With less than a month to go until a make-or-break election in Hungary, consecutive four-term prime minister Viktor Orbán is desperate to distract voters from the dire state of the economy and his government’s finances.

He and his Fidesz party have turned the dial to 11 in their campaign against Péter Magyar’s Tisza movement, who - they claim - plan to sell-out Hungarians to the EU and to Woke globalists while forcing them into joining Ukraine’s war against Russia.

Independent polling suggests the demonisation of Ukraine and its president may be only working with voters at the margin. The electorate seems to be motivated more by Hungary’s stagflationary environment, which has not been helped by the surge in oil and natural-gas prices caused by the US-Israeli war with Iran.

The outlook for growth in Hungary “might be made a lot worse by ... the energy-price shock that Europe is being hit by now,” says Twenty-Four Two co-host Pepijn Bergsen. “If the suggestion is that Hungary would probably be hit harder than many others in the region, I don’t think that they have a good answer to that. Just trying to cap retail-energy prices is not going to work. It’s too costly, which is why you also get Orbán explicitly arguing for sanctions reductions, particularly on Russian energy. The rest of Europe isn’t going to go along with that anytime soon”.

In this episode, Pepijn and co-host Tim Jones discuss the latest polls, the vicious turn in the campaign, Volodymyr Zelensky as Emmanuel Goldstein, and the overdue fiscal and political bill from 16 years of Orbánomics.

Twenty-Four Two, hosted by Tim G. Jones and Pepijn Bergsen, is a podcast from 242.news - a Substack newsletter covering the destructive recreation of Europe since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24/2/2022.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com