How Hungary Ran George Soros Out of Town The fate of one civil-society group is a disturbing case study of budding authoritarians setting the rules in Europe.
Rachel Donadio
May 15, 2018
An activist with a Hungarian opposition party rips a government billboard criticizing George Soros.Bernadett Szabo / Reuters
PARIS—Has Hungary’s Viktor Orbán won this round against the European Union? The announcement Tuesday that George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) will move its headquarters out of Budapest and set up shop in Berlin, a victim of the Orbán government’s crackdown on foreign NGOs, certainly seems to indicate as much. The question now is will the European Union push back? And how?
Orbán, whose right-wing, increasingly authoritarian Fidesz party secured another term in Hungary’s national elections last month, has for years been waging an escalating war against Soros. The billionaire financier and philanthropist survived Nazi-occupied Hungary as a boy, and his foundation has been funding civil-society initiatives in Hungary and across Eastern Europe since before the end of the Cold War, as well as programs in Hungary and across Europe aimed at supporting immigrants. It’s the immigration programs that have riled up Orbán. Ever since the migration crisis of 2015, Fidesz has been depicting the nation and Europe as besieged by foreigners. Before the elections, Fidesz spent millions on ad campaigns Open Society called anti-Semitic, including a doctored image of Soros with his arms around opposition leaders who are taking wire cutters to the border fence.
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