Aron Kerpel-Fronius, author of ‘Pole and Hungarian Cousins Be? A Comparison of State Media Capture, Ideological Narratives and Political Truth Monopolization in Hungary and Poland’.

Aron is a Hungarian post-graduate student at the flagship IMESS programme at University College London, studying Economics and Politics. He is set to spend the next academic year at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Aron’s main research interests include illiberal parties and civil societies of EEA, particularly within the Visegrad group. Aron is also planning to pursue a PhD programme in the same field next year. Currently, he is an intern at Transparency International Hungary, and from next month, will be starting another internship in Krakow’s Kosciuszko Institute, a Polish think tank specialising in cyber security, using this opportunity do deepen his knowledge on Polish language and culture.

Public discourse is shaped through various factors; in his article, Aron focuses explicitly on the two governments’ treatment of the media landscape, as it is the biggest and most effective platform for this purpose. The paper argues that both Fidesz and PiS are attempting to capture the state and private media, using these to propagate their political ideology. Thus by monopolising media discourse and portraying themselves as the representatives of the people on all three symbolic levels, the two governments attempt to discredit any civil or parliamentary opposition group, and emerge as the sole central political force domestically. The aim of the paper is to compare the extent to which the Fidesz and PiS government managed to succeed in this attempt to the present day.

Posted by Borimir Totev, Executive Editor of SLOVO Journal