Hungary’s opposition-supporting newspaper Magyar Nemzet is to close as of Wednesday after 80 years in print, the publisher said in a statement cited by the news website Hvg.hu.

Its sister radio station Lánchíd Rádió, which belongs to the same media group, is also to shut while the Hír TV news channel will implement significant costs cuts, according to the online news website index.hu.

The closures follow the landslide election victory of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Sunday’s general election. The media companies are controlled by oligarch Lajos Simiscka — former best-friend-turned-nemesis of the prime minister. Simiscka had poured a lot of resources into supporting the far-right Jobbik opposition party in the election campaign. But the party’s poor showing and Orbán’s landslide win had prompted speculation that Simicska would cut his losses and sell his media holding.

The publisher’s statement cited financial problems as the reason for the shutdown. Following the quarrel between Orbán and Simicska, state advertisements in media owned by the tycoon disappeared and subscriptions dropped rapidly, resulting in significant losses according to the Budapest Business Journal. </s> BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian broadsheet daily Magyar Nemzet, one of two opposition daily newspapers, will close its operations from Wednesday after 80 years in print, the publisher said in a statement cited by news website Index.hu on Tuesday.

Magyar Nemzet is owned by tycoon Lajos Simicska, once an ally of right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban who fell out with him and became one of his staunchest opponents in the election campaign. Orban won Sunday's election by a landslide.

The publisher will also shut down Lanchid Radio, a sister radio station. The group's flagship company, news television Hir TV, will undergo changes, the statement said. </s> Lajos Simicska, a former ally of Prime Minister Viktor Orban who turned into a major supporter of the opposition, is shrinking his media empire after the incumbent won an overwhelming election victory Sunday.

Magyar Nemzet, a national daily newspaper, will publish its last edition on Wednesday, Magdolna Maj, who works on sales, said by phone on Tuesday in Budapest after a newsroom meeting. Lanchid radio, which belongs to the same media group, will shut down at midnight Tuesday, while HirTV, a 24-hour news network, will stay on air but will cut jobs, 444.hu news website reported, without citing anyone. Staff at Heti Valasz weekly will be given an opportunity to find a new investor, the news website said.

Orban, who won a third consecutive parliamentary supermajority, has used the past eight years to extend his influence over the media as part of an unprecedented centralization of power over European Union objections. Steps included turning public media into a government propaganda organ and pushing his allies to buy up key private media outlets. Hungary plunged to 71st place on the World Press Freedom Index last year, from 23rd when Orban returned to power in 2010.

Simicska was a former ally of Orban until a public falling-out with the prime minister in 2015, which pushed him to turn a formerly pro-government media empire into an opposition-backer. His outlets were a source of numerous reports alleging widespread government corruption. </s> Former prime minister Stephen Harper is being criticized for congratulating Hungary's Viktor Orbán on his election victory, despite the concerns of international observers who say the campaign was tainted by hostile anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Harper tweeted his congratulations to Orbán Monday evening after the Hungarian prime minister and his Fidesz party cruised to a third consecutive mandate, securing a two-thirds majority in Sunday's vote.

Harper made the comments in his role as chairman of the International Democrat Union, an alliance of more than 80 centre-right parties from around the world which includes the Conservative Party of Canada.

Observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have expressed concerns about the Hungarian election campaign, saying that political debate was stifled by "intimidating and xenophobic rhetoric, media bias and opaque campaign financing."

Throughout the campaign, Orbán railed against the United Nations, the European Union, Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros and the civic groups he funds, accusing them of plotting to turn Hungary into an "immigrant country" and erase its Christian identity.

"I don't think [Harper] has much of an idea of what's going on in Hungary," said Robert Austin, an associate professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and an expert on the politics and history of Central Europe.

"That was true when he was in power. Canada was always noticeably silent about some of the issues that other states had raised about shortcomings in Hungarian democracy."

