Hungary’s Orbán-style media takeover playbook lands in Serbia before elections

The end of Viktor Orbán’s system of patronage is nigh. Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar spent the summer overhauling the presidency, the prosecution service and the heads of state broadcasting, while prying open the network of shell companies and captive funds built up over 16 years. Europe has looked on with relief as a captured state is returning to its citizens. But in the wake of that dismantling a harder question that reaches beyond Hungary’s borders comes into view. Orbán’s networks and capital were never purely domestic, the clearest export being the concentration of media ownership through private intermediaries that enable and consolidate authoritarian models. As the system is pulled apart at the centre, the afterlife of these networks elsewhere in the region demands attention too, especially with consequential elections on the horizon. Hungarian money in Serbia? Consider the following developments that lately converged. Hungarian state money has spent years financing media acquisitions across Europe. A fund with a long record in that trade has just taken Serbia’s last independent broadcasters. It has done so in an unusual rush, weeks before a Serbian election. Gaps in the public record and undisclosed funding make these, when taken together, difficult to ignore. Hungarian capital has been moving into the European media ecosystem for years. In 2022, Portuguese financier Pedro Vargas and his Alpac Capital acquired Euronews. Reporters at Direkt36, Le Monde and Expresso traced €45m of the price to Hungary’s state-controlled Széchenyi Funds, with a further loan from a company tied to a businessman close to Orbán's government. Portugal’s financial regulator later fined the fund for weak defences against money laundering. Alpac’s dealings have long been entangled with Budapest. In 2017 Orbán’s government handed Alpac Capital the management of a fund seeded by the state EXIM bank, OTP and the energy group MOL. From 2021 to 2025, Vargas sat on the board of telecoms group 4iG, whose contracts with the Hungarian state are now under investigation. Opaque financing So, when Vargas had himself registered as director of the companies behind what survives of critical television news in Serbia—N1 and Nova S—last month, few in the region were surprised and fewer reassured. The previous directors were removed the same day, before the purchase had received the necessary regulatory approvals. Luxembourg, where the purchasing vehicle is based, had not cleared the change of control and competition questions remained in Serbia and Montenegro. The financing of the Serbian purchase is opaque, but Alpac’s habit of concealing its backers, specifically its Hungarian ones, is a reason for regulators to settle the question of financing before they approve the sale, rather than after. There is nothing inherently suspect about a Luxembourg investment vehicle buying a media business. Cross-border ownership is an ordinary feature of the single market. Vargas and his fund can buy these companies if the transaction satisfies the relevant authorities. Why rush when European regulators would have most likely cleared the sale within months? Set beside the reckoning underway in Budapest, the answer to rushing a deal may be twofold. The buyer may be moving before Magyar’s investigators, now tracing the public money of the Orbán years, catch up with its affairs. Or, more plainly, it is moving in time for the Serbian election. Belgrade election Aleksandar Vučić faces a vote in October, held against the largest protests of his rule. An independent broadcaster is never more inconvenient to a government than in the weeks before a vote. N1 and Nova S are the outlets that have broadcast those protests to the country and given opponents a platform. In aligned hands, they cease to be a liability and become the opposite. In a letter to Serbia's information minister, Vargas wrote that reporters who see their mission as more than reporting "enter the arena; they become part of the game." He promised instead a press that gives audiences "the facts, as they are, without attempting to take sides." The adversarial reporting he disparages is what made N1 and Nova S a target. Europe’s relief at Orbán’s defeat rests on the assumption that authoritarian techniques depend on the political actors who first developed them. They do not. Once established, they can become institutional knowledge that can be reproduced by actors with no formal political affiliation and deployed in entirely different political settings. This matters most in the media where the line between censorship and a routine acquisition is thin and consequential. Why silence a newsroom when you can buy it? Silencing a newsroom by decree is an act every European regulator can recognise; buying the same newsroom through a fund that has a history of being sponsored by authoritarian capital is not. It draws only the scrutiny that any commercial transaction attracts, which is to say very little. Supposedly independent economic actors thereby acquire a particular role in the reproduction of authoritarianism. Businessmen need not share a government’s ideology, or even have a stable political allegiance, to become useful to it. Their value lies in their capacity to convert political objectives into commercial transactions. What appears to be market activity can therefore perform a political function. Orbán’s playbook, in other words, has become detachable from Orbán himself. It is exportable by intermediaries and available to governments that need it. Vučić may be the immediate beneficiary; others may follow. The remedy is not beyond reach and it begins with acknowledging this is not a routine transaction. The European Board for Media Services is already examining the concentration, at Luxembourg’s request, under the Media Freedom Act, whose ownership-transparency provisions were written exactly for this kind of case. The regulators in Luxembourg, Serbia and Montenegro should consider withholding their approval until the source of the financing is disclosed. Hungary’s own authorities should ask what has become of public funds and what part they play in financing this export abroad. The important point is that authoritarian diffusion does not always proceed from one regime to another. It can proceed through markets and private intermediaries, making the method harder to identify, harder to regulate and considerably harder to defeat.