wave of its own filth.
Orbán’s mamelukes have so far closed rank, dismissing these reports as a smear campaign by an unnamed foreign intelligence agency. I say both sides are right: what we are witness to in Hungary is the unwinding of a late Cold War blackmail network that will bring down either the government or what remains of the post-socialist deep state.
Let’s review the evidence. While accusing one’s opponents of ill-doings with children, farm animals, or gypsies is part and parcel of the vibrant patchwork of democratic participation in this part of the world, serious questions about pedophilia in high circles first began to be asked in Hungary in 2024, when it came to the public attention that Katalin Novák, the country’s president (and, as state secretary for family and youth affairs, the face of the „Hungarian family policy“ that the government spent the late 2010s talking up abroad), had the previous year granted an official pardon to a man named Endre Kónya, the deputy director of an orphanage in the Budapest commuter belt town of Bicske. Kónya had been convicted of intimidating his juvenile charges to prevent them reporting sexual misdeeds by his superior, János Vásárhelyi. Somehow, report of this trickled through the tightly-controlled Fidesz media ecosystem and stirred a black murmuring among the party base that Orbán’s spin doctors could not quell.
It wasn’t difficult for the magyar newshounds to trace the scent back to Orbán’s patch of the woods. Bicske is just down the road from the prime minister’s hometown of Felcsút and his nearby zebra ranch, while Kónya and his family, which hails from the tiny Transylvanian village of Zabola, are longstanding friends of the Counts of Mikes, whose residence, refurbished several years ago out of the Hungarian public purse, is located in the town, where the count has frequently hosted Orbán’s wife and other senior Fidesz politicians. Vásárhelyi, too, is a well-known face in local party circles, and there is even a video of him campaigning with Orbán in the early 2000s, although here the connection becomes more tenuous, since a populist of Orbán’s calibre has shaken perhaps trillions of hands over his long career.
At this stage in the proceedings, there was no reason to suspect anything more serious than someone in high places using his connections to do an old friend a personal favour. Sleazy business, but not uncommon in this corner of the world. The opposition tried to link the pardons to the 2020 conviction of a senior career civil servant at the Foreign Ministry for similar pedophiliac indecencies, while less politically correct commentators pointed to József Szajer’s Brussels shenanigans (the opposition is not quite so bold to note that all these cases — bar one single, notable exception to whom no one has thus far been able to make anything stick — involve homosexuals). Orbán reacted quickly and decisively, forcing the resignation of the president and justice minister (incidentally the estranged wife of opposition leader Péter Magyar, who used the moment to launch his political career). By that summer’s European Parliament elections, Fidesz appeared to have weathered the storm, winning an outright majority of Hungarian seats despite near-zero GDP growth and persistently high inflation.
The storm flared up again when, on May 27th of last year, police in the capital arrested the director of the city’s sole juvenile correctional facility, Péter Pál Juhász. Juhász had been suspended in March based on a criminal complaint filed by the Budapest Regional Child Protection Office (which — this will be important — was transferred from under the umbrella of the Ministry for Human Resources, formed in 2010 after Fidesz swept back to power through the merger of the educational, cultural, social, labour, health, and local government ministries, to the Interior Ministry in 2022). The press soon got wind of the fact that Juhász, like Vásárhelyi, was a long-time local Fidesz activist and occasional guest speaker at various party-affiliated think tank dos. Then, in September, a certain Gábor Kuslits, former head of the Child Protection Office, told the website Válasz Online that it was an open secret in his agency that „two very high-ranking politicians, one of whom is said to have taken the boys, the other the girls“ had protected Juhász. Budapest is a small town, smaller even than Westminster, digging up each other’s skeletons is the city’s favourite pastime, and it did not take long for theories to form about who these individuals might be.
