Human Rights Watch reports on Viktor Orban’s abuse of data. His party, Fidesz, gained access to state databases and used them to send campaign messages to voters
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskMr Toka was not the only one. A report published on December 1st by Human Rights Watch suggests that Fidesz seems to have gained access to state databases and used them to send campaign messages to voters. In addition to emails, people got phone calls and text messages from Fidesz candidates urging them to vote and reminding them what a wonderful job the government was doing.
Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, has been erasing the boundaries between the state and Fidesz ever since coming to power in 2010. He has used his two-thirds majority in parliament to overhaul the constitution and pack the courts with sympathetic judges. Friendly businessmen have taken over nearly all of the country’s media outlets and put most of them under the control of a foundation whose board is appointed by Fidesz members.
Some Hungarians complained about such practices during the campaign, to little effect. The National Electoral Commission ruled in February that the government information office had broken no rules with its emails praising the government’s Ukraine policies. The supreme court said the emails went too far, but imposed only a procedural fine.
The report documents apparent violations of data-privacy rules by the opposition as well. The main opposition parties formed a coalition during the election campaign in the hope of unseating Mr Orban. The parties set up a new joint database of contact information collected with voters’ consent for this campaign, which was not to be merged with their separate party databases .
Yet the scale of the data available to Fidesz and the government dwarfs anything the other parties could put together. The joint opposition’s pre-election signature campaign, which it used to build its voter database, reached some 800,000 people, of whom a third agreed to be contacted. The health authority’s covid contact list alone contained information about 6.5m citizens, about two-thirds of Hungary’s population.
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