Since coming to power in 2010, Austin said, Orbán has upended Hungary's democracy, pursuing divisive and anti-liberal policies as part of his plan to create a "Hungary for the Hungarians."

Along with seizing on the 2015 refugee crisis as an opportunity to whip up latent anti-migrant sentiment, he said, Orbán has pushed judicial appointments that line up with his political views and clamped down on media outlets that he deemed unfriendly to his government.

Last year, Orbán also moved to shut down the Central European University in Budapest. Led by former Liberal Party of Canada leader Michael Ignatieff, the school is largely funded by its founder, George Soros — someone the ruling Fidesz party considers an ideological enemy.

"The prime minister of Hungary has no time for democracy," Austin said. "He shut the door on that a long time ago. He's building something totally different."

Rachel Curran, Harper's former policy director and now a senior associate at Harper and Associates, said Harper's tweet should not be seen as making any sort of comment on Orbán or his policies.

"He's not offering his views or opinions on Mr. Orbán's government or his party," she said. "He is in his capacity as chair of the IDU congratulating him on his political success, which in its instance has included a massive democratic mandate from Hungarians."

Congratulatory messages are sent out regularly to IDU member parties that win election, Curran said, adding that the practice started long before Harper's appointment as the alliance's chair.

Curran also rejected the suggestion that Harper could have done anything apart from offer the customary congratulations to Orbán, adding that it would be "totally inappropriate" for him to send a political message to a member party of the IDU.

"The chair of the IDU isn't in the position of pronouncing on the particular practices or the particular election tactics of member parties," she said. "That's just not the role."

Still, many on Twitter criticized Harper for congratulating Orbán, citing the Hungarian leader's anti-democratic policies.

In response to Orbán's election, a spokesperson for the Minister of Foreign Affairs said Canada remains committed to fostering open, inclusive and democratic societies.

"As a NATO ally and EU member state, Hungary must ensure the protection of human and democratic rights — including the rights of a free press and civil society," Adam Austen said.

"Our government has made its concerns clear, including about the actions taken against the Central European University. This is an issue that the Minister has raised directly with her Hungarian counterpart.‎" </s> BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungarian lawmakers re-elected President Janos Ader to his largely ceremonial post on Monday, ensuring another five-year term for a supporter of populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government.

Ader, nominated by Orban’s governing Fidesz party, defeated Laszlo Majtenyi, a former ombudsman for data protection nominated by the left-wing opposition. Ader won by 131 votes to 39, with 29 abstentions.

A second round was needed because Ader fell two votes short of the 133 votes needed for a two-thirds majority in the first round. Only a simple majority was needed to win in round two.

The 57-year-old Ader is a former parliamentary speaker and member of the European Parliament. He became president in May 2012, after the departure of former Olympic fencing champion Pal Schmitt, who resigned after 20 months in office because of a plagiarism scandal.

Ader has often spoken out on issues related to environmental protection and ensuring the global water supply.

In March last year he clashed with the government over legislation which would have shielded from scrutiny hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds used by foundations set up the National Bank of Hungary. Critics accused the central bank, headed Gyorgy Matolcsy, of using the foundations to distribute money to friends and supporters and of splurging on real estate deals and other non-banknig activities. Ader sent the legislation for review to the Constitutional Court, which later struck down the legislation..

“He could have made his voice heard more often and noted his criticism in symbolic terms, but he could hardly block legislation,” said Csaba Toth, strategic director of the Republikon Institute think tank. “After Schmitt, he played a dignified role.”

The 66-year-old Majtenyi, who heads the Eotvos Karoly Institute, a liberal think tank, was branded by Fidesz as “serving foreign interests” because his institute receives funding from Open Society Foundations founded by Hungarian-born U.S. billionaire George Soros.

The government has accused Soros and numerous non-governmental organizations he supports — including corruption watchdog Transparency International and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights advocate — of trying to unduly influence Hungarian politics. Legislation targeting those and similar groups is expected to be debated in parliament within weeks.

