Media giant ‘Politico’ alters Poll of Polls @Orbán’s Hungarian party leading

Politico tries to present itself as “objective” and on a quest to fight “disinformation” and “fake news,” but the media giant’s latest actions reveal it appears to be willing to get dirty in support of the EU establishment’s preferred candidates. Yesterday, Politico’s “Poll of Polls” aggregator showed Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party pulling ahead of the opposition Tisza party for the first time in a year. Shockingly, Politico waited less than 24 hours to react to this “bad news” by changing the data in its own polling aggregator, which also happened to be very good for the opposition Tisza party.

Once the results were “corrected” on Politico’s polling aggregator — by removing two polling firm results and adding a new one — suddenly Fidesz dropped from a one-point lead to seven points behind Tisza in the polling average.

This came after Hungarian media reported on Orbán being ahead of Magyar for the first time in a year, as Remix News published yesterday. However, screenshots had already been widely taken of the Politico polling results, showing the before and after.

Telex media outlet, by no means friendly to Orbán, reported on what Politico did next in response to Orbán gaining the polling lead.

“But what happened in the specific case? Although Politico’s graph does not indicate which research is from which company, if we compare them with the research published in the past period, it turns out that the position of Poll of Polls on Sunday was most influenced by the recent measurements of the Hungarian Social Researcher and the Center for Fundamental Rights. The former measured a Fidesz advantage of 10 percentage points, the latter 7 percentage points, and these two measurements were enough to drag the average so far that a Fidesz advantage of 1 percentage point emerged.

And here comes the twist. Around noon on Monday, Politico deleted the research of the Hungarian Social Researcher and the Center for Fundamental Rights from its summary, but added Publicus’ latest measurement, which shows a Tisza advantage of 9 percentage points. Accordingly, the overall Tisza advantage of 7 percentage points came out, so that the Tisza stands at 46 percent and Fidesz at 39 percent. (We asked Politico why the measurements of the Hungarian Social Researcher and the Center for Fundamental Rights were deleted; if they answer on the merits, we will report on it.)

By excluding the two researches from the total and by hiring Publicus, who made significant mistakes in the previous two elections, the difference between the support of the Tisza Party and Fidesz immediately jumped by 8 percentage points.”

Politco could not even wait a few days to change the data firm inputs. It immediately sprung into action, adding the Publicus poll and deleting two polls which showed Orbán in the lead.

Besides the ridiculous timing of Politico’s actions, Politico’s move is also highly dubious, considering that it removed polling firms that have a better track record than Publicus, which is known to have an extreme left-wing bias.

Notably, the firm Politico added, Publicus, is a polling institute that was remarkably wrong about the last Hungarian national election in 2022. It claimed the opposition was tied with Orbán’s Fidesz party, but this result was massively off the mark. In fact, Publicus had the worst polling result of any firm in the lead-up to the 2022 national election, amounting to an incredible 20-point failure.

As Telex writes, “With the last measurements before the 2022 election, however, Publicus made the biggest mistake, 20 percentage points in the difference between the support of Fidesz and the united opposition, slightly ahead of the 16 percentage point mistake of Republikon and Závecz (all three institutes measured the opposition above and Fidesz below).”

In addition, before the 2024 European Parliament election, Publicus overestimated the DK-MSZP-Párbeszéd list by 6.5 percent, as well as the Tisza list by 4.2 percent, even if it predicted other party results accurately.

In other words, Publicus has a very poor track record, and by some measures, the polling firm should be seen as a laughing stock with its 20-point miss. Notably, in the United States, the outrageously wrong Iowa poll from Selzer led her to quit polling completely, and that was only a 16-point miss versus the Publicus 20-point failure.

However, some could argue that the Publicus polling firm did exactly what it was supposed to do: deliver a manipulated poll that showed the opposition to Orbán with far more support than it actually had. A 20-point miss, after all, veers into the realm of a failure so great, it is difficult to explain such a miss purely by poor data science.

***

One of the polling firms removed by Politico, Hungarian Social Research voiced outrage over the move. An analyst from the firm, Krisztián Talabér, wrote on Facebook about Politico’s move. He noted that his firm actually had the most accurate result of the 2022 election, while Publicus had the worst result.

“So Politico removed the Hungarian Social Research Institute from its ‘Poll of Polls’ research summary, the institute that gave the most accurate election forecast in Hungary before the 2022 parliamentary election, and instead included the institute that claimed even on the eve of the election that the score was 47-47, while the opposition was more among the undecided. The domestic result was 52-36 in favor of the ruling parties. Most accurate out, most inaccurate in. Scandal,” he wrote.

Of course, the Hungarian government has jumped on this “alteration” of the polling firms included in the Politico “Poll of Polls” as well.

The political director for the Fidesz party, Balázs Orbán, took to X to write, “Less than 24 hours after I posted an analysis citing the @PoliticoEurope ‘Poll of Polls’ — which clearly showed Hungary’s patriotic government parties, Fidesz-KDNP, ahead of Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party — the pro-war Brussels elite’s in-house outlet suddenly rewrote its numbers & deleted that lead retroactively. Such blatant data tampering exposes exactly how far some are willing to go to distort Hungary’s political reality. By removing from their aggregate index every poll that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, they turned a ‘Poll of Polls’ into a one-sided construction.”

‼️ Less than 24 hours after I posted an analysis citing the @PoliticoEurope “Poll of Polls” — which clearly showed 🇭🇺 Hungary’s patriotic government parties, Fidesz–KDNP, ahead of Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party — the pro-war Brussels elite’s in-house outlet suddenly rewrote its… pic.twitter.com/U1oTu2xYsg

— Balázs Orbán (@BalazsOrban_HU) November 24, 2025

The timing from Politico is indeed remarkable and shows the lengths publications are willing to go to remove Orbán from power. Politico lives and dies on its access to the EU power structure, and that relationship may come at a cost. In short, this certainly looks like a “favor” that veers into outright manipulation. Of course, Politico is a media giant with more reach than any Hungarian publication, both in Hungarian and the English language. That means it can afford to take these measures, since it will receive very little heat from anyone that matters to its bottom line.

Case in point, Balázs Orbán’s post on X did not even obtain 40,000 impressions. His audience is also meaningless to Politico. They care about power first and foremost, and Orbán holds very little sway in the levers of power in Western Europe, especially in Brussels.

In fact, any move Politico makes against Orbán can only stand to be rewarded by powerful backers, with more insider access and connections to the power structure within the EU. At the same time, removing Orbán from power aligns with the fundamental ideological approach of Politico, along with many other powerful media outlets.

Expect more manipulation ahead from Brussels and its “independent” publications of choice.

___________

SOURCE

Header featured image (edited) credit: Org. post content. Emphasis added by (TLB) editors

••••

••••

Stay tuned…