Us-backed university pulls out of Hungary over ‘repression’
HUNGARY’S nationalist government was accused of opening the door to “repression” yesterday after a Us-backed university partly withdrew from the country in a row over academic freedoms.
The Central European University (CEU), which is funded by George Soros, the liberal billionaire, announced it was moving Us-accredited degree courses to Vienna after years of wrangling with the government of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister.
“We are being forced out of the country,” said Liviu Matei, the CEU’S pro-rector. “This is not restriction anymore; this is repression.”
The Hungarian government dismissed the move as a “political bluff”, noting that the CEU would still run local courses in Hungary. The decision follows years of bitter exchanges between Mr Soros and Mr Orbán over the immigration issue, with the Hungarian leader making a package of anti-immigration “Stop Soros” laws a key plank of his 2018 parliamentary election campaign.
Michael Ignatieff, the author and
‘This is unprecedented. A US institution has been driven out of a country that is a Nato ally’
politician who is CEU president, said that the university had been “forced out” by the government’s actions.
“This is unprecedented. A US institution has been driven out of a country that is a Nato ally. A European institution has been ousted from a member state of the EU,” he said.
The decision is likely to further draw attention to mounting concerns in Europe about the erosion of law in Hungary, which saw the European Commission take the country to court over its higher education law in 2017.
Zoltan Kovacs, the Hungarian government spokesman, made light of the CEU decision: “It’s common knowledge that a significant number of its courses will still be held in Budapest. This is nothing more than a Soros-style political bluff, which does not merit the attention of the government.”
Founded in Budapest in 1991, the CEU has about 20 per Hungarian students, with the bulk of the remainder drawn from central and eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and western Europe.
A “disappointed” US state department said: “The departure of these Usaccredited programmes from Hungary will be a loss for the CEU community, for the United States, and for Hungary.”