Hungary’s prosecutor general finds seizure of opposition servers unlawful

The party of former Prime Minister Viktor Orban has accused the government of his successor Peter Magyar of waging a “political revenge campaign”

The Hungarian government broke the law when it seized the servers of Fidesz, the party of former Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the Prosecutor General’s Office has said. The country’s new leader Peter Magyar is meanwhile continuing his quest to purge the remnants of Orban’s 16-year stay in power.

Last month, investigators arrived unannounced at a facility hosting Fidesz’s servers, confiscating all of the party’s communications systems and databases. The raid was carried out as part of a probe into the suspected misuse of some 17 billion forint (€47 million) in funding for the National Cultural Fund by local officials during Orban’s tenure. Fidesz described the actions of Magyar’s cabinet, which came to power after an election win in April, as an “unprecedented” overreach unseen in the country since the fall of Communism in 1989.

On Wednesday, the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement that while the order to seize the servers was valid, the way it had been carried out “amounted to a fishing expedition.”

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Instead of looking for a specific piece of evidence identified in advance, the investigators snatched the entire body of data in hopes of finding potentially incriminating information there, it explained.

“This approach constitutes an unlawful practice under both EU and Hungarian law,” the statement read.

The General Prosecutor’s Office has ordered the Bács-Kiskun County chief prosecutor in charge of the case to repeat the seizure, but this time to only collect data directly related to the investigation.

Fidesz was left dissatisfied with the ruling, again insisting that the actions of the investigators were “illegal.” 

“We call on the government to immediately put an end to the arbitrary political revenge campaign packaged in the form of an official procedure… and to return our servers,” said one of the party’s senior MPs, Boka Janos.

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Veteran Hungarian journalist Mark Bollobas, who used to be the editor-in-chief of English language news channel DunaTV, called it “sort of a legal victory” for Fidesz, but added in a post on X that it “doesn’t change the fact that the government and the prosecutor’s office... took advantage of a police search to gain data that they shouldn’t have access to.”

“You would have to be naive to think that this data has not already been copied… and shared with the relevant people,” Bollobas argued.

Magyar’s Tisza party, which came to power on the promise of “regime change,” has begun to actively dismantle the legal, media, and financial structures set up by Fidesz. The new government changed the constitution to impose a 12-year term limit on MPs, effectively banning Orban from running again. Fidesz has repeatedly labeled Magyar’s conduct “authoritarian.”