Hungary’s incoming Prime Minister Péter Magyar has announced plans to temporarily suspend news services across the country’s state media, as part of a broader overhaul of the public media system following his election victory.

Speaking after securing a constitutional majority in parliament with his Tisza Party, Magyar said his government would halt news operations run by the state media fund MTVA until their objectivity can be ensured. The move, he stressed, is not permanent but intended as a transitional step during a restructuring period that will lead to a fundamental transformation of Hungary’s public service media.

Magyar’s party won 136 seats in the 199-member parliament after Sunday’s election, with voter turnout approaching 80 percent—the highest level since 1990. The result marks a dramatic political shift after 16 years of rule by Viktor Orbán.

As part of the reform agenda, Magyar pledged to end what he described as government-funded propaganda and to significantly change the relationship between the state and the media. He said ministers from the Tisza-led government would be regularly available to journalists and would hold frequent press conferences. “We will not build a propaganda machine; on the contrary, we will dismantle the existing one,” he said.

He also committed to cutting state advertising spending, which he argued had been used under the Orbán administration to support pro-government messaging. According to Magyar, hundreds of billions of forints in taxpayer money were diverted from public services such as healthcare and infrastructure into what he described as a “deceptive propaganda machine.”

Magyar further said that the media environment under Orbán systematically excluded opposition voices, with state television and pro-government commercial broadcasters allegedly ignoring dissenting perspectives. He claimed that he had not been invited to appear on state television or major pro-government channels over the past 18 months, while being the target of sustained negative coverage.

The incoming PM concluded that the previous media model—characterized by close alignment between government and key broadcasters—would no longer exist under his administration, promising a more open and pluralistic media landscape going forward.