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Budapest. The war of nerves surrounding the Liberal University of Central Europe (CEU), against which the Hungarian right-wing national government has been campaigning for a year and a half, is continuing. All indications are that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán likes this. This came out clearly on Thursday as a result of his cabinet's response to CEU director Michel Ignatieff's threat to transfer the educational institution to Vienna. There, the CEU was already "warmly welcomed", said the head of the CEU. However, he does not mention that the FPÖ, which co-directs in Austria, is anathema to the university.
Ignatieff had invited the press conference to give an ultimatum to Orbán: if the government does not create the conditions for the legal maintenance of the functioning of the CEU before 1 December, the institution will be obliged to leave Budapest. The problem is that Hungary does not want to sign a long-negotiated memorandum with the US state of New York, which, according to the new legal situation, would be a condition for the continued functioning of the CUE in Budapest. In the summer of 2017, Orbán had promulgated a new law aimed at CEUs: foreign-run universities can operate in Hungary only if they also have a seat and campus in their home country and are not 39, there is a bilateral agreement at the governmental level.
The first requirement fulfilled CEU: He opened a campus in Bard College New York. It only misses the Budapest signature on the bilateral agreement. Ignatieff said that Mr Orbán had declared a few weeks ago to the US ambbadador in Budapest that Hungary would not sign. The reasons were not mentioned.
The two most powerful communicators of Orbán – the spokesman Zoltán Kovács and his minister, Gergely Gulyás – immediately and unanimously called Ignatieff's ultimatum of a "political bluff" coined by George Soros. Kovács added that in his opinion, the CEU in Budapest will be "in the future". As he concretely imagines an agreement, he did not say.
Clearly, Orbán wants to keep the subject of Soros on the agenda of the election campaign debates for the 2019 European elections. Because the American investor is in the truest sense of the word his favorite enemy: he needs him as a figure of hate to reinforce his camp. The Chief Justice also suggested in August that this was a deliberate tactic: he spoke of the Hungarian philosopher criticism as the government, Ágnes Heller, whose voice was important to "hold together" the camp favorable to the government. Without enemies, the Fidesz party would have a hard time defining itself.
Challenge to the European Parliament
The UEC issue is also becoming a challenge in relations with the European People's Party (EPP), of which Fidesz is a member. EPP leader Manfred Weber has repeatedly condemned relations between Orbán and the CEU. The fall of the university was one of the reasons why many EPP representatives in the European Parliament voted in favor of opening a European case against Hungary in September. At the same time, however, Weber needs the help of the Hungarians to surrender to the EPP's lead candidate for the presidency of the European Commission.
If Orbán pbades the ultimatum, the CEU will visit the pavilions of the Otto Wagner Hospital in Vienna in autumn 2019 – where the wind of the FPÖ is unfavorable. Viennese FPÖ club observer Johann Gudenus had already expressed his sympathy for Orbán's anti-Soros course in the spring. The CEU is in the opinion of Maximilian Krauss, FPÖ lecturer on education, "totally expandable", and the Soros Foundation is not an "objective work in the scientific sense".
Soros, a Holocaust survivor and American philanthropist, born in Hungary, founded the CEU, which has been operating in Budapest for 26 years, to teach young people from Eastern Europe. a liberal and democratic thought.
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