Hungarian opposition leader Magyar vows to pull Hungary back toward the West in campaign launch

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar launched his party's election campaign in Budapest on Sunday, vowing to restore Hungary's Western orientation just eight weeks before he faces Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in a pivotal vote.

Magyar, a former insider in Orbán's nationalist Fidesz party, burst onto Hungary's political scene in 2024 after breaking with his political community and quickly forming the center-right Tisza party.

After taking around 30% of the vote in European Parliament elections in June 2024, he has grown Tisza into the most formidable political force Orbán has faced during his 16 years at Hungary's helm. Most independent polls show Tisza with a significant lead before the April 12 vote, an advantage which has held steady for more than a year.

“We’re standing on the threshold of victory with 56 days left to go,” he told supporters during his speech at an exposition center in Budapest on Sunday. “Tisza stands ready to govern.”

Magyar has vigorously campaigned across Hungary's rural, conservative heartland — traditionally an Orbán stronghold — holding rallies and town hall events in scores of villages and towns. He has focused on bread and butter issues such as low wages and rapidly rising living costs that have made Hungary one of the poorest countries in the European Union.

Magyar accuses Orbán and his government of mismanaging Hungary's economy and social services, and overseeing unchecked corruption he says has led to the accumulation of extreme wealth within a small circle of well-connected insiders while leaving ordinary Hungarians behind.

He has also criticized Orbán for conducting a combative foreign policy with the EU while maintaining close ties to Russia despite its war in neighboring Ukraine.

On Sunday, Magyar pointed to meetings he held with numerous European leaders at the Munich Security Conference in Germany over the weekend, and said he would put an end to Hungary “drifting out of the European Union” under Orbán.

“Hungary’s place is in Europe, not only because Hungary needs Europe, but also because Europe needs Hungary,” he said.

Magyar's comments contrasted starkly with statements Orbán made a day earlier at his own campaign launch, where he said the real threat facing Hungary was not military aggression from Russia, but the European Union.

In a 239-page program released last week, Tisza outlined its plans for how it would govern Hungary if it wins April’s elections. Fidesz has not released a program, arguing that after governing for 16 years, its voters know what kinds of policies to expect.

On Sunday, Magyar reiterated that his party plans to retain a fence Orbán's government built along the country's southern border in 2015, and said he would maintain Fidesz's policies of opposing illegal immigration and any accelerated procedure for Ukraine to join the EU.

However, Magyar has vowed to bring home billions in funding the EU has suspended to Hungary over its concerns that Orbán has eroded democratic institutions, reduced judicial independence and failed to tackle corruption.

The program also pledges to fulfill conditions for adopting the euro currency by 2030, and to invest in Hungary's faltering state health care and public transportation sectors. Tisza also plans to crack down on corruption and recover public funds it argues have been funneled into the hands of government-connected oligarchs.

"It is time to call corruption what it is: theft," Magyar said Sunday.

For its candidates in each of Hungary's 106 individual voting constituencies, Tisza has largely drawn on political neophytes locally active as entrepreneurs, doctors, economists, educators and other professionals.

Leading the ticket alongside Magyar are international energy expert Anita Orbán (no relation to the prime minister), whom the party tapped as its prospective foreign policy chief, and former Shell executive István Kapitány, who would fill a senior economy position in a future Tisza government.

Such candidates, Magyar has argued, will provide sectoral expertise he says is lacking under Orbán's government, and will help rebuild relations with Western partners and end Hungary's international isolation.

"I am proud that our experts are once again showing what it means to take the country’s fundamental issues seriously and to plan our shared future,” he said Sunday. “We don’t plan to dominate this country, but to serve it."

Péter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party who will challenge Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in national elections on April 12, speaks during the party's campaign opener event in Budapest, Hungary on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

Péter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party who will challenge Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in national elections on April 12, speaks during the party's campaign opener event in Budapest, Hungary on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

Péter Magyar, center, leader of the opposition Tisza party who will challenge Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in national elections on April 12. poses for a group photo with all the candidates of the party, after their campaign opener event in Budapest, Hungary on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

Péter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party who will challenge Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in national elections on April 12, speaks during the party's campaign opener event in Budapest, Hungary on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

Péter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party who will challenge Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in national elections on April 12, speaks during the party's campaign opener event in Budapest, Hungary on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Hold on to those Thanksgiving turkeys! WKRP is coming to Cincinnati — for real this time.

“I cannot, by contract, tell you when. I cannot tell you who. But I can tell you, direct to the camera, WKRP, after 48 years, is coming to Cincinnati,” D.P. McIntire, who runs the media nonprofit that is auctioning the famous call letters, told The Associated Press. “Book it! It’s done!”