Majtenyi criticized a wide range of Orban’s policies, including the educational, press and cultural freedoms “stolen” by Orban’s seven-year government, as well as the nationalization of the funds once belonging to private pension schemes.

“Corruption has crushed the state,” Majtenyi told lawmakers. “We would like a free and solidary Hungary. My ideal is the smallest possible state and the most possible solidarity.”

Majtenyi jokingly said he could ask parties whose leaders received support from Soros to vote for him, since Orban briefly studied at Oxford University in 1989 thanks to a Soros-backed scholarship.

Hungary’s Basic Law, or Constitution, alllows the president to serve for a maximum of two terms.

Orban will seek to win his fourth four-year term as prime minister in April 2018. </s> BUDAPEST — Viktor Orbán’s critics are bracing for another tough four years.

Having secured a third straight term with a landslide election win, the Hungarian prime minister is arguably more powerful at home than any other head of government in the European Union. His Fidesz party is set to take two-thirds of seats in parliament, enough to change the constitution and pass bills without consulting the small and fragmented opposition. Orbán’s allies also control powerful companies and much of the media.

For his supporters, Orbán symbolizes stability and national pride. For his opponents, he has put Hungary on the road to autocracy and re-introduced undemocratic practices last seen under communism, such as de facto censorship in state media.

Now he has a new mandate, analysts and opponents of the prime minister expect him to take steps to tighten his grip on power still further. Remarks by Orbán and his officials also suggest that’s what he has in mind.

“The nature of this regime is that they can’t stop when there are still institutions they don’t control,” said Péter Krekó, director of the Budapest-based Political Capital think tank and consultancy. He said the government could turn its attention to the judiciary, remaining independent media, and parts of the economy like retail chains.

NGOs are another likely target. Even on election day, government officials were already talking about planned moves against civil society.

Organizations that meddle in politics “should be shut down,” government spokesman Zoltán Kovács told news portal Index late Sunday.

Ahead of the election, the government promised that if re-elected, it would pursue a crackdown on NGOs through its “Stop Soros” legal package, named for the liberal American-Hungarian financier and philanthropist George Soros, whom Orbán regularly depicts as a threat to Hungarian society. The package would make it in effect impossible for some civil society organizations to continue working in Hungary.

“The last decades have shown the importance and merit of our work,” the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, one of the NGOs regularly criticized by the government, said in a statement to POLITICO. “This is even more so now, when an unscrupulous government has gained effectively unlimited power to change the constitution, further dismantle the rule of law and arbitrarily restrict human rights.”

Hungarian anti-Orbán activists often point to seemingly small developments as signs of who will be targeted on a larger scale: a police search at the home of a high school-age protester, journalists surrounded by police for no legal reason, or NGO leaders secretly taped.

There have also been signs that Orbán hopes to take control of the few remaining large media outlets in Hungary not already under his influence. In February, magazine Heti Válasz reported that Fidesz hopes to target the independent German-owned RTL television channel and the popular liberal-leaning online portal Index, which is owned by Orbán’s former best friend-turned-nemesis Lajos Simicska.

RTL is the only truly independent television channel that reaches a large segment of the population, while Index is one of the only mainstream outlets still to engage in investigative reporting.

Orbán has publicly talked of his wish to see changes in the media market.

“Most of a country’s media systems should be in national hands,” he said in a December television interview. “And, well, I don’t want to conceal the fact that I would like to achieve a bit more than that.”

The prime minister’s electoral success not only gives him a strong legal and political mandate to implement change he wants. It has also raised questions about the future of his old friend Simicska’s media holdings.

Besides Index, Simicska controls a major print daily and popular television station. The oligarch, who had a falling-out with Orbán a few years ago, poured a lot of resources into supporting the far-right Jobbik opposition party in the election campaign. The party’s poor showing and Orbán’s landslide win could prompt Simicska to cut his losses and sell his media holding — which would then likely fall into the hands of allies of the prime minister.

