Hungary opposition condemns Fidesz election video with fictitious execution scene

BUDAPEST, Feb 19 (Reuters) – Hungarian opposition leader Peter Magyar protested on Thursday after Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz party aired an emotive campaign video showing a little girl weeping at a window, intercut with scenes of her father being executed in war.

Orban has cast a parliamentary election on April 12 as a choice between “war and peace”, asserting that Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party would, at the behest of the European Union, drag Hungary into Ukraine’s war against Russian invasion.

Tisza has said it wants peace and would not send any weapons or troops to Ukraine.

The 33-second video, published on the Facebook page of Fidesz’s Budapest branch, depicts a kneeling, blindfolded soldier in Hungarian uniform being shot on a rain-drenched battlefield. A caption reads, in part: “This is only a nightmare now, but Brussels is preparing to make it a reality … Let’s not take risks. Fidesz is the safe choice!”

In a statement, Magyar called the video “sickening, unforgivable and deeply outrageous”. “This is not politics, this is soulless manipulation,” he said.

At a briefing, Orban’s chief of staff said more than a thousand people were killed or seriously injured in Ukraine’s war every day.

“What we see is the reality of the war,” Gergely Gulyas said.

He did not deny that the video had been made using artificial intelligence, which allows complex, lifelike scenes to be generated on demand, without a film set or actors.

In October, Magyar filed a criminal complaint accusing one of Orban’s key political aides of using deepfake technology to impersonate him, without acknowledgment, and damage him in another campaign video.

Fidesz has used AI-generated election videos repeatedly in recent months, some labelled as such, some not. The European Union’s forthcoming AI Act will make such disclosures compulsory.

Reuters confirmed that the war video had been made with the help of Google’s AI models.

A survey published on Thursday by the 21 Research Centre indicated that 23% of voters believe Tisza would lead Hungary into the Ukraine war if elected. 

While 57% of Fidesz voters answered ‘yes’, among Tisza’s supporters the percentage was statistically zero.

Tisza has an 8-12 point lead over Orban’s Fidesz in most polls, though pollsters close to the government still say the governing party is ahead.

(Reporting by Anita Komuves; Editing by Kevin Liffey)