Long years of SZDSZ lobbying reached its goal, when a medium was re-launched with US taxpayers' money under the name "Free Europe". The portal's bias is well illustrated by the fact that one of the founding members is a former journalist of the post-communist MSZP, László Botka's advisor is their permanent expert, and several journalists who used to work for the Soros media also referred to it.
In the following, we will talk about the dollar medium called Szabad Európa, although the Hungarian-language radio station under this name, which played a major social role before the regime change, was closed for good in 1993 after forty-two years of operation, but was relaunched as an internet site in 2020, but now with a total left-wing bias. .
The main advocate of the "revival" was Miklós Haraszti, one of the key figures of the defunct SZDSZ, who asked the United States in the Washington Post in 2012 to restart the classic medium. In addition, Haraszti had two left-liberal big guns, the SZDSZ sympathizer at the time of the regime change, the American ambassador, Mark Palmer, and Charles Gati, who believed that the replacement of the Orbán government was also conceivable through civil war, by his side at the time of the initiative. As the three of them wrote more than a decade ago:
with the fall of Western-style plural democracy in Hungary, it is time for the United States to restart Radio Free Europe broadcasting in Hungarian.
The needs of the liberal intelligentsia were finally met by 2020 in the USA. Two years ago, in September, the medium called Free Europe was launched, now in an online edition. Apart from the publication of archival audio recordings, there is not much on the site that reminds us of the old days. In fact, one of the founding members of the paper is György Kerényi, who was a journalist for the post-communist party, MSZP, a few years earlier. During László Kerényi Botka's candidacy, he worked for the MSZP, then he went to the town hall in Szeged, as if following his boss's retirement at the end of 2017.
However, Kerényi is not the only actor close to Botka at szbateuropa.hu.
A regular expert is former SZDSZ chief of staff and advisor to the mayor of Szeged, Bálint Ruff. It is an interesting episode that, according to press reports, Péter Márki-Zay, a consultant who commented on the left-wing primary election in podcasts on the portal, applied for a job with him after his victory in October last year, but the failed prime ministerial candidate did not ask for his services. In addition, it is also noteworthy that several employees of the portal, which pretends to be independent, previously worked for a medium financed by György Soros.
The portal, which operates under the name Free Europe, is maintained with funds from the American budget. According to their own admission, one of the guarantees of their independence is the legislation defining the activities of USAGM, the agency that unites American media operating abroad, based on this, although the word "Europe" is in their name, they actually see themselves as American media.
"The costs of operation are provided by the United States Congress through the independent body USAGM"
- they write, and the abbreviation USAGM is translated as "United States Agency for Global Media".
The website actually belongs to a "trade representation" named: RFE/RL Inc. Hungarian Direct Trade Representation. The exact budget of the paper is not known, but it is financed entirely from American taxpayers' money, because there are no advertisements on the portal. In 2019, press reports talked about budget plans of 750,000 dollars for the Hungarian medium. The budget of the American global agency, which also maintains sbatteuropa.hu, is 810 million dollars this year, i.e. approximately 35 billion forints.
One of the special moments of the campaign was when szabadeuropa.hu published a correction regarding Tímea Szabó last November: "in our article on szabadeuropa.hu titled >>Gergely Karácsony resigned from the prime ministership after a serious internal dispute<< published on October 28, 2021, it was untrue we claimed that Tímea Szabó called on Gergely Karácsony during a hearing to take responsibility for the botched campaign and to step back from the prime ministerial candidacy."
In fact, the circumstances of Karácsony's withdrawal are still as unclear as the circle of financiers of the dollar left. It is also unclear who spent hundreds of millions of forints on the Budapest mayor's campaign.
Apart from the stumble regarding Tímea Szabó, the dollar medium functioned as a rallying ground for the opposition throughout the campaign, and launched a highly one-sided series of evaluations of the Orbán government. A few days before the voting, Péter Márki-Zay gave a "big campaign closing interview" to the portal, and then a few weeks later he summarized his election experience with them as well.
It has now become clear that Márki-Zay's Meninki Magyarországa Mozgalom (MMM) received more than HUF 1.8 billion from America through the organization Action for Democracy. In addition, Action for Democracy, led by Dávid Korányi, the former Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and the former advisor to Mayor Gergely Karácsony, also provided HUF 1 billion in support to the publisher of the fake news portal Ezalényeg, a dollar-denominated media outlet near DK. In the end, the above-mentioned sums largely went to the DatAdat group marked by the name of Gordon Bajnai. As is well known, DatAdat actually complicated the left's entire election campaign. Hungary's sovereignty may have been damaged due to American influence, and the incident is also being investigated by the national security services.
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