Comments made about the Hungarian right-wing political magazine and new site Mandiner by Prime Minister Péter Magyar of Hungary during a spat with Fidesz MP Balázs Orbán at a parliamentary session on Monday, 15 June have caused quite a bit of controversy in the Hungarian press.
‘I understand that it hurts you that the joke magazine called Mandiner will become state property, and we will be its publisher. We will be determining the content that it will publish,’ PM Magyar has declared in the National Assembly of Hungary.
The context here is interesting. MP Orbán (no relation to former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán) is currently still the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) foundation, the current owner of Mandiner.
However, the new constitutional amendment passed by the Tisza supermajority earlier this week does away with the special so-called KEKVA (közfeladatot ellátó közérdekű vagyonkezelő alapítvány; asset management foundation providing public service) foundations created by the Fidesz–KDNP government back in 2021.
According to the rules set by the new relevant Tisza amendment, state assets transferred to the foundations after the 2021 KEKVA law must now be returned to the state. Critics of Former PM Orbán’s government allege that they used the KEKVA organizations as a means to transfer state assets to private use.
However, Mandiner does not fit neatly in the category of a state asset transferred to a foundation.
The news site Mandiner.hu was launched in 2009, under the ownership of Reakció Kiadó Kft, the media company of the site’s first editor-in-chief Ákos Gergely Balogh. It is now a prominent outlet consistently bringing in over 10 million unique visitors per month.
It has had multiple owners over the years, including the newly founded Mandiner Press Kft in 2017, owned by Hungarian businessman András Tombor. The weekly print magazine version of the publication was started in September 2019.
Mandiner became a property of the MCC foundation as recently as late 2024, from its most recent private owner, Mediaworks Hungary Kft. Thus, even under the amendment passed by the Tisza supermajority, PM Magyar’s claim of state ownership of Mandiner is questionable. The amendment states that ‘The state can only reclaim property from the foundations that was granted to them by the state.’
Conservative columnist Zsolt Bayer likened PM Magyar’s expressed ambitions of controlling Mandiner to the state media control and forced nationalization of property under the communist regime in Hungary in the 20th century.
Hence, it is unclear if PM Magyar’s government is actually intending to bring Mandiner under state ownership, and have his Tisza Party, or people associated with Tisza, assume editorial control over the outlet; or if he just used it as a rhetorical device in a debate against MP Balázs Orbán.
For instance, previously, he has vowed to suspend the public media news programming on the first day he takes office over its bias for PM Orbán’s Fidesz Party, but he never followed through. Instead, he opted for a systematic overhaul of Hungarian public media through legislation.
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