Hungarian public media files a criminal complaint. New management says they were run by the "fifth floor" in a four-storey building

The management of Hungary's public media filed a criminal complaint on Monday over suspected unlawful control of the institution. It says the outlet was in fact not run by its statutory officers, but by an external communications adviser, Attila Várhegyi, who did not appear anywhere in the organizational chart. Employees had their own name for that level of decision-making, even though no such floor exists in the building.

For now, these are only claims made by the current management, and neither the police nor a court has examined them.

The Fifth Floor in a Four-Storey Building

Duna Médiaszolgáltató, under which Hungary's public media now falls, attached a nine-page document to the complaint. It is called The Fifth Floor, after a word that, according to the company, had become common among employees. The media fund's headquarters on Kunigunda utca has four floors, yet many there spoke of an invisible institution one level higher. "This was the decision-making level from which the everyday operation of public media was determined outside the official chain of command," the document says. 24.hu ↗

According to the economic news site Economx, this was not a physical floor, but shorthand for a secret connection between the Karmelite Monastery, the seat of Orbán's Prime Minister's Office, and public broadcasting. The central figure in this connection was said to be Attila Várhegyi. Economx ↗

Yet Várhegyi was formally only an external communications adviser and was not part of the hierarchy. The management says that, despite this, he "took over the powers of the official heads of public media, made decisions instead of them on editorial, personnel and financial matters, and without his approval even those who were formally responsible for running the institution often dared not decide." Index ↗

He became an adviser at the beginning of 2019, and his contract was extended year after year. According to Economx, which drew on the published document, he initially received a monthly gross fee of 1,503,759 forints; from 2023 it was 3.5 million net, or around five million gross. By comparison, the media fund's CEO Dániel Papp had a gross salary of 4.2 million from 2025, and the head of Duna Médiaszolgáltató, Anita Altorjaiová, about 2.5 million. The external adviser therefore earned more than both people who, on paper, ran the institution. Economx ↗

How the New Management Supports It

The new management says the document is based on internal correspondence belonging to the media fund. When Dániel Papp sent him a file titled Arrears and Financing Problems, Várhegyi reportedly replied, according to the document: "Send one printed copy to Rogán, no need to sign it. I'll brief him." At the time, Antal Rogán was the minister heading the Prime Minister's Cabinet Office. Economx ↗

The document's authors also cite Várhegyi's oversight of Viktor Orbán's regular Friday interviews for Kossuth Radio as evidence of his status. According to them, on broadcast days he would greet the prime minister in the studio at dawn, follow the entire programme, and leave with him afterward. Beside the studio, Orbán was said to have had his own room for focus, fitted among other things with a sofa for roughly fifteen million forints. Economx ↗

The daily Telex selected from the document cases showing the adviser’s reach over day-to-day operations. In response to a weekly list of topics, he is said to have once written, "Ukraine and war in any amount." He was also said to have decided who would be person of the year, choosing György Kurtág over Donald Trump. According to the document, it was also him who actually corresponded with the spokespeople of then-opposition Tisza, leaving only the signing and sending of letters to Dániel Papp. Telex ↗

Telex is also affected by another item. When the newsroom asked public media questions, it received a prewritten response template that first demanded to know who funded it and on whose behalf it was asking. According to the document, Várhegyi himself drafted it. Telex says it received such a reply for the first time in May 2025, when it asked how much public money the government commissioner for cinema received for an upcoming film. Telex ↗

The management also objects to the benefits the adviser received. According to the complaint, public media provided him with a driver for years by employing the person as an event organizer, thereby, in the wording of the complaint, "concealing the fact in the company's official documents." Index ↗

Why It Is Legally Difficult

The management entrusted the legal steps to lawyer Gábor Papp and formulates its conclusion cautiously: "This operating model is in no way lawful." It has not disclosed which specific offense the complaint cites. HVG ↗

That is the core of the problem. The fact that someone without a formal position was obeyed by others is not, by itself, a criminal offense. That is why the specialist media outlet Media1 writes about the whole matter consistently in the conditional mood, saying that Várhegyi may have exercised de facto control and may have been the link between the government and the media outlet. Media1 ↗

Várhegyi is not an unknown figure in Hungarian politics. After the regime change, he was mayor of Szolnok and chairman of Fidesz's national board. His career was broken when, in 2002, he was lawfully convicted and given a suspended prison sentence for an offense corresponding to breach of duty in managing another person's property causing major damage. He gave up his parliamentary seat and also failed to keep the post of political state secretary at the Ministry of Culture. 24.hu ↗

Várhegyi had not publicly responded to Monday's accusations by the time this text was finalized. Nor did government media close to Fidesz respond, even though they were writing that same day about developments around public media.

