Castles of Illiberal Thought

On the hills of Buda, across a momentous construction pit, a new campus for Matthias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), an Orbán-linked “think tank” and academy for nurturing illiberal elites is currently being built.

Internationally, the MCC is still little known. In 2023, the mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer, was in the news for accepting an invitation of the German-Hungarian Institute at MCC in Budapest, apparently because an advisor had confused MCC with Corvinus University. But MCC not only finds itself in Budapest, it spreads over 35 locations: in Hungary, across the Carpathian basin, and even to Brussels. On 17 September, it published a piece titled “Professors of Propaganda: How EU funding corrupts academia”. This “report” targets the Jean Monnet programme of the EU and individually named chairholders in the fields of law and politics and accuses them of being propagandists of the EU. So, perhaps it is time to have a closer look at MCC.

Political scientists speak of “three pillars” on which authoritarian regimes rest: legitimation in the eye of the public, repression of the opposition, and co-optation of elites. MCC is both in the legitimation and in the co-optation game. And it is not alone. This blog post explains how and why it matters for academic freedom in Hungary and beyond.

The rise of the GONGOs

MCC is one of many, albeit one of the most important, Government-Organised Non-Governmental Organisations (GONGOs), functioning as an illiberal academy and think tank. It is, in many ways, both complementary and juxtaposed to pressure on academic freedom at Hungarian universities and research institutes that András Pap has described in his piece. The expert-coded Academic Freedom Index of the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem), shows the gradual decline of academic freedom from 0.95 to 0.3 over the last 15 years. Even the European Union found the foundation-universities to be so problematic that they have banned them from partaking in Horizon Europe funding calls and the Erasmus mobility scheme.

Specifically, this was done under the Conditionality Regulation (Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2020/2092) based on Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2022/2506 of 15 December 2022 on measures for the protection of the Union budget against breaches of the principles of the rule of law in Hungary. Despite changes to Hungary’s regulatory framework in light of the Commission’s concerns, the changes were assessed as leaving too many loopholes for senior politicians to sit on foundation boards. Thus, the implementing decision barred specifically the EU from entering new legal commitments with “public interest trusts” in Hungary (Art. 2(2) Council Implementing Decision), which affected both outgoing Erasmus mobility and grants under the Horizon Europe programmes. Ironically, the absence of supranational funding made Hungarian research institutions even more dependent on state support.

In a recent paper, Coman et al. have explored four functions of illiberal “think tanks” in Hungary and Poland. They argue that these mediate and act as brokers between political elites, the media, intellectuals and even online troll networks (mediator function); they build international connections between European and American actors (builder function); they spread and disseminate illiberal ideas in their respective country (disseminator function); and they legitimise illiberal projects by way of using cultural capital such as academic credentials (legitimiser function). Thus, “researchers” working for GONGOs appear frequently as “experts” on state television, where they legitimise the government’s policies. For a lay audience, it is often difficult to judge expertise. Comparing Hungary and Poland,  Coman et al. point out that the Hungarian GONGOs were better connected internationally compared to their Polish counterparts.

GONGOs retain the image of independent institutes, but are actually closely linked to the state. Take MCC: Balázs Orbán – the Prime Minister’s Political Director and one of his closest advisors – has since 2020 been the chairman of its board of trustees. After Balázs Orbán took an interest in MCC, the institution grew and became the beneficiary of a transfer of shares in the state-owned companies MOL – a petrol giant – and Gedeon Richter – a pharmaceutical in 2021. The shares transferred were worth €1.3 billion. As the New York Times noted, this was nearly one per cent of Hungary’s GDP. Le Monde, meanwhile, pointed out that this single transaction surpassed the 2019 budget of all 27 of Hungary’s public higher education institutions.

With this endowment, MCC can fund many activities. Founded in 1996 through large philanthropic donations , MCC was an academy; a place of study for talented and ambitious students besides their university education. Students attended seminars and lectures at MCC and received stipends and lodging in Budapest. In recent years, MCC has extended. It still provides extra-curricular programmes to university students, but also university preparation courses and programmes for pupils in high and middle school and pupils of the Roma minority. It funds PhDs, publication fees, and runs leadership programmes in Transylvania, Transcarpathia, and for women. It also provides scholarships, including for students studying at the ESMT Business School in Berlin.