There is a widely reported rumour — unfortunately fanned by its object’s comically exaggerated denials when the matter was raised in parliament — that the first of these high-ranking politicians is Zsolt Semjén, the deputy prime minister. The substance to this rumour is a set of notes made a private investigator called „Robert R“, which became known to the authorities in the course of an unrelated public investigation into R’s employer, the bailiff György Schadl, whence they were leaked to the opposition MP Ákos Hadházy, who published them on facebook. Hadházy claims that Schadl himself was in the pay of Orbán’s Cabinet Office Minister Antal Rogan, a man about whom I could say a great deal, but will not. R’s notes include a set of official photographs of the finance minister Mihály Varga, the interior minister Sándor Pinter, as well as one of Semjén, beneath the last of which R. scribbled the cryptic formula „several videos of oral sex in a hunting lodge with gypsy boys“ — what could he mean by this? It is a matter of public record that two dvd’s of sexual compromat with the name of „a public figure“ on them were found in a safe in Schadl’s house, although these were ordered destroyed by the public prosecution as irrelevant to the case. The jottings beneath Varga and Pinter’s pictures are less conclusive, with R. connecting the former to a large rural landholding and the latter to the late police captain László Valenta and the former counterintelligence agent László Tasnádi, both of whom participated in Pinter’s old business ventures and the latter of whom served under him as a state secretary at the interior ministry — information that can be found by a simple google search.
While Semjén’s theatrics have captured the public imagination, the opposition media has also fixed its sights on Zoltán Balog, a former Minister of Human Resources and head of the Reformed Church in Hungary. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever accused Balog of sexual misdoings with minors, yet it was still he, as Novák’s „political mentor“, who lobbied for the disgraced former president to pardon Kónya. It was on Balog’s nomination that Vásárhelyi received a state order equivalent to an MBE in 2016, even though his ministry had by this time already launched an internal investigation into his and Juhász’s conduct. And Balog’s ministry had taken an interest in goings-on at the correctional facility as early as 2013 (as had the Soros-funded Hungarian Helsinki Committee, which inspected the facility in 2014 and found nothing untoward), with the matter handled on at least the first of these occasions by Balog’s immediate subordinate, Miklós Soltész. Either this is gross negligence or Balog, either of his own volition or under duress, is running interference for the pedophile blackmail network operating out of his ministry. Who is this Balog and what makes him tick?
Balog has been involved in Fidesz since almost the very first hour, yet the dissident’s past which he has fashioned for himself sits oddly with the contents of his CV. Balog’s career trajectory reads as oddly similar to that of Angela Merkel, that other satanic spawn of communist ecclesiastical politics. Like Merkel (and, come to think of it, Theresa May), Balog’s father was a pastor and committed communist who worked to consolidate the party’s authority over a church that historically functioned as the backbone of national feeling in his country. Like Merkel, Balog travelled to the motherland of the proletariat as a teenager after winning fourth place in „Who Knows More About the Soviet Union?“, a quiz show organised by the state broadcaster. What he got up to there, no one knows — there have been plenty of other strange events in his life, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.
In any event, the young Balog was a man of independent mind. A 2009 hagiography in the liberal weekly Magyar Narancs describes how Balog, after graduating, lived an unusually cosmopolitan life for a young man from rural northeastern Hungary in the 1970s. He attended summer camps organised by a libtarded West German church group, cultivated the friendship of a Dutch couple that happened to be studying in the country, and was briefly expelled from the theological faculty in Debrecen for marrying an East German girl, all of which, so Balog claims, drew the suspicions of the Interior Ministry’s Department III, responsible for state security, which tried to recruit him as (in his words) a „double agent“, although the young theology student nobly rebuffed their advances. An old story.
In spite of this juvenile obstreperousness, Balog came to the attention of Károly Tóth, the well-connected primate of the Reformed Church’s Danubian province and an enthusiastic promoter of ecumenical diplomacy within the Soviet Bloc (and, so a persistent rumour within the church had it, a KGB agent), who used his rolodex to furnish a place for the young Balog at the theological faculties at the universities of East Berlin and Wittenberg. Balog would return to Germany in 1987, this time to the West to study in Tübingen — not altogether unusual for a theologian, a group which at that time enjoyed privileged access to foreign travel. In 1989 he returned to Hungary to minister to the large influx of East Germans passing through the country’s porous borders en route to the West, perhaps as a selfless act of Christian charity, although the information that he would have been privy to would have been doubtless of interest to an intelligence agency. It was around this time that the young pastor entered the Fidesz fold.
