Szijjártó's private flights worth €14 million. Hungary's new government tallies up the Orbán era

The ministry that Péter Szijjártó led for years this week calculated that its former chief spent nearly €14 million of public money on privately chartered aircraft. The disclosure did not come from the opposition but from the same ministry's new state secretary — and it is just one of a series of concrete tallies that Péter Magyar's government has presented eight weeks after taking power from Fidesz. Within a few days it was joined by a leaked document on a Hungarian spy network in Brussels, a decree declassifying the archives of the communist-era secret police, and the revocation of asylum for a former Polish minister. Each time with a specific date and document attached.

The bill for the planes

According to László György Velkey, parliamentary state secretary of the foreign ministry, Szijjártó and his delegation chartered private aircraft for official trips fifty-three times between 2022 and 2026, for a total of 4.87 billion forints, or nearly €14 million. According to him, the ministry is also examining criminal liability. SME ↗

Velkey also named specific instances of waste. A plane costing over eighteen million forints ordered for a trip to Bratislava was ultimately never used, and an aircraft costing thirty-two million forints for planned trips to the Maldives and Lebanon never took off at all. The most was spent in 2025, when the ministry spent the equivalent of €5.8 million on private flights. All this alongside the state's government and military air fleet of four aircraft, which Hungary has at its disposal. The Budapest Times ↗

Fidesz rejects the disclosure. Its spokesman Bertalan Havasi declared that Szijjártó had been "the best foreign minister in Europe" and that the cost of his work was "in line with European standards." The ministry is now headed by his successor Anita Orbán, an economist and energy diplomat who is not related to Viktor Orbán. SME ↗

Espionage in the heart of Brussels

The second account is more sensitive for Hungary. A leaked internal European Commission document from April, obtained by Politico and confirmed by Euronews, provides the clearest confirmation yet that Hungary ran a network of intelligence officers under diplomatic cover out of its embassy to the EU. According to the document, between 2012 and 2018 the network targeted Hungarian employees of European institutions. Euronews ↗

The findings have renewed pressure on Hungarian EU Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi, who was Hungary's permanent representative to the EU from 2015 to 2019 — that is, during part of the period under scrutiny. Várhelyi denies any knowledge of the network. At the same mission, however, today's Prime Minister Péter Magyar also served as a diplomat at the time, and he now claims that Várhelyi is not telling the whole truth. SME ↗

Archives, asylum, and slow-grinding mills

At the same time, the government is pushing the reckoning further into the past. A decree published in the official gazette orders the declassification of all secret police documents from the communist era predating April 8, 1990, and their transfer to public archives. The files are to be made accessible gradually, by the end of the year at the latest, symbolically ahead of the seventieth anniversary of the 1956 uprising. Sensitive personal data of the people who were monitored will remain anonymized. Aktuálně.cz ↗

The reckoning also has a foreign dimension. Hungary has revoked refugee status for former Polish Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro, his wife, and his former deputy Marcin Romanowski. Ziobro, accused of leading an organized group during the government of the Law and Justice party, rejects the accusations as politically motivated and left for Budapest at the end of 2025, citing fears of an unfair trial. From there he traveled to the USA on a Hungarian travel document, and Magyar has now promised to push for his extradition. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski commented that "the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine."SME ↗

The camp that lost its money

The same loss of access to public money is also unraveling the media camp that served Orbán's system for years. Less than two months after Fidesz's election defeat, dozens of pro-Orbán outlets have lost their subsidies, readers are turning away, and former Minister for European Affairs Tibor Navracsics has called on conservative billionaires to fund the media out of the wealth they acquired under Orbán's governments. We wrote about the first wave of layoffs last week. Reflex ↗

Also read: Magyar dismantles Orbán's apparatus: ultimatum to the prosecutor's office, collapse of pro-Orbán media

Why it's worth watching from Slovakia too

For a Slovak reader, Budapest is not just a neighbor. Robert Fico has for years seen Orbán's model as an example, and Hungary is now showing live what it looks like to try to dismantle a state that one party controlled for sixteen years — with the risk that the "reckoning" itself becomes a political weapon. Fidesz is already speaking of persecution of the defeated, not a cleanup. Which interpretation holds up will be shown by the courts, not press statements.

What hotinfo is following

• The decision on criminal liability for Szijjártó's charter flights.
• The fate of EU Commissioner Várhelyi — the response of the European Parliament and Commission to the documented network.
• Ziobro's extradition from the USA to Poland and the proceedings in Warsaw.
• Whether President Sulyok signs or rejects the sixteenth constitutional amendment, and the Constitutional Court's ruling on the eight-year cap for the prime minister.
• The progress of making the secret police archives accessible by the end of the year.