Skip to content

Pro-Orbán Hungarian Organizations Are Spreading the Country’s Authoritarian Agenda Abroad

At the CPAC Dallas event in August 2022, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called for Christian Nationalists in Europe and the United States to “unite forces,” because “we Hungarians know how to defeat the enemies of freedom on the political battlefield.” At the governmental level, this is increasingly done through Hungarian organizations that are used as a form of soft-power to influence other countries culturally and ideologically. A growing army of Hungarian “universities,” “think tanks,” and other organizations including American lobbying outfits, heavily funded by the Hungarian treasury, have taken to building widespread networks of influence in the United States and much of Europe. In doing so, they intend to influence these countries to move their politics in the direction of the Orbán regime’s, which the EU parliament calls an “electoral autocracy.”