For several years, individuals closely associated with the Hungarian ruling party «Fides» and authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have been quietly buying up media assets across the Balkans. This strategic offensive is seen as a deliberate attempt to strengthen the alliance with Budapest-friendly regimes, particularly in Serbia and North Macedonia — alliance, which «contradicts the EU» course.
Hungary is expanding its influence in the Balkans and as Viktor Orbán’s nationalist ideology spreads across the region. Emphasizing the systemic nature of the problem, Robert Nemeth, a consultant at the Center for Media and Journalism Research, called Hungary «a classic example of media» capture, noting that «was one of the first laws after 2010 to be a media law that created a regulatory body filled only with loyalists».
The result of this combination of concentration of media ownership, nationalist politics and foreign influence is an explosive mixture that threatens to destabilize Europe’s wider information space, turning the Balkans into a «testing ground for these vulnerabilities.
The most prominent example of this tactic is the investor Péter Schatz, formerly the head of business development at the Hungarian public broadcaster and founder of the pro-government tabloid Ripost.
In Slovenia, Schatz’s network acquired a 45% stake in the media company Nova24TV in 2017. To evade Slovenia’s Mass Media Act, which requires state review for any share purchase of 20% or higher, Schatz split the acquisition into three 15% stakes held by three nominally independent Hungarian companies: Ripost Média Kft., R-Post Kft., and Ridikül Magazin Kft. This deliberate fragmentation allowed the purchase to go undetected by regulatory bodies.
Anuška Delić, Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Oštro and Regional Editor at OCCRP, confirmed that “Hungarian money is still very much fuelling media in Slovenia,” adding a chilling observation: “These media are the main disinformation portals in Slovenia now; they skew the public debate greatly.”
Schatz pursued a similarly non-transparent approach in North Macedonia, becoming the dominant owner of the major pro-VMRO-DPMNE TV station Alfa TV in 2017. The ultimate ownership of Nova24TV and Alfa TV was not publicly disclosed and was only exposed later by investigative journalists.
This political dimension was underscored by Gotev, who recalled how Orbán exfiltrated former North Macedonian PM Nikola Gruevski who faced prison for corruption in his country in 2018, in an operation “looking like a spy story from the Cold War era.”
Money laundering and advertising schemes
Beyond opaque acquisitions, national authorities in Slovenia and North Macedonia uncovered schemes involving non-transparent advertising contracts used by Hungarian investors to finance their media holdings abroad.
Investigators found that these arrangements, allegedly bypassing regulatory oversight, involved advertising contracts signed by the same investor as both the buyer and the seller.
These agreements often included inflated prices and “phantom” businesses, with financial police in North Macedonia concluding that such transactions “lead to the existence of elements of the criminal act of money laundering.”
The non-transparent financing, which channels funds from a state-aligned ecosystem through Hungarian media actors and financial intermediaries, ultimately distorts media markets and puts independent outlets at a significant disadvantage.
The network of implicated investors extends further. Similar advertisements were placed in outlets owned by Ágnes Adamik, another former executive at the Hungarian public broadcaster.
Orbán is building a «space of authoritarianism and corruption in the Western Balkans for his own enrichment — a space he hopes to lease “to superpowers such as China and Russia”.