Fidesz is also likely to turn its attention to members of the judiciary. Some ruling party politicians have referred to sitting judges as “communists.”

Orbán has already implemented some judicial reforms which resulted in EU legal action under the bloc’s infringement proceedings, ultimately leading to some concessions from Budapest.

But despite the government’s changes and the installation of Tünde Handó — the wife of a Fidesz MEP — as head of the powerful National Judiciary Office, many judges have so far resisted growing government pressure and continued to issue independent decisions.

On the foreign policy front, Orbán is set to maintain his controversially close relationship with the Kremlin. Russian company Rosatom is carrying out a major expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant, a project that the Hungarian government will pay for using primarily a €10 billion loan from Russia.

Hungary’s election campaign showed the deep influence of Russian propaganda in the country, with both Fidesz and state-controlled outlets running stories and narratives directly borrowed from Kremlin-directed outlets.

But Orbán is a shrewd politician who knows that his relationship with the European People’s Party, and especially the German members of the pan-European center-right grouping, is shielding him from potential sanctions and the threat of losing EU funds. However, this hasn’t stopped him from growing closer to Europe’s far right, spending time with the likes of Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Brothers of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

Some observers have noted that Orbán at times appears bored with Hungarian politics, and aspires to take on a role as a leader of a nationalist European movement. During the election campaign, most of Orbán’s official campaign videos were posted online with English subtitles.

He has already received an endorsement from Steve Bannon, the U.S. far-right firebrand who served as Donald Trump’s campaign chief and White House adviser. Orbán is “the most significant guy on the scene right now,” Bannon declared last month. </s> The philanthropic foundation funded by the billionaire George Soros is to close its offices in Hungary, saying it can’t protect its own staff from the country’s government.

Open Society Foundations will move its international operations in Budapest to Berlin in Germany, according to a press release Tuesday.

“The government of Hungary has denigrated and misrepresented our work and repressed civil society for the sake of political gain, using tactics unprecedented in the history of the European Union,” said Patrick Gaspard, president of the Open Society Foundations.

The Hungarian government, led by the recently re-elected Viktor Orban, won a strong mandate by campaigning on the issue of migration, which included the promise of a “stop Soros” package.

Orban launched a nationwide television and billboard advertising campaign in July accusing Soros of devising Europe’s refugee crisis. Critics of Orban’s drive to condemn the 87-year-old investor said posters were not dissimilar to the anti-Semitic imagery of the 1930s, which portrayed Jews as political manipulators. </s> Orbán to form cabinet with ‘mostly new people’

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said he plans to form his cabinet "with mostly new people" and "with new structures," speaking at an international press conference in the Hungarian Parliament building on Tuesday, national news agency MTI reported.

Orbán said he had a mandate from the heads of ruling party Fidesz, which won a sweeping victory in general elections on Sunday, to start the work of forming a government, which could take 3-4 weeks, MTI reported.

Voters had showed their support for Hungarian sovereignty in Sundayʼs election, Orbán asserted. Hungarians decided that only they can determine with whom they want to live in Hungary, and "that decision binds us," he added.

Hungary is a nation that wants a strong Europe of strong member states, Orbán said. Hungaryʼs government must support a Europe of nations, not a "united states of Europe," he added.

Asked to name some of the new cabinetʼs key areas of policy, the prime minister said demographics would be a priority.

Orbán said he was a "member of the Matolcsy school of economics," referring to György Matolcsy, the former economy minister and current governor of the National Bank of Hungary (MNB). He added that the tenets of this school hold that the stateʼs finances must be in order and that state debt must decline.

Orbán revealed that European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had congratulated him on the election win by telephone, and that he had invited Juncker to visit Hungary, a visit expected to take place in one or two weeks.