Balog’s globetrotting came at a moment when the Hungarian and East German security services, perhaps inspired by the Soviet example, were actively exploring the protestant churches’ potential as a source of foreign intelligence. According to Réka Földváryné Kiss, a church historian and Fidesz-aligned chairman of Hungary’s National Memory Commission:
„Already in 1955, [Károly Tóth] had been recruited by the state security services, when he was still a theology student, and after 1956 he was among the first agents to be reactivated by Kádár’s political police. He wrote seriously incriminating reports against his own professor and the dean of the faculty, László Pap — it’s a wonder that he wasn’t hauled before a court for this. Yet Károly Tóth was a talented, multilingual church diplomat whose career was on a steep upward trajectory. This occurred precisely in the 1960s and 70s, when the Cold War was mellowing and, within the Soviet Bloc, international ecclesiastical relations became an area of priority for Hungarian state security. Simultaneously, the West also took an interest in bolstering its ties beyond the iron curtain, thus revving up its own church diplomacy with the East. In this field, the outstandingly able Tóth enjoyed a brilliant career. Not only as a representative of Soviet interests at the Christian Peace Conference, but also as a leader of the World Council of Churches and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the West saw him as a significant negotiating partner — all while he closely coordinated his activities with state security. Unfortunately, the documents on his activities during his time as bishop are no longer available. [this is not an uncommon formulation for Ms. Földváryné Kiss — fp]“
The bizarre ideological fusion between the Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet intelligence that came about in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, and whose end product is Mr. Putin and his Woke Armed Forces Cathedral, had its ugly stepsisters elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Homo sovieticus found refuge in the church, and it was this unholy alliance of mitre and mafia that ruled Europe for the better part of three decades. Society overall may have secularised, but a vanguard party still carried the 20th century’s flame of egalitarian universalism, national self-determination, communitarian ontology, and the sense of an ending down from the highest heights. For nearly two decades, Europe groaned under this double yoke of Patriarch Kirill’s Tory mates and the daughter of the GDR’s leading theologian — Balog was the Hungarian sales representative of this continent-scale multilevel marketing scam. It was under Balog’s spiritual guidance that Orbán went over to Calvinism — a fact significant in that it was not, as it is so often retroactively interpreted, a nationalist gesture, but a quiet, personal conversion mediated by a liberal theologian who enjoys books with titles like „The Church as Dialogue“. A German in sheep’s clothing.
Balog may not be a spook himself („unfortunately the documents are no longer available“), but he could not have attained the positions he did in the 1980s without the help of the men in dark glasses behind the curtain. As a foreign student at a politically relevant faculty, the Stasi almost certainly assembled a substantial dossier on him, which may or may not be gathering dust in a basement in Pullach. In any case, as has already been noted, there are plenty of odd chapters in his biography that might cause someone somewhere to invite him into their office for a brief chat, bid him sit down, and then wordlessly push some photocopies across the desk. Quiet habermasian pastors don’t get involved with pedophile blackmail rings of their own volition. But let’s leave the matter for now.
The persistence of the old regime is a question that has hung over Hungarian politics for three and a half decades now, nearly as long as the „old regime“ actually existed. The Interior Ministry’s legendary „magnetic tapes“ containing the records of the state intelligence services have never been deciphered; despite recurrent pledges by governments left and right, the parliament has consistently voted against releasing the apocryphal list of Department III’s agents and informers into the public domain. Such rejection on principle is all the most striking given that the compilation of such a list might not even be possible: according to Csaba Ilkei, a longtime employee of the Historical Archives of the State Security Services and a former journalist for the communist-run state television, 17-18,000 cartons of operational data disappeared during the Interior Ministry’s dissolution of Department III and the transfer of its responsibilities (and much of its personnel) to the new National Security Office, while in the meantime another 12,493 of the Department’s personnel files can no longer be accounted for.
The National Security Office (renamed the Constitutional Protection Office by the Orbán government in 2010 after the equivalent German agency; I am just going to call it the Verfassungsschutz for simplicity’s sake) has maintained an unusual degree of autonomy in a system where personnel is very much policy. Its senior officials are promoted from within its own ranks and entrusted with responsibility at a young age. The office has frequently clashed with the more politicised agencies, scoring its most spectacular coup in 2018 when it raided the Information Office, the foreign intelligence service under the direct authority of the Prime Minister’s Office. In May 2022, a month after Orbán secured his reelection, the agency was brought under the supervision of the Cabinet Office under Antal Rogán — a blow to Sándor Pinter, Rogán’s longstanding rival, under whose ministerial jurisdiction the Verfassungsschutz had stood since Orbán’s return to government in 2010. This is when things started to fall apart.
