Veronika Varga-Bajusz (C) is led away in chains by armed officers.
Some observers have been baffled that the Magyar government has chosen to charge and arrest mostly lower-level officials in its purge of Hungarian conservatives. These are certainly not the central hate-figures that left-leaning media have vilified for years, nor the personalities that TISZA’s hardcore loyalists have demanded be dragged under the political guillotine. Yet there is a sound logic to this approach—one long employed by the most oppressive systems of the twentieth century.
What distinguishes a political prisoner from a common criminal is not simply whether they are innocent or guilty of breaking the law. Without full access to the evidence (or its absence), it is impossible to determine whether those led away in chains by the Magyar regime’s enforcers actually committed crimes in public office. What defines a political prisoner are the motives—in this case political—of the prosecutors, and the selective manner in which cases are brought against political adversaries.
We have spoken with insiders familiar with ongoing cases, including that of former Minister of Culture Balázs Hankó, who is currently being held in a maximum-security prison. Most expressed the view that the TISZA regime is locking up conservative-leaning politicians and officials who in particular may possess inside knowledge of the Orbán government’s workings and whom the authorities believe they can pressure into incriminating higher-ups. Behind these recent arrests there may also be an intention to intimidate those who might resist the course Péter Magyar is currently setting for the nation, and to satisfy an artificially inflated public demand for retributive “justice.”
However, the primary goal of these arrests—and the particular selection of those now in detention—appears to be the extraction of information that could help build cases against the main targets: former high-ranking politicians and their backers.
Balázs Hankó, former FIDESZ Minister, is led away in handcuffs by armed police. MTI/Hegedüs Róbert
This raises the suspicion that, despite years of liberal media campaigns and pre-election rhetoric about corruption, prosecutors have very little concrete evidence with which to prove these allegations. Furthermore, what was previously only anecdotal evidence of coercion through imprisonment has now been confirmed by one of the political detainees herself: former State Secretary in the Orbán government, Veronika Varga-Bajusz. In a letter from prison, she wrote: “When I received the approximately 2,000 pages of documentation supporting the charges against me, I looked the prosecutor in the eye and told him it was impossible that any witness or suspect had linked me to the case in their testimony… My name did not appear in connection with the NKA (National Cultural Funds) in any of the statements. Even those who mentioned me did so only in response to questions from the prosecution, and even then, they never linked me to NKA grants…
And the goal? If I implicate a politician, my situation will be resolved,”
wrote the former FIDESZ MP and mother of three.
There are clear, well-documented historical precedents, especially in 20th-century totalitarian communist regimes, where security services arrested lower-ranking or relatively insignificant officials and used imprisonment, psychological pressure, and threats to extract confessions implicating higher-ranking colleagues or building larger “networks” of alleged conspirators. The Soviet Union under Stalin (Great Purge / Yezhovshchina, 1936–1938) is a textbook case. Confessions were used not only against the arrestee but to name co-conspirators, which then justified further arrests. Lower-ranking party members were explicitly instructed to denounce those above them (while higher officials could accuse those below), creating a mutual atmosphere of denunciation.
“This is a political showdown, and I am the target,” said Viktor Orbán during a recent public appearance. Photo: Facebook Orbán Viktor
These tactics repeatedly appear in highly centralized, ideologically driven regimes with powerful secret police. The regime needs “evidence” of conspiracy or sabotage—often fabricated—to legitimize purges of elites, settle factional scores, or justify its authoritarian policies. Arresting and breaking lower-level people is lower-risk and efficient for generating names that climb the hierarchy. Similar methods appeared in a number of communist systems throughout the 20th century in Eastern Europe.
More recently, the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been accused of using the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) to conduct raids and detentions framed as countering Russian infiltration—actions that some Western observers have described as efforts to undermine probes into the president’s circle. In Poland, the Donald Tusk government has likewise been accused by the opposition of politically motivated proceedings, such as the Justice Fund (Fundusz Sprawiedliwości) case involving the previous PiS government.
All of this is currently unfolding amid the silence, or even outright support, of European mainstream media and human rights NGOs. Neither Magyar, Zelenskyy, nor Tusk has any reason to fear pushback from Brussels, as both the European Parliament and the Commission are currently dominated by parties and officials willing to turn a blind eye to any methods that lead to the dismantling of Europe’s national-sovereigntist movements. Yet while there are signs in Ukraine and Poland that a majority of the electorate is no longer willing to tolerate an atmosphere of fear and political reprisals, Péter Magyar still enjoys his post-election honeymoon period. With the absence of an effective, sizeable, and united opposition, Hungary can only expect to sink further before the tide has a chance to turn.
Featured Image: MTI/Hegedüs Róbert
The post Extracting Confessions from Low-Level Political Prisoners Follows a Historical Model appeared first on Hungary Today.
