This restructuring is no ordinary corporate acquisition. It is the direct realization of a scenario that CIVIL Media warned about exactly 24 hours after the tectonic political shifts in Hungary following Orbán’s electoral cataclysm. This was detailed in the analysis “Magyar won. The real test for Hungary begins.”, followed by “Time for vigilance – authoritarian structures adapt quickly” and “Orbán’s electoral cataclysm and lessons on the resilience of authoritarianism and oligarchy”, as well as the warnings outlined in the republished article “The sale of N1 is ready…” and several others.

Managerial “purge” prior to the regulatory green light

On August 17, the executor of this operation, Alpac Capital’s owner Pedro Vargas Santos David, was registered at his own request in the Serbian Business Registers Agency as the new and sole director of the companies managing the Adria News Network.

With this bureaucratic blitzkrieg, the previous executives were literally wiped off the map. Left without their functions overnight were Mihailo Jovićević (from the portal and newspaper Nova and the weekly Radar), Aleksandra Mitić (from the company Dan Graf, publisher of the daily Danas), as well as Brent Sadler and Janez Živko from Adria News and Nova S television, as reported by the Belgrade-based Nedeljnik.rs.

The Hungarian propaganda connection and the “Alpac” Trojan horse

To understand the true threat of this acquisition, one must examine Alpac Capital’s European dossier. Behind the facade of a Western investment fund lie deep connections with the autocratic regime in Budapest.

An international investigation conducted by the French newspaper Le Monde, the Portuguese Expresso, and the Hungarian investigative center Direkt36 irrefutably proved that the previous takeover of the pan-European channel Euronews by Alpac Capital in 2022 was indirectly financed with tens of millions of euros from the Hungarian state-owned Széchenyi Funds. The Hungarian PR agency New Land Media, the main executor of the Orbán government’s propaganda campaigns, also directly participated in that transaction. Internal documents openly stated that the goal of that incursion was “mitigating left-wing ideology and bias.”

The CEO himself, Pedro Vargas Santos David, maintains close personal and business ties with the Hungarian government. This very same network is now activated to swallow Serbian critical voices.

Resistance from journalists: We will not be anyone’s prey

Aware of the danger, journalists are not remaining silent. The trade unions of Nova, Radar, N1, and Forbes strongly condemned the opacity of the operation, declaring that they will not allow journalism to become anyone’s prey. The editorial board of N1 sent a clear message of defiance, stating that their daily work remains their sovereign territory.

Strong support has also arrived from Europe. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), together with trade unions from across the region, issued a joint reaction, warning that this carries serious consequences for media pluralism in the Western Balkans. They rightfully recall that following Alpac Capital’s entry into Euronews, journalists there suffered a massive layoff plan, resulting in the departure of over 175 employees.

From the April debacle in Budapest to the August purge in Belgrade

When the electoral rise of Péter Magyar in April 2026 triggered a political earthquake for Viktor Orbán’s regime, independent analyses clearly pointed out a key lesson regarding the resilience of authoritarianism and oligarchy: an endangered autocrat does not retreat. On the contrary, when authoritarianism is threatened domestically, it consolidates its hybrid network and exports its influence beyond its own borders.

The real test for Hungary began this spring, but the true test for the resilience of the Western Balkans is happening right now. Faced with domestic cracks, Orbán’s oligarchy is tightening its grip on the neighborhood, deploying the well-known tactic of capturing the information space.

CIVIL’s analyses accurately predicted and mapped these tectonic shifts in both the domestic and regional media landscape over a prolonged period. This process has been unfolding much longer and far more obviously than the public, civil society, and pro-democratic entities wanted to acknowledge. The cleared space in the Balkans is rapidly filled by those whose primary currency is not the free market, but political control, ownership manipulation, and the spread of disinformation.

A test for Brussels: Institutional blindness or action?

The fall of management in these Serbian media bastions is not just a local problem—it is the most serious threat to the democratic and free media ecosystem in the entire region this year. The Budapest-Belgrade axis is rapidly closing its propaganda loop.

The time for diplomatic press releases and expressing “deep concern” has expired. The European Commission, alongside leading international journalistic organizations, has a responsibility and obligation to urgently abandon their silence and calculation in the face of a series of transnational media engineering operations. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has become “famous” for a series of omissions and passivity in these processes, thereby directly or indirectly legitimizing the operations of occupying independent media in the Western Balkans, as well as in Europe and beyond. This is not about isolated operations in just one or two countries on Europe’s periphery. Warnings about these processes have been launched from CIVIL’s media platform for years, with the organization pointing to the Western Balkans as a testing ground for media, political, and hybrid operations, which are later implemented much more broadly.

CIVIL continuously, openly, and publicly warns and calls for action. Therefore, in the context of the latest events in the media sphere, it emphasizes the need for an urgent and thorough international investigation into the true origins of the capital behind this so-called “investment” by Alpac Capital in Serbia.

If the new European mechanisms, such as the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), hold any substantial weight and are not merely a dead letter, Brussels has an obligation to activate them immediately to trace the money and the links to political and financial centers of power. These funds are pouring through proxy funds from Budapest to Belgrade—and also to Skopje, which is a separate story.

In cooperation with the MEDIA OBSERVATORY | CIVIL