A word should be said about Sándor Pinter, the great survivor of Hungarian politics. Pinter, a septuagenarian career policeman with no party membership, has served as Interior Minister in every single Orbán government since 1998, a record unmatched by any of Orbán’s fellow travellers. Pinter, whose police career began in the early 1970s, transparently represents the accommodation between the old regime and Orbán’s new oligarchy. Unlike the Fidesz old guard, Pinter has no pretensions to a dissident past; there are no grand speeches recorded in his name; no samizdat essays on István Bibó or civil society in Poland; no lively debates in the warm halls of the Mentesi Street Collegium or witty banter at Roger Scruton symposia, just good, honest head-cracking. Though convivial with the government, he has been careful to lay down an independent line, and has publicly pushed back against Orbán over the anti-Soros campaign in the past.
For many years, Pinter’s authority rested on three pillars, of which today only two still stand. The first is his private security empire, currently run by his old comrade László Tasnádi, the Department III hand who was on duty at the now legendary demonstration in March 1989 where Viktor Orbán launched his political career, and whose greatest hit was procuring the Israeli Pegasus software for the Hungarian security services. The second is the Counterterrorism Office, which handles the private security of the government’s members and is run by János Hajdú, a counterterrorism professional from the Kádár era and another longstanding associate of Pinter. Finally, after Rogán’s takeover of the Verfassungsschutz, Pinter’s mates Károly Papp and József Kovács (the latter of whom reorganised Hungary’s mysterious military intelligence services in the mid-2010s) stayed behind in senior positions in a move widely perceived as a check on Rogán’s influence; this detente lasted until March 2024, when Orbán dismissed both.
Increasingly marginalised by Rogán at court, Pinter has been quietly moving against Orbán for the better part of a year now. It was Pinter who caused the prime minister to lose face among his hardline supporters last summer when he ordered the Budapest police to let the city’s illegal pride parade proceed as planned, kettling right-wing counterprotestors on a narrow bridge further down the Danube (reader, I was there). An issue as sensitive as the arrests at Juhász’s institute could hardly have taken place without the Interior Minister’s knowledge, and Pinter has seized the initiative in leading the investigation, even going so far as to offer his registration if police errors are discovered (Pinter is 77 years old and it is widely anticipated that Orbán will dismiss him after the election). In the event of a contested election with massive street protests, it will fall to Pinter’s policemen to enforce order and ensure Orbán and his ministers’ personal security.
What is Pinter’s endgame? Pinter represents the old Kádár-era security oligarchy whose ambitions do not stretch beyond perpetuating their fortunes and their ultimate veto over Hungarian politics, and whose interests are thus indelibly linked to the integrity and survival of the Hungarian state. A portrait of the Interior Minister in the French spook journal Intelligence Online last Fall suggested both he and Rogán enjoyed the confidence of Western intelligence agencies and their own men because they are perceived as trusted brokers who, though hardly committed atlanticists, nevertheless view the Russians as the greatest threat facing Hungary. Whether this still applies to the heavily compromised Rogán or his office is anyone’s guess. Orbán has opened the door as far as he could for Moscow, while the German deep state’s drive to go all-in on decoupling from Russia has exhausted Berlin’s patience with Budapest. An old socialist apparatchik like Pinter would be inclined by his socialisation to cut a deal with Big Zeitenwende like the Romanians and Bulgarians have done; Orbán, whose power increasingly rests on the pro-Russian factions of German industry, may no longer be able to do so. But this is just speculation, and there may be other motives.
What is certain is that Pinter and the Kádár-era security oligarchs behind him are setting the pace of events, and the outcome of April’s election will depend on Orbán’s will or ability to placate either them or whatever higher power they may be acting on behalf of. So far, Orbán and Rogan seem confident of victory and have doubled down, briefing the papers that a post-election shakeup at the Interior Ministry is in the works. The next few months will show who holds the cards. What they will not bring is justice.