have included<\/a> American figures like Gladden Pappin and Patrick Deneen, both of whom have close ties to U.S. Vice President JD Vance. Mr. Vance himself spoke at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest just last week.<\/p>\n\u201cThey have the same vision of the world, the same idea that Western civilization is under threat,\u201d said Laure Neumayer, a French political scientist with a focus in Central Europe.<\/p>\n
As MCC Brussels tried to build up an intellectual basis for populism and worked to establish a trans-Atlantic network, the group followed on years of groundwork laid by The Danube Institute and other far-right think tanks.<\/p>\n
But MCC Brussels had its more specific goal of remaking the European Union from within.<\/p>\n
Fidesz\u2019s goal is \u201coccupying Brussels,\u201d Bal\u00e1zs Orban, the prime minister\u2019s political adviser, told the MCC Brussels conference in December. The point is to \u201ccreate a situation where there is a possibility, a real possibility, a real chance of leadership change in Brussels.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Furedi is blunt. \u201cThe only thing that\u2019s holding populism back is the lack of professionalism, and the intellectual immaturity of these movements,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The point is to make anti-establishment populists more established.<\/p>\n
A question is whether Mr. Magyar will now upend the model.<\/p>\n
Mr. Magyar\u2019s party pledged before the election to defund organizations like Mathias Corvinus Collegium, and now that he has won so many seats in Parliament, he theoretically has the mandate to do it.<\/p>\n
But Petra Bard, a professor of sustainable rule of law at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said the new government would probably have to dissolve such organizations to claw their assets back.<\/p>\n
If the parliament and Mr. Magyar try to do that, the Hungarian president, Tamas Sulyok, who was appointed by the old, Fidesz-dominated legislature, could challenge the move in court, using one of the few powers in the mostly ceremonial job. In his victory speech on Sunday, Mr. Magyar called on Mr. Sulyok, who has time left in his term, to depart early and \u201cleave office with as much dignity as he has left.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the difficulties, Ms. Bard said she thinks Mr. Magyar is likely to at least try to dissolve such organizations, which are privately managed foundations financed by public assets.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey expressly promised,\u201d she said. \u201cI think people expect them to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
MCC Brussels does not see Mr. Magyar as an ideological opponent. Mr. Furedi pointed out that he \u201cnever actually challenged\u201d the more traditional conservative values that \u201cunderpinned the Orban regime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyond that, the group has already received its yearly budget, which Mr. Furedi said was smaller than the 6 million euros it got in 2024, its last published disclosure, but still comfortably in the millions of euros. So the organization would have some room to run even if the educational institution in Budapest was defunded.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no chance of them disappearing from the Brussels scene anytime soon,\u201d said Kenneth Haar, a researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory, which focuses on lobbying in European Union policymaking. \u201cBrussels has become an important power base for them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban worked with his allies to try to change the European Union…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[26374,307,939,18608,422,2783,14660,26372,26373,3591,11947,6938,26371,25396,25397,350],"class_list":{"0":"post-40698","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-viktor-orban","8":"tag-danube-institute","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european-union","11":"tag-fidesz-party","12":"tag-hungary","13":"tag-international-relations","14":"tag-magyar","15":"tag-mathias-corvinus-collegium","16":"tag-mcc-brussels-political-organizations","17":"tag-orban","18":"tag-peter","19":"tag-politics-and-government","20":"tag-populism-theory-and-philosophy","21":"tag-tisza-hungarian-political-party","22":"tag-viktor","23":"tag-viktor-orban"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116457351609460261","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}