Any hope of enacting new media legislation in Hungary faded away on Wednesday as the main opposition party Fidesz withdrew its support for a bill based on a compromise by the country’s five parliamentary parties.
The enactment of a media law requires the votes of two-thirds of MPs, which has provided a major stumbling block to introducing badly needed improvements on the current law, which came into effect in 1996.
Expert panels have made several attempts over the past seven years to design a law fit to regulate Hungary’s fast-changing media environment. Since 2007, the five parties have worked out a series of compromise bills, all of which failed for a variety of reasons.
One version published late last year provoked an outcry by commentators in the media, who objected to draconian measures which appeared to threaten press freedom. The parties dropped the offending passages, but the bill again hit the buffers as the liberal Free Democrats pushed for a regulatory structure better insulated from the controlling interests of politicians.
Still, there was broad agreement that the cross-party bill served its main purpose of bringing media rules in conformity with European Union regulations and providing the legal basis for cross-platform digitalisation.
The minority Socialist government and the opposition parties had come under increasing pressure from Hungary’s broadcast media industry to arrive at a consensus on how to revamp the current outdated law, such as providing the framework for delivering digital content to mobile phones.
Fidesz, which according to current polling evidence would win a landslide in an election — giving it a two-thirds majority in parliament — said in a statement on Wednesday that the bill had undergone so many permutations and compromises that it was not fit to handle “the current media regulatory chaos”.
Hungary’s parliament on Tuesday elected a new partly technocratic government whose term expires in spring 2010.