What Came Before

The criminal complaint did not come out of nowhere. On 18 August, public media published the full 482-page document on the functioning of the MTI news agency. It was compiled by a group of foreign-affairs correspondents and news editors calling themselves PRO DOMO, who had spent more than ten years gathering evidence about withheld, deleted and rewritten reports. The oldest dates from 2015, the newest from the day before this year's election. Telex ↗

According to the daily 444, the material shows that reports inconvenient for the government of the day were blocked even several weeks before the election. 444 ↗

The restructuring itself is drastic. On 3 July, lawyer András Horváth P. became interim CEO, and four days later the new management halted the M1 news channel. It did not resume broadcasting until 44 days later, on Thursday 20 August at 6 a.m.

In the meantime, the institution's structure itself also changed. On 26 July, the MTVA media fund ceased to exist as it was absorbed into Duna Médiaszolgáltató. It was precisely the split into two bodies, one broadcasting and the other commissioning and paying, that for years made it unclear who was actually making decisions. According to public media's statement, the restructuring is meant to produce a new organization called Magyar Rádió és Televízió, and the MTI news agency is to become independent again. MTVA ↗ Index ↗

Limits of This View

The whole picture of the "fifth floor" comes from one side of the dispute. The document was compiled by the current management about its predecessors, based on correspondence it selected itself and to which nobody else has access. That does not make the claims false, but it does mean this is not yet a court finding or a police finding, only a filing that no one has yet examined.

At the same time, the new power is encountering situations that feel familiar. On 26 August, the parliamentary culture committee did not approve any of the three candidates proposed to the Independent Body for Public Media by the opposition clubs of Fidesz, KDNP and Mi Hazánk. All three received four votes in favor and seven against. The opposition parties protested. Index ↗

Still, this is not a simple story of a new majority acting like the old one. According to HVG, Mi Hazánk's candidate Zoltán Moys was previously detained for giving a Nazi salute in a Munich stadium during the European Championship, and his company produced a video for Adolf Hitler's birthday. HVG ↗

The criticism also comes from the opposite side. Prime Minister Péter Magyar himself publicly criticized the revamped broadcaster's guest lineup. He wrote that "in the restarted public media, there is one Fidesz-invited guest per day, hallucinating about arbitrariness," and added that he had not yet received an invitation himself as prime minister. Index notes that in the first broadcast after the restart, the prime minister was heard twice in his own voice, the ministers of defense and culture once each, while the statements of opposition parties were merely read out. Index ↗

A public consultation is supposed to decide the future shape of the media. On Monday, the government launched the Közhang platform, coordinated by government commissioner Márk Radnai, with public media as its first topic. HVG writes that it is at times didactic, but unlike Orbán's national consultations. It also points out that even for anonymous responses, the platform still requires age, education and occupation. HVG ↗

The pro-government Magyar Nemzet, which did not write about the criminal complaint, devoted that same day to this platform. It criticizes it for not allowing the user to skip between chapters freely and says that behind the declared joint reflection lies profiling. Magyar Nemzet ↗

Meanwhile, more than a hundred expert submissions on the future of public media have reached the Ministry of Culture. 24.hu ↗

For a Slovak reader, the interesting part is precisely the legal question. Political control of a public media outlet is usually not carried out by an order that can be taken to court, but by a network of relationships in which nobody feels guilty because each person was only waiting for someone else's approval. Hungary's attempt to translate such a network into the language of criminal law is unusual in the region. How it ends will only become clear once we see whether anyone even begins to deal with the complaint.

Illustrative photo: the headquarters of Hungary's public media on Kunigunda utca in Budapest's 3rd district, where the decisions described in the document also converge. Photo by Globetrotter19, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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