The takeover of Hungary’s largest publishing house and bookstore chain by a private foundation with close ties to the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has prompted walkouts from authors who fear the sale heralds a further step in the country’s crackdown on media freedoms.
The Libri Group, which includes the Libri publishing house, a chain of 57 bookstores by the same name and several smaller imprints for literary fiction, announced last week it had sold 98.5% of its business to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a private college that has received vast amounts of direct funding from the government since 2020.
The board of trustees of the MCC, which has been likened to a training ground for future cadres of Orbán’s hard-right, populist Fidesz party, is chaired by Balázs Orbán, the political director and strategic adviser to the prime minister. As of 2021, the MCC is understood to control assets worth more than the annual budget of Hungary’s entire higher education system.
The takeover, which has yet to be cleared by competition authorities but is expected to be finalised by the end of the month, will make the Hungarian state the dominant player in the Hungarian publishing market. Libri’s stores account for nearly half of the country’s book trade market, and its publishing arm for nearly a fifth of books published.
As well as awarding one of the country’s most prestigious literary prizes, Libri also publishes translations of prominent English-language authors who have championed freedom of expression in their writing, such as Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie.
While Libri’s founder remains on its board and its editorial director said he did not expect any “visible changes” in its literary output, there are fears that via MCC, the government will strive to establish a similar hegemony in Hungarian literature that it has achieved in media and theatre.
In protest against the takeover, Éva Péterfy-Novák, a bestselling Hungarian author, announced she had terminated her existing contracts with Libri and would no longer release her work through the publisher in the future.
“This publishing house was like a family to me, and I don’t want to be part of a family where the Fidesz is the patriarch,” she said. “It is inconceivable for me to celebrate Christmas dinner with those people who dominate the entire country, who lie, steal and use propaganda to brainwash society.
“I am certain that the same thing will happen as what happened with universities, theatres or [former independent news portals] Index and Origo, which is that they will take full control and use Libri for their own ideological and political purposes. It’s only a matter of time.”
A Berlin-based author, Mátyás Dunajcsik, 39, who worked at Libri Publishing as editor in chief for literary fiction from its foundation in 2011 until 2014, announced on Monday he was pulling his book of collected Hungarian-language poetry that was due to be published by a Libri imprint, Jelenkor, in the autumn, instead releasing it with a smaller independent press in 2024.
In a statement, he described MCC as “an organisation which, with its conferences and publications, actively spreads Russian war propaganda, misogyny, xenophobia, homo- and transphobia, and is part of the current Hungarian government’s project to crack down [on] the complete cultural infrastructure of my former homeland”.
“From now on, every book published by or sold in the bookshops of the Libri Group directly finances this organisation,” he wrote.
In an interview with the Guardian, Dunajcsik said it had been easier for him to reach his decision because he no longer lived in Hungary. “In Europe, we have protection mechanisms for when writers are being arrested or shot,” he said. “But this is a much more quiet, and cleverer kind of stifling of free speech. It mainly works through defunding or appropriation.”
Dunajcsik said he would in future concentrate on writing and publishing in German. “I know for some people leaving behind your native tongue is the greatest sacrilege, but for me it’s more important to remain a writer than remain a Hungarian writer.”
Most of the authors on Libri’s list have so far declined to comment on the sale, while the Fidesz-adjacent Hungarian writers’ union welcomed the takeover.
One anonymous Hungarian Instagram channel posted a widely shared picture of the logo on the bookstore’s exteriors doctored to read “illibri” – a reference to the landmark 2014 speech in which Orbán proclaimed his intention to build “an illiberal state”.
In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, the conservative American publicist and Orbán supporter Rod Dreher recently said the Hungarian leader was seeking to build a “deep state” in the culture sector to cement his legacy.
“I think one of the reasons that the Orbán government is building up all these institutions using government funds and government power is because he knows he’s not going to be prime minister forever,” Dreher said. “And he wants to have some sort of deep state built that will be able to survive whoever is coming.”
Flora Garamvolgyi contributed to this report
