A 44-year-old man from Bölcske, Tolna County, Hungary has been arrested for allegedly plotting an assassination attempt against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary. The local court has ordered his detention for one month, according to the news site Teol.hu.
The suspect has published a video on the social media site TikTok in which he proclaimed that the supposed offences of PM Orbán warrant his murder. Reportedly, he threatened other Hungarian public figures with violence as well, but they have not been specified in media reports.
The suspect has since deleted the video, but it was too late—authorities have already taken notice.
During the investigation, he admitted to creating the video, but claimed he did so because of recent ‘family tragedies’. The psychiatric evaluation of the suspect is still underway. The man’s home in Bölcske, a small town of around 2,500 people on the bank of the Danube River, was also searched. There, police seized ‘a tool capable of ending human life,’ although the object has not been specified; and that definition is so broad that it could include simple household objects as well.
‘The staff of the National Bureau of Investigation questioned the man as a suspect for the crime of preparation to commit murder, which is punishable by law with imprisonment from one to five years,’ the Tolna County Prosecutor’s Office wrote in a public statement following the incident.
Last year, Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia, who has close relations with his Hungarian counterpart, was shot five times by an assassin on 15 May. Thankfully, he has survived the attack, he is still serving in office to this day, and was even one of the distinguished speakers at CPAC Hungary 2025.
Famously, only a few months later, on 13 July 2024, US President and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, another right-wing populist leading figure, was also the victim of an assassination attempt. During a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight rifle rounds towards President Trump speaking on stage, grazing his ear with one of his bullets, and mortally shooting one of the rally attendees.
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