The prime minister declined to comment on the announcements on Tuesday that daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet would stop publishing and Lánchíd Rádió would stop broadcasting because of financing problems. He said he does not deal with business matters, adding that owners decide the fate of privately owned media.

Responding to a question on the oppositionʼs election success in the capital, Orbán conceded that "we have more work to do in Budapest."

Asked about criticisms by election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe suggesting that the opposition partiesʼ ability to compete on a level playing field in the general elections had been undermined by the overlap between state and ruling party resources, the Fidesz leader said the OSCE had issued a "political opinion" about the elections.

Asked about the fairness of Hungaryʼs electoral system, the prime minister said Fideszʼs victory on Sunday would have counted as a "landslide" in the British system, adding that the government would strive to serve the "three-thirds majority." </s> Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his populist Fidesz party easily swept to victory on Sunday in a parliamentary election that saw the highest turnout of voters in more than a decade.

It will be the third successive term for Orbán, who is the longest-serving prime minister in post-communist Hungary; it's the 54-year-old's fourth term overall. His party is projected to regain its two-thirds majority in the 199-seat parliament.

"We scored a decisive victory," Orbán told his supporters. "We have received an opportunity, created an opportunity to be able to defend Hungary."

Budapest voter Katalin Andrássy said she cast her ballot for Fidesz because she believed the right-wing party and its leader offer Hungary the best protection against Muslim migrants and pressure from Brussels — the main issues Orbán campaigned on.

"I voted for stability and the process that is already underway, and I would like for this process to continue positively with the team that has managed to do positive things," she said.

Fidesz' formerly far-right rival, Jobbik, came in a distant second. Its chairman, Gábor Vona, told reporters at a late night news conference that he was resigning. "We would have liked for this high turnout to yield a different result, but the people decided this way," he said.

Some Hungarian analysts had predicted the high turnout of voters would benefit the opposition. Those candidates did appear do better in bigger cities like Budapest, but Fidesz appeared to dominate races in the rest of the country.

Many polling stations around Hungary remained open for several hours after the 7 p.m. CEST closing time to accommodate voters standing in long lines.

The prime minister and his party also likely benefited from the mail-in ballots of 378,000 of new voters who are ethnically Hungarian, but live abroad. Critics say the current government actively recruited and provided them with citizenship and also allowed them to mail in their votes, which citizens who move abroad from Hungary are not allowed to do.

International observers from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) have scheduled a press conference on Monday to talk about some of their findings on the Hungarian elections.

Some right-wing conservatives in Hungary who used to support Fidesz have soured on Orbán. One such supporter-turned-critic is Péter Márki-Zay, an independent mayor who two months ago beat the Fidesz candidate in the party's southern stronghold of Hódmezővásárhely.

Orbán "created a system where he practically cannot be removed from power," Márki-Zay said. "As in every authoritarian leader, you know, after time, he just surrounded himself with people who supported him and didn't dare to criticize him. So he lost touch with reality."

That's not how the prime minister sees it. "Our homeland, Hungary is not yet where we would like it to be," he told supporters on Sunday night. "But it has set out on the way it has chosen for itself. We'll go all the way on this road together."

The sweeping election results will likely embolden the prime minister in his battles with the EU leadership over its attempts to better integrate the 28-country bloc, as well as any plans it has regarding refugees.

Hungarian government spokesman Zoltán Kovács told NPR the new government also plans to exert more control over civil society. Earlier this year, the cabinet submitted draft measures to the Hungarian parliament aimed at banning NGOs deemed a security risk or that support immigration, while also imposing a 25 percent tax on foreign donations to those groups who help migrants.

"Because of the election campaign ... there was no time actually to go through the proposal," Kovács said. "But that's going to be the first issue, the first topic on which the new parliament" votes.
Hungarian businessman Lajos Simicska shuts down daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet after 80 years in print, and Lánchíd Rádió in response to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán winning a third consecutive parliamentary supermajority. Simicska was a former supporter of Orbán until he fell out with the Prime Minister in 2015.