On top of this, MCC has in recent years opened “research centres”. These span areas that are of special interest to the far-right government: the Institute For Hungarian Unity, the Youth Research Institute, Climate Policy Institute, Migration Research Institute, Learning Institute and the German-Hungarian Institute. “Experts” from these institutes are often invited in Hungarian public television to present, elaborate and support the government’s positions.

MCC is large, but it is not alone. Other major players are the Centre for Fundamental Rights, the Danube Institute and the Századvég Foundation, which are also parts of the illiberal GONGO space. The Batthyány Layos Foundation acts as an intermediary for state funding, which it directs to other GONGOs.

In a country in which already meagre academic salaries have been eaten up by the highest inflation in Europe over the last years, the deal offered by GONGOs is sweet, even if it comes with a bitter aftertaste. One paper from 2024, puts the typical salary of a senior, full-time law professor in Hungary at €14,000. In contrast, MCC runs together with the Hungary Foundation the Budapest fellowship scheme that pay “junior fellows” (i.e. those without a PhD) $36,000 on top of housing and moving benefits and “senior fellows” considerably more. This fellowship is specifically targeted at US citizens. One wrote about his experience in the Guardian, describing the expectations set by MCC and how little academic freedom he enjoyed whilst working there. Thus, good salaries, stipends, and opportunities are one way in which GONGOs co-opt elites and those who would like to become elites. MCC has become an elite training centre for Fidesz.

Fighting battles of ideas abroad

In 2022, MCC opened a subsidiary in Brussels. MCC Brussels functions like a think tank, publishing short reports and policy papers, and organising events with stakeholders. It fulfills the mediator, builder and legitimiser functions described above. Through these, Orbán builds soft power in the EU, and builds spaces to connect the far right across Europe. Like its parent institution, MCC Brussels is lavishly funded. In the transparency register of the EU, MCC Brussels reported an income of over €6.3 million through grants from its parent Mathias Corvinus Collegium Alapítvány in 2024. Another acquisition was the Vienna-based “Modul University”, which MCC acquired in 2022. Reported plans for a London-branch have not yet materialised.

Other organisations are spreading internationally, too. The Center for Fundamental Rights has in 2024 opened a branch in Madrid. This office is supposed to “gather new allies … [and] shape and display a realist image of Hungary” abroad. From its activities, it is clear that it not only connects Hungary to the Iberian peninsula, but also to right-wing forces in Latin America. The Center for Fundamental Rights is best known for organising CPAC Hungary, which has become a magnet for transatlantic ring-wing networking. The Danube Institute established close links to the American Heritage Foundation, which prepared the “Project 2025” report.

Yet the GONGOs no longer stay among themselves. “Researchers” from Hungarian GONGOs can sometimes be spotted at large, international conferences, where they present legitimating narratives veiled as “research papers”. How hard it is to spot them even for expert audiences is something that surprised me when experiencing this whilst attending a leading European political science conference a while ago. For academics it is time for a reckoning, as they need to find a way to deal with “fake research” by illiberal mercenaries. Academic ideals mandate engaging with challenging ideas, but what if these ideas are funded by an authoritarian state? The first step to finding the answer is recognising GONGOs for what they are: not independent research institutions, but extended arms of their illiberal government, where “researchers” enjoy little academic freedom themselves. The academic space should think hard and fast if it wants to cooperate with such institutions.

Despite the smoke screen generated by MCC, “professors of propaganda” is a fitting title for its own staff. Academic freedom has been significantly curtailed in recent years, albeit in Hungary, not the EU at large. The Hungarian government has done this both through pressure on academic institutions on the one hand and the creation and expansion of the illiberal GONGO space on the other. This provides ways of co-opting academic elites who are drawn by over-average salaries, who then legitimise the illiberal regime using their academic credentials and halo of “expertise”. Missing legal means to address the threat of GONGOs on EU level, a strong stance of the academic community is needed. The academic community should be clear in not helping mainstream illiberal GONGOs.

Acknowledgement: The research was supported by a Fellowship of the re:constitution Programme – a joint initiative of Forum Transregionale Studien and Democracy Reporting International, funded by Stiftung Mercator.