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MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 7–HUNGARIAN PRESIDENT HAS SIGNED THE LAW–SEE COMMENTS–MORE WELCOME
This is an open thread for links, information, commentary, perspective on what's next for CEU in light of the assault by the fascist government of Hungary.
One of my colleagues is a CEU grad. His speculation is, should CEU have to close its doors in Budapest, the university would very likely try to move to another city as promptly as possible, more than likely with financial support from Soros. The most plausible candidate is Prague.
There have already been serious discussions with Vienna's mayor, so that's also a likely candidate.
Updates and link to the petition can be found at https://www.ceu.edu/istandwithceu
"Dear Colleagues,
Late this afternoon there were reports that the Austrian chancellor had spoken with CEU's founder, George Soros, about CEU moving to Vienna. This is not accurate. As I have said and continue to say, CEU is determined to stay in Budapest. This is fully supported by the Board of Trustees and our Founder. The Chairman of the Board of Trustees issued a statement reiterating these points. We have spoken with our Founder, who said that he reiterated our commitment to Budapest to the Chancellor and that such decisions are CEU's alone.
Best regards,
Michael Ignatieff
President and Rector"
First of all, thanks to all colleagues who stood up and voiced their support for CEU (including the PSA and many other professional organizations and individuals)!
I think it is still unclear whether this assault is merely one of the usual smokescreens that is employed in order to pass other legislation which they care about (like the planned horrific modification of the civil law) and divide attention of opposition forces, or it indeed seriously aims to destroy the largest Hungarian institution whose employees enjoy truly protected expression of speech. (One only needs to take a look at how meekly/cowardly other higher education institutions and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences stood up to this bullying to understand the depth of self-censorship already operating in all other academic institutions.) The fact that the last-minute modifications of the law made CEU's compliance even more difficult could be interpreted both ways. The optimistic interpretation, since Orban is not procedurally stupid, is that they wanted to make sure that the Constitutional Court will quickly throw the law back and hence they can both have their cake (show strength in the face of foreign pressure, stress-test the party loyalists before the elections next year, alter their public image that under pressure they change course, paint all other parties as servants of foreign interests (Soros) etc) and eat it. The pessimistic interpretation is that Orban is simply following the path to his oxymoronic "illiberal democracy" he clearly set out in his 2013 speech.
Whatever the outcome is going to be, the mere fact that the governing Fidesz party voted unanimously for this measure is a new low, one that hits in the heart many of us. This is the first time that I started to seriously consider that I'd need to leave the country where I returned after so much rumination.
Massive demonstrations today in Budapest demanding that the President (not Orban) veto "lex CEU" tomorrow. Crowds are estimated around 70-80,000. Hungarian state television claims they have been bused and flown in by George Soros from abroad.
Since president Janos Ader (puppet of prime minister Viktor Orban) just signed the law (as opposed to sending it to constitutional review in front of the Supreme Court) the "optimistic" interpretation I gave above does not seem to be the correct one.
I always thought that my powers of imagination are fairly good, but the past few years repeatedly proved me wrong: things happen here that I can not imagine to happen.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
“Lex CEU” is the next logical step in Orban’s authoritarian playbook. (For the great misfortune of Hungary, Orban is both much more intelligent, and more disciplined that Trump. He has been executing his plan to turn Hungary into an authoritarian kleptocracy with ruthless efficiency. ) He has subdued the judiciary, changed the election laws, purged the executive down to its lowest levels, has a choke hold on independent media (the last opposition daily with wide circulation was recently acquired by an oligarch close to Orban who closed it down overnight), completely centralized higher education. The next logical step is to “sweep out of the country” the last holdouts of free and democratic thought: the thriving and wonderful CEU and the fledgling NGO watchdogs.
But his his evil plan concerning the CEU has more to do with Trump and the US than I thought. In the final bill, they introduced a small modification that not only makes the deadlines for compliance even more unrealistic, but changes the role of the federal government in educational agreements with Hungary. CEU is based in New York State and its functioning in Hungary is based on an international agreement between New York State and Hungary. The new law would make it a condition for such agreements that the federal government (in countries that have such a thing) first ratifies the conditions of such an agreement. This is, according to many observers, a ploy for Orban to force some reaction from Washington which so far, to Orban’s great disappointment, has paid no attention to Orban or his government. It also serves his vengeance by meddling in Soros’s relationship with the American government by putting the fate of CEU in Trump’s hands.
This whole move happened because of Orban’s bitter resentment against George Soros, and what his Open Society foundation represents. The move against the CEU will, by all accounts, be followed by aggressive legal moves against NGO’s; his antipathy against them is also fueled by the fact that many of them accept small amounts of money from Soros.
George Soros has been a great benefactor of Hungary. CEU is only one of the many caritative projects he has founded from maternal and infant health to education and infrastructure. Even Orban, in his youth, has studied in Cambridge for a semester on a Soros grant. (Full disclosure: I came to the US on a Soros fellowship….)
For this reason, it is especially painful to watch what is happening. CEU still vows to fight.
Just to add more detail to the political motivations behind the attack that Kati and the others have very well canvassed:
Orban is drawing closer and closer to Putin, and also admires Erdogan's anti-liberal, anti-democratic measures. Much of the constant criticism Orban voices about the EU, tolerance, the West, and so on, is the same what the Russian leadership said in the last 10-15 years.
There is also more and more evidence of strong cooperation between Orban regime's and Putin's. Recently there have been several links exposed that show that the Russian secret services cooperate closely with Orban's people, despite Hungary being a member of NATO and the EU. Orban is clearly in the same boat with Putin when dreaming of bringing down the EU and he is rocking the boat as hard as he can without compromising the flow of development funds from the EU budget (Hungary is still a middle-/low-income country, one of the poorest in the EU).
Orban's people also regularly take part in the spreading of Russian propaganda regarding the EU, they support Brexit, they are anti-US and anti-NATO, and often praise the more authoritarian, bigot, and crazy-conservative measures of Putin.
The attack on CEU is part of this larger agenda of Orban's. Putin hates the CEU and all of Soros's projects. Soros is of Hungarian origin, and he was always keen on funding institutions and granting scholarships to people who he thought could contribute to a healthy, democratic society with debates and open information and knowledge sharing. When the Soviet Union fell he funded schools, and spent a fortune on giving scholarships to scientists, artists, intellectuals to allow them to study for shorter or longer periods at good European and US institutions to bring them up to the standards which have been neglected during the non-competitive era of Soviet rule. Soros founded independent journalists and intellectuals in the Baltic states after the Soviet Union collapsed too, and many Russian liberal families send their children to study at CEU.
Putin can't forgive this. His larger aim is to crush the EU – this is a key part of his vision of the rise of a regionally dominant Russia – and he is more and more forcefully meddling and putting pressure on the Baltic countries too. Orban is making a statement and taking a stance by acting against the symbolic enemy of his puppet master.
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