The claim is that he was not allowed to appear on state television, the one channel that is funded by the state. There are other private TV channels, with much higher viewership, where he could appear. And even the state TV channel didn’t fully ban him, there was a big debate between the main candidates of the 2024 European Parliament election on state TV which significantly contributed to Magyar’s rise.
Yes, the state media was highly biased, which is bad, and the government party used their governmental power to help their political campaign in a number of other very unfair ways, which would be unacceptable in most Western democracies.
But to the best of my knowledge, the votes were always fairly counted in every election, there were never any censorship laws (except some rule on LGBTQ topics) and freedom of assembly was almost always respected (except unsuccessfully trying to ban Pride).
I think Western media has been consistently overstating how authoritarian Hungary was, and I think the fact that Magyar managed to win is significant evidence for that.
Ah I see. I think the analogous thing would be if Harris but not Trump could appear on PBS. Which I think would be quite bad. But maybe not so bad that it would tempt me into calling the US “not a democracy”.
The claim is that he was not allowed to appear on state television, the one channel that is funded by the state. There are other private TV channels, with much higher viewership, where he could appear. And even the state TV channel didn’t fully ban him, there was a big debate between the main candidates of the 2024 European Parliament election on state TV which significantly contributed to Magyar’s rise.
Yes, the state media was highly biased, which is bad, and the government party used their governmental power to help their political campaign in a number of other very unfair ways, which would be unacceptable in most Western democracies.
But to the best of my knowledge, the votes were always fairly counted in every election, there were never any censorship laws (except some rule on LGBTQ topics) and freedom of assembly was almost always respected (except unsuccessfully trying to ban Pride).
I think Western media has been consistently overstating how authoritarian Hungary was, and I think the fact that Magyar managed to win is significant evidence for that.
Ah I see. I think the analogous thing would be if Harris but not Trump could appear on PBS. Which I think would be quite bad. But maybe not so bad that it would tempt me into calling the US “not a democracy”.