Did Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose in front of a Nazi flag with some Portuguese far-right politicians? No, that's not true: The photo circulating on social media has been altered. The original picture, posted online by Portuguese politicians visiting Hungary in May 2023, did not have a flag with Nazi symbols in the background but pictures of football players.
The altered photo appeared in a TikTok video (archived here) on February 27, 2024, under the title:
With his Portuguese far-right friends. Well, congratulations.
(Translated from Hungarian to English by Lead Stories staff).
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Feb 28 16:27:47 2024 UTC)
The original photo (archived here) was tweeted by Ricardo Regalla Dias Pinto (next to Orban, on the left), cabinet chief of André Ventura (next to Orban, on the right), on May 6, 2023. Diogo Pacheco de Amorim, a senior politician, is the last one on the right, in the picture. There are no flags in the background.
A group of politicians of the Portuguese right-wing Chega party visited Viktor Orban (archived here) that week, in May 2023, and participated in the CPAC Hungary (archived here) conference, the Conservative Political Action Conference that took place in Budapest on May 4-5, 2023 (archived here).
Ventura tweeted a different photo (archived here) from the exact location on May 6, 2023. He added that they met Viktor Orban in the building of Puskas Academy (archived here), a football club located in the Hungarian Prime Minister's home village, Felcsut. That photo also shows a background with no flags, just images of football players.
The doctored photo was probably first tweeted by a satirical account on Twitter, @AndreCVentora. The account was suspended, and the photo was deleted, but an archived version is available through the Wayback Machine.
