Budapest (Hungary).– In mid-February, the Hungarian branch of the NGO Transparency International chose the nearly deserted premises of Central European University in Budapest to unveil its annual country corruption ranking to the press. A handful of journalists and a few representatives from foreign embassies gathered in a small room of the emblematic institution founded by billionaire George Soros, which, under Viktor Orbán’s battering, relocated most of its activities to Vienna (Austria) at the beginning of the decade.

For the third consecutive year, Hungary is the most corrupt country in the European Union, sharing 82^nd place in the ranking with Cuba, Tanzania and Burkina Faso.

This “corruption perception index” is itself highly questionable, and other studies, for example from the World Bank, paint a less gloomy picture. But in any case, to dismiss its results with a wave of the hand, the Hungarian government simply needed to point out that Transparency International is funded both by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, its nemesis, and by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

“This indicator is nothing more than a political weapon to discredit those who oppose the liberal world order,” responded Zoltán Kovács, Secretary of State for Communications and International Relations.

Similarly, the documentary film exposing the shameless enrichment of the Orbán clan, viewed on YouTube by three million people in ten days (“The Dynasty”, with English subtitles), is also unlikely to shake the convictions of the “Orbanist” camp. According to government propaganda, Ukraine, seeking to destabilise Hungary, is behind it, and the Hungarian journalists from Direkt36 who produced it are in the pay of American Democrats.

Ukraine has nothing to do with it, but this small media outlet, which produces the best investigative journalism in Hungary and represents a genuine counter-power, does indeed supplement its readers’ micro-donations with a multitude of public and private grants from the United States. Its star journalist, Szabolcs Panyi, a veritable scoop machine, has benefited from scholarships for training in the United States. This earns him accusations of being a CIA agent from pro-government media.

These same media omit that Viktor Orbán, like many other promising young people emerging from communism, was also “nurtured” on dollars, with scholarships from George Soros’s foundation, to study for a semester at Oxford (United Kingdom) and take a discovery trip to the United States.

The “dollar left”

From the early 1990s, the former “Eastern bloc” countries were copiously showered with American funds, from both the government and private foundations. Particularly Hungary, George Soros’s country of origin, which he made the laboratory for his “open society”. The aim was to bring about, as quickly as possible, the then-triumphant pairing of liberal democracy and market economy, and to anchor the “Eastern countries” to the Western world.

Three decades later, the Open Society Foundation has almost deserted the region (with the exception of Ukraine) and the Trump-Musk tandem has frozen, perhaps permanently, USAID’s $40 billion in development aid and all other public aid.

Thanks to the usaspending.gov website, created in 2007 to ensure transparency of funding provided by the US government, it is very easy for Donald Trump’s teams to identify USAID recipients. Every day, pro-Orbán Hungarian media mock those who have received a few thousand dollars here, or a few tens of thousands of dollars there, to fight against Roma segregation, for LGBTQ+ rights, or against violence against women.

“All money coming from the United States must be made public and those who receive it must be sanctioned.” Viktor Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister

During the last legislative elections in 2022, Péter Márki-Zay’s movement, the sole candidate of an anti-Orbán bloc, received €5.7 million in funding from Action for Democracy, an NGO created by Hungarians in the United States to “support civil society on the front lines in countries where democracy is threatened”. A report by Hungarian intelligence services concludes that it served as a cover for funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a bipartisan American private foundation (supported by both Republicans and Democrats) financed by the federal budget. The NGO denies this.

The sum is paltry compared to the unlimited resources available to Fidesz, the ruling party, which has almost merged with the state and dried up the revenue sources of its competitors. But it was enough to mobilise the right against the external threat and its fifth column, “the dollar left”.

Viktor Orbán is rubbing his hands at seeing these sources that feed a myriad of NGOs, vestiges of political liberalism in Hungary and irritants for his national-conservative government, dry up. In a long diatribe on 7 February on the public radio Kossuth, he threatened: “All money coming from the United States must be made public and those who receive it must be sanctioned. [...] The people involved will face legal consequences.”

The Magyar leader is not alone in this stance. In Slovakia, Robert Fico treats the tens of thousands of demonstrators who regularly march against him as agents in Soros’s pay. In Romania, the private channel TV Romania is conducting a defamation campaign against NGOs active against Roma segregation (more or less the same as in Hungary), and Călin Georgescu, a far-right candidate who appeared in the first round of a presidential election cancelled in December, directly targets “Sorosists”.

A civil society built “from the top down”

These media and NGOs now look like the last islands of progressivism in a rising national-conservative ocean. “Civil society projects were set up from the top down, superimposed on society. It was an opportunity for the intellectual elite of the time to convert to liberalism, but without truly rooting it,” analyses Gautier Pirotte, a sociologist at the University of Liège (Belgium) and author of a doctoral thesis entitled “The Invention of Civil Societies in Eastern Europe”.

The researcher points out that “associations and NGOs were not created out of generosity, but as an instrument of EU integration. They were showered with money to push through reforms – democratic and market economy – that seemed desirable to the triumphant Westerners. Populist movements are riding on the disappointment of some of the population with the economic transition, but even more so on the non-entrenchment of these models and the inability to popularise NGOs, perceived more as service organisations than as popular, social movements.”

In the opposition, few voices criticise this model. Among them is Csaba Toth, a journalist for the left-wing media outlet Mérce: “This money is not charity. American political interference in Europe, as I have seen, has made some NGOs, media outlets and political movements lazy and less responsive to popular feelings and demands. They no longer cared so much about the people they felt responsible for as they did about the tastes and demands of their donors.”

Nevertheless, these organisations now under fire fulfil essential tasks. They produce information to counter powerful state propaganda, provide lawyers for asylum seekers, ensure schooling for marginalised Roma, bring cases of discrimination against minorities before Hungarian and European courts, and so on. It is they who will take the case to court to allow the thirtieth Budapest Pride to be held in June, which Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has just announced he wants to ban.

Media at the heart of the storm

In Central Europe, the media are particularly affected by American cuts. Reporters Without Borders believes that “Trump is plunging journalism into chaos” based on an USAID fact sheet, according to which the agency has funded, worldwide, the training and support of 6,200 journalists, 707 non-state media and 279 NGOs in the media sector. The NGO also points out that the US Congress had earmarked $268 million this year alone to support “independent media and the free flow of information”.

In Hungary, a half-million-dollar envelope from the US embassy, destined for twenty-two online media outlets independent of the government, has been cancelled. Ágnes Urbán, director of the NGO Mérték, responsible for their distribution, believes that “these grants are hyper important in Hungary because the entire media market is skewed”, pointing to an advertising market that is “almost dead”.

These grants, she explains, did not fund ongoing operations but only technical development projects and the consolidation of reader communities. “These media will not cease to exist overnight, but their long-term existence is called into question,” according to her.

Unleashed by Trump’s return to the White House, Viktor Orbán swears to make these “foreign agents”, these “well poisoners” paid to “bring down the government” pay the price. He is already working on new restrictive laws, he announced on 22 February in a state of the nation address with a very worrying tone.

Corentin Léotard

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