BUDAPEST: Hungary's Viktor Orban has used disinformation to make Ukraine the scapegoat of his election campaign, analysts said, with some suggesting he is receiving covert help from Russia against an unprecedented challenge to his 16-year rule.
The nationalist premier -- Moscow's closest ally in the European Union -- has used AI-generated images to help whip up sentiment against Kyiv, which is fighting off a Russian invasion.
Analysts argue Russia is aiding him in shifting the conversation away from the bread-and-butter issues that have propelled opposition leader Peter Magyar's party to the top of the polls ahead of the April 12 vote.
"The campaign's rhetoric is deliberately binary -- peace versus war -- portraying Ukraine as a risk and the incumbent Hungarian government as seeking stability and rationality," Csilla Fedinec, a historian from ELTE University's Centre for Social Sciences, told AFP.
The two neighbours have been at loggerheads after Orban accused Ukraine of stalling the reopening of a pipeline carrying Russian oil to the landlocked EU state, with Kyiv saying the pipe was damaged by Russian airstrikes in January.
Hungary has also been holding up a 90-billion-euro EU loan to the war-torn country and a new round of sanctions on Russia over the issue.
Russian disinformation
Earlier this month, Hungarian counter-terror forces temporarily detained Ukrainian bank employees, seizing valuables passing through the country.
Tabloids affiliated with Orban's Fidesz party published AI-generated pictures exaggerating the amount of cash and gold involved.
Posts involving the images garnered unusually high engagement on Facebook, with many accounts having non-Hungarian names, lacking public information or profile photos -- typical signs of fake profiles used in coordinated bot campaigns.
Weeks earlier, fake images began circulating online purportedly showing a Hungarian memorial in Transcarpathia -- home to Ukraine's ethnic Hungarian minority -- defaced with anti-Hungarian and anti-Orban slogans, as well as Ukrainian nationalist symbols and a swastika.
While the monument has been vandalised several times in the past, the images were found to have been made by artificial intelligence. Even so, their publication prompted some social media users to demand retaliation.
Experts argue that there is also evidence of ongoing Russian attempts to influence Hungarian voters in the run-up to the election, including through the use of deepfakes and disinformation couched as genuine news reports.
"There is constantly detectable disinformation campaign to influence the Hungarian election, much like it was during the Moldovan and Romanian elections," Ferenc Fresz, the former head of Hungary's Cyber Defence Service, told AFP.
The messages Russian groups convey are "mostly identical with Hungarian pro-government propaganda, so they reinforce each another", Fresz said, adding that he finds the lack of declassified official communication on the matter "problematic."
Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto and other ruling party officials however have called claims of Russian interference "fake news."
'False flag operation'
For his part, Orban has sought to portray his chief rival Magyar as the "puppet" of the EU and Ukraine.
"We have to choose who will form the government -- me or (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelensky," he told a mid-March rally in Budapest.
Hours later, at an opposition march, a large Ukrainian flag was unfurled, with photos of the incidents swiftly shared by government politicians and pro-Fidesz outlets on social media.
But within a day, the individuals holding the flag were identified as people linked to the youth wing of Orban's party.
"We said there would be false flag operations, but this is not what we had in mind," Magyar quipped at a campaign event.
The opposition leader had already been targeted with similar techniques last year, when pro-Fidesz content creators posted an AI-manipulated image that made it appear as though he was holding a Ukrainian flag.
Billboards -- paid for with Hungarian taxpayers' money -- casting Zelensky in a negative light have also sprung up around the country over the past year, including one depicting Magyar flushing cash down a golden toilet alongside the Ukrainian leader.
'Existential safety'
Yet while the government campaign has untrue, even "surreal" elements, it is grounded in widespread public fears of Hungary being drawn into the Ukraine war, said political analyst Eszter Kovats, from the University of Vienna.
She told AFP that European leaders' statements about reintroducing conscription, advocating for rearmament or describing the EU as being part of the conflict have fed that anxiety.
"Fidesz appeals to people's deepest need for existential safety," the expert said. "Their message is: when the world is falling apart, trust in what you have, even if there are problems, change is risky."
