VSquare: Orbán ordered intelligence services to compile blacklist of foreign-funded NGOs and media

Shortly before his speech on 15 March, Viktor Orbán ordered the National Information Centre (NIC) to prepare a report and a list of NGOs and press products which have received foreign funding in the past ten years, the investigative portal VSquare reported in its newsletter. This was the speech in which Orbán compared opposition politicians, NGOs, journalists working in the independent press journalists and judges who demanded a restoration of the judiciary's independence to "bugs which have made it through winter". According to Fidesz's narrative, they are all funded from abroad and as such, they serve foreign interests and present a threat to the country's sovereignty.

In his speech, the PM said: "After today's festive gathering comes the Easter clean-up: the bugs have made it through winter. We are going to dismantle the financial machine that has been using corrupt dollars to 'buy' politicians, judges, journalists, bogus NGOs and political activists. We are going to eliminate the entire shadow army. They are our modern-day lackeys, the minions of Brussels, who are pushing the empire's cart against their own country, in exchange for money."

The National Information Centre is a sort of umbrella organisation for the intelligence services, which receives information from all the other services and writes reports for the Prime Minister and his national security staff. According to the information received by VSquare, Orbán's order only applies to human rights and advocacy groups and independent media outlets that received financial support from Europe or the U.S. in the past ten years. The order given to the NIC is, of course, not applicable to Chinese NGOs registered in Hungary and linked to Beijing’s powerful United Front and the Ministry of State Security, nor to organizations receiving money from Russian proxies.

The first time Orbán spoke about the big pre-Easter cleanup, which he also referred to in his speech on 15 March, was in his annual State of the Nation address on 22 February. "We can finish off the Budapest branch of the empire by Easter," he said then. According to the sources of VSquare's Szabolcs Panyi, it was after this that he issued the order for the blacklisting. This was preceded by the Prime Minister's speech given at the off-site meeting of the Fidesz-KDNP parliamentary group, where he said that organisations receiving US funding should be "banned" from Hungary.

Shortly afterwards, Orbán even appointed a special government commissioner to investigate those in Hungary who had received support from USAID. András László, Fidesz MEP and a former paid propagandist at Megafon, immediately got to work: he met with Tamás Lánczi, President of the Sovereignty Protection Office, which was set up to harass NGOs and the independent press critical of the government, and then travelled to the US to gather information on exactly which Hungarian organisations had received funding from USAID.

VSquare notes that this is the first confirmed instance of the intelligence services collecting or processing information on Hungarian NGOs and media organisations on a massive scale under political orders. "While the true purpose of creating such a report and list using national security agency methods remains unclear, the possible outcomes range from declassifying or leaking the report to fuel a naming-and-shaming propaganda campaign by government-controlled media and the Sovereignty Protection Office to using it as the basis for prosecution, tax investigations, or new discriminatory laws imposing fines", VSquare writes. Neither the government nor the National Information Centre responded to the investigative journal's questions.