Why the Pegasus spying scandal probably won’t harm Viktor Orban

‘The EU has a dictatorship growing inside of it,’ proclaimed Guy Verhofstadt on Monday afternoon, while calling for an EU inquiry into the ‘Pegasus’ scandal, which has exposed the potential Hungarian misuse of state surveillance on anti-government journalists, media owners and businesspeople.

The ‘Pegasus Project’, a multinational investigation led by the French non-profit organisation Forbidden Stories, suggests that investigative journalists critical of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s regime (along with independent media owners and government-critical businesspeople) were the subject of phone hacking in recent years. The Pegasus software, marketed to international governments by the NSO Group, an Israeli company, is capable of recording phone calls, accessing private messages, and switching on a device’s video and microphone without permission.

Forensic analyses confirmed that the phones of anti-Orbán journalists were indeed infected with the Pegasus spyware, and circumstantial evidence makes government involvement in the affair seem likely. Szabolcs Panyi, one of the journalists targeted, noted the clear correlation between dates on which his phone was attacked by Pegasus and his official requests for comment to government departments.