How Independent Journalism Outlasted the Orbán Regime
Photo: Shutterstock 2026-04-14
Budapest is celebrating the fall of the Orbán regime. Driven by a surge of young Hungarians—first on the streets, then at the ballot box—the message was a deafening “Russians, go home.” Preliminary data confirms a massive generational shift: for many, Orbán’s 16-year rule had spanned their entire adult lives.
This moment comes nearly a decade into VSquare’s existence. We launched our Central European investigative outlet with a mission. That mission included tracking the export of “Orbanism” and exposing Russian influence across the region.
According to a number of political analysts, our recent two-part “Kremlin Hotline” investigation provided definitive proof of state capture and of the Kremlin’s grip on Hungarian politics. For a generation raised on Orbán’s “sovereignty” rhetoric, the foreign minister acting as a servant to Sergey Lavrov was the ultimate hypocrisy. The government’s traditional campaign pillars—migration and “Brussels”—failed to resonate with younger voters, who saw the Kremlin Hotline revelations as a direct betrayal of Hungarian interests.
The publication of our joint investigation followed an unprecedented attack on our journalist, Szabolcs Panyi, a long-time target of the regime’s hostility.
The fall of this administration is a moment to recognize the independent journalism that survived in Hungary despite relentless propaganda, systemic underfunding, and years of being branded “foreign agents” by Orbán’s loyalists. Despite this hostile environment, our friends and partners at Atlatszo, Direkt36, and Telex never stopped exposing abuse and corruption. This is also the case of independent NGOs and watchdogs like Political Capital, which provided the public with credible data and analysis.
Together with our Hungarian partners, we have published dozens—perhaps hundreds—of investigations at VSquare. Today, they stand as an open-access archive of the final decade of Orbanism.
As you browse this archive, I urge you to also look at our investigations into Slovakia. Let them serve as a memento: the euphoria that comes with the perceived end of power—even power that allowed the murder of an investigative journalist and his fiancée—can quickly turn to disillusionment. And that disillusionment can rapidly erase public memory, paving the way for the old guard to return.
And so, at VSquare, this is the end of one chapter, but the continuation of the story. As we await the immediate withdrawal of all charges against our journalist and real accountability for the collusion between Péter Szijjártó and Moscow, we will continue to investigate Central Europe.
We still have many stories to tell.
We still ask you to support our work.
Anna Gielewska
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Anna Gielewska is co-founder and editor-in-chief of VSquare and co-founder of Polish investigative outlet FRONTSTORY.PL. She is also vice-chairwoman of Fundacja Reporterów (Reporters Foundation). A journalist specializing in investigating organized disinformation and propaganda, Gielewska was the John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University (2019/20) and has been shortlisted for the Grand Press Award (2015, 2021, 2022) and the Daphne Caruana Galizia Award (2021, 2023). She was the recipient of the Novinarska Cena in 2022.