A vlog called Partizan run by Hungarian left-wing activist Marton Gulyas has cooperated with data provider DatAdat, a company with ties to people who played key roles in former leftist-liberal cabinets. The company also came into focus during this spring's election campaign, lending support to the joint prime ministerial candidate of Hungary's opposition parties. This kind of network-building activity, which also raises some national security issues, was exposed by the Hungarian Mandiner portal.

Both Partizan’s operator Marton Gulyas and Peter Marki-Zay, the opposition’s prime ministerial candidate who failed in Hungary’s parliamentary elections in April, have spoken about foreign funds in the past few days. Gulyas also made mention of DatAdat, a consulting data provider campaign-technology company with links to former socialist-liberal government officials, the Hungarian Mandiner portal writes.

In an interview with Telex, a Hungarian opposition news site, Gulyas disclosed that roughly one-third or one-quarter of the operation costs incurred by the non-profit organisation that runs the programme is covered by Patreon (a content provider crowdfunding platform – ed.). Thus, the majority of donations are not anonymous micro-donations, but come in the form of larger private donations and grants awarded on foreign tenders. Marki-Zay, leader of the Everyone’s Hungary Movement (Mindenki Magyarországa Mozgalom; MMM), revealed in a podcast that even in June hundreds of millions of (Hungarian) forints arrived from the United States to finance their campaign.

The Mandiner news site throws some light on how a network with international actors is built up and how it played a key role in the parliamentary election campaign of the opposition’s so-called „rainbow party alliance,” as well as on the actors apparently backed by foreign funds and donations.

Foreign donors in George Soros’s network

In December last year, Partizan announced on its Facebook page that the organisation behind the vlog, the Partizan Foundation for the Production of System-critical Content, had been granted funding by two prestigious, invitation-based tenders. The organisation won 15 thousand dollars on the the German Marshall Fund’s tender while it was awarded 200 thousand euros on The Foundation for Democracy and Pluralism’s tender. Gulyas was probably referring to these founding sources in his interview with Telex published this week.

As it turns out, one of the leaders of The Foundation for Democracy and Pluralism, whose mission is to promote civic engagement, is Daniel Sachs, who also sits on the international advisory board of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF). Soros’s OSF also appears on the donors’ list of the Washington-based German Marshall Fund.

„Even in mid-June, hundreds of millions of (Hungarian) forints in funding arrived from the United States (…) With the help of this, we were able to pay the last campaign bills,”

said Marki-Zay. Disclosing the accounts of their campaign budget to the public has revealed that the funds were disbursed by the Action for Democracy. In response to a Hungarian portal’s inquiry, the organisation stated that it did not support the general political campaign of the opposition alliance, the funds were specifically raised for Everyone’s Hungary Movement for the purpose of „disseminating information”. In another statement, the organisation emphasized that the donations come exclusively or mostly from Hungarian citizens. No one knows how they can tell this as the background of donors is unclear, let alone transparent, the portal notes.

However, it is clear that the advisors and leaders of the Action for Democracy include David Koranyi, who was an advisor to former leftist PM Gordon Bajnai and has served as senior advisor on urban policy to leftist Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony since 2021; Anne Applebaum, historian and writer for The Washington Post; Wesley Clark, retired US general; and Chris Maroshegyi, strategist for Meta (Facebook), among other responsibilities.

In the same article, the failed prime ministerial candidate, who is now the mayor of the south Hungarian town of Hodmezovasarhely, admitted during the campaign that fundraising for his Hungarian movement was carried out by the very campaign technology company that Gulyas also talked about: DatAdat. It’s wort mentioning at this point that a few days before the election, the Hungarian Index portal came into possession of an invoice, which was issued to the name of DatAdat Professional Kft after a meeting in a restaurant on 17 March. The document was proof that Marki-Zay’s meal was paid for by DatAdat.

Leftist-liberal network in the background

The network of companies that the other leftist premier, Ferenc Gyurcsany and his family began building years ago with a view to acquiring and organising publicity online and in social media, as well as to collecting and analysing data and profiling – is of huge importance.

The network includes DatAdat, which is clearly the domain of Mr Bajnai’s people, because his former state secretary Viktor Szigetvari and Intelligence Minister Adam Ficsor are also linked to the company.

One of the leaked recordings of the attempted sale of the Budapest City Hall complex revealed statements about Mr Bajnai’s possible role by Gyula Gansperger, who presumably knows the ex-PM well from the Wallis Group:

“In Hungary, – I think – there are basically foreign forces and financiers behind the movement of the whole opposition. (…) Who are these forces? One of them is, let’s put it this way, the Soros Empire. The other is composed of big-capital groups, that is, from Germany and especially the United States, who want to gain influence here. I think Gordon is their man. Not in the bad sense of the word,”

After Karacsony, they lined up behind Marki-Zay

The sponsors of Bajnai’s former political movement, the Haza es Haladas Alapitvany (Home and Progress Foundation), included Soros-linked organisations, as well as the Center for American Progress, which the press referred to at the time by saying “the hinterland of Democrat Hillary Clinton became the main sponsor of Bajnai.” Similar to this, the Egyutt (Together) group, also led by ex-PM Bajnai, did not live up to the hopes of the Left, so after the 2014 fiasco it seemed that the ex-premier would withdraw.

Last year, however, he returned. He first threw his weight behind the PM candidacy of Budapest’s mayor (the aforementioned David Koranyi also appeared as an advisor to Mr Bajnai), and then the candidacy of Peter Marki-Zay. DatAdat did the same: in addition to the IT support and the invoice case detailed above, it may have also provided support for Mr Marki-Zay’s campaign with other means.

Some media outlets have linked to DatAdat the infamous phone campaign during which people who had never given away their personal details to the leftist coalition began receiving text messages from Mr Marki-Zay. In a related broadcast by Partizan Peter Zarand, a former campaign advisor of the mayor of Hodmezovasarhely, tried to downplay the text messages described as outright data abuse by the media, saying DatAdat was chosen in the first place to ensure that its background was GDPR-compliant and that the company had no phishing activities. We handled voters’ data „with the utmost care and in a legal way,” Mr Zarand explained.

The company has issued a statement in response to various interpretations released by the press, explaining that a smear campaign is being waged against them. Their communique dubbed „Smear campaign against DatAdat group based on lies” stated: „The real purpose of the flood of lies is to interfere in the ongoing Hungarian elections, to spread fake news about the opposition campaign to voters, the consequences of which are grossly harmful to the business interests of the DatAdat group, and we are taking legal action. The outcome of the legal proceedings is no question, as we provide our services to our international clientele in a fair and legal manner, paying all taxes and using only legal solutions, but it is also clear that the outcome of these proceedings can only be expected long after the elections.”

So, that was this year’s opposition campaign

Gulyas and Marki-Zay admitted that US sources linked to the Soros network were also among their donors, and that both the Partizan and MMM were supported by DatAdat, a company controlled by leftist-liberal circles that has been developing campaign technology for years. However, both of these directions, the foreign funding and the questionable campaign technology, appear to raise questions. The former includes national security concerns, as foreign campaign financing is prohibited in Hungary.

In any case, all this may make it a little more understandable how the cooperation between Partizan and DatAdat could have prompted so many interviews with Marki-Zay on Gulyas’s YouTube channel, Mandiner concludes.