The call sign was made famous by “WKRP in Cincinnati,” a CBS television sitcom that ran from 1978 to 1982. It made stars of actors like Loni Anderson and Richard Sanders, whose bumbling newsman Les Nessman reported on a Thanksgiving promotion gone bad when live but flightless turkeys were dropped from a helicopter.

McIntire remembers watching the show’s first episode — featuring disc jockeys Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) and Venus Flytrap (Tim Reid) — in the living room with his parents and older sister.

“And at the end of the 30-minute episode,” he said, “I got up and I proclaimed, `I’m going to be in radio. And if I ever have the opportunity, I’m going to run a station called WKRP.’”

McIntire said he got his first on-air job at 13 as a news anchor at WNQQ “Wink FM” in Blairsville, Pennsylvania.

Fast forward to 2014, when his North Carolina-based nonprofit acquired the call sign from the Federal Communications Commission. Stations in Dallas, Georgia, and Alexandria, Tennessee, previously bore the letters.

McIntire laughs as he recalls his chat with a woman in the agency’s audio division.

He had two sets of call letters in mind. She told him he needed a third.

“Being the jokester that I am, I said, `Well, if you need three, and if it’s available, we’ll take WKRP,’” he said. “And 90 seconds later, she came back and she said, `Mr. McIntire. Congratulations. You’re the general manager of WKRP in Raleigh, North Carolina.’”

WKRP-LP — 101.9 on the FM dial — went live Nov. 30, 2015. The LP stands for “low power,” a class of station created to serve more local audiences that didn’t want mass-market content.

“Our format is what radio used to be 35 years ago in small-town America,” he said. “There is Greats of the 80s, Sounds of the 70s, 90s Rewind.”

LPFM is restricted to nonprofit organizations like his Oak City Media, and it’s definitely local.

“Your broadcast capacity is limited to 100 watts,” McIntire said. “So, your average range is between, depending on your terrain and circumstances, 4 and 12 miles (6 and 19 kilometers) in any direction. Enough to cover a small town.”

And, by necessity, it’s a low-budget affair.

The transmitter is in a corner of McIntire’s garage, between a recycling bin and the cleaning supplies. The broadcast antenna sits atop a 25-foot (7.62-meter) metal flagpole in the backyard. The studio — microphones and a mixing board hooked up to a computer — is in McIntire’s basement.

Like the WKRP of television, McIntire and his partners set out to be “irreverent.” One of their offerings is a two-hour show called “Weird Al and Friends,” focusing on the satirical works of Weird Al Yankovic.

They even had an annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway. But don’t call the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — they hand out gift certificates to a local grocery store.

“We don’t toss them out of helicopters,” he said with a laugh.

After more than a decade on the air, the 56-year-old McIntire decided it was time to pass the reins.

“We’re in a position where the older members like me who started the station are turning the leadership over to younger members,” he said. “They’re not interested in radio.”

They put out a call for bids to use the call letters on FM and AM radio, as well as television and digital television.

They intend to use the proceeds for a new nonprofit venture called Independent Broadcast Consultants. He said IBC will be “geared specifically toward helping these new broadcasters get up and running, get the consulting that they need in order to be, hopefully, more successful than we have been.”

Oak City Media was all set to hand off the television-related suffixes — WKRPTV and WKRPDT — when another group defaulted on the agreement, McIntire said. But he said the Cincinnati deal is in the bag, he just can’t legally discuss it.

“It will be radio,” he said. “But that’s all I can tell you at this time.”

Robert Thompson, who uses a season 2 episode of “WKRP” in his TV history class at Syracuse University, said it’s telling that people see real value in a fictional station whose call letters invoke the word “crap.”

“The value comes from the love of the characters for each other,” he said. “And now by buying this thing, the value comes from our love of the characters themselves.”

Whatever they do with the call sign, McIntire hopes they will be true to the show that inspired it.

“It has a special place in the hearts of an awful lot of people,” he said. “And we have been very, very, very proud to have been a steward of that legacy.”

D.P. McIntire leans against a deck beneath the WKRP radio antenna in the backyard of his home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

D.P. McIntire points to the transmitter for WKRP radio in a corner of his garage in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

The WKRP radio antenna sits atop a 25-foot flagpole behind D.P. McIntire's home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

A photo of the cast members of the sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati" sits in a window at the home of D.P. McIntire in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

D.P. McIntire stands beneath a WKRP banner in the backyard of his home in Raleigh, N.C., on Thursday, April 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)