The National (Scotland) - Seven Days
The Hungary games
How an Orbán-backed populist think tank is stoking Scotland’s culture war. By Karin Goodwin of The Ferret
WHEN MCC Brussels – a soft power outpost of right-wing Hungarian president Viktor Orbán’s privately run “pet” University, Mathias Corvinus Collegium – launched in November 2022, its aims were clear. From farming to migration and from “family values” to net zero, the topics that have increasingly polarised conservatives and progressives – as well as attracting conspiracy theories and misinformation from some quarters – were firmly in its sights.
The Brussels unit, led by director Frank Furedi, says it aims to win the “culture war” “being waged on the values and aspirations of ordinary Europeans”, “unshackling Europe from environmentalism” and promoting sovereignty, “strong borders” and individualism.
In the last two years it has produced reports and events criticising the “takeover” of Europe by the “LGBT+ lobby”, the “perils” of net zero and Europe’s “attack” on free speech. Many of them involved UK academics and campaigners – including those calling for Scottish policy reform or working for Scottish universities.
Now concerns are being raised about its influence on Scottish discourse on topics from sex education in schools to farming and net zero targets. A perception that Scotland was pursuing liberal policies and rhetoric on issues from migration to trans rights has made the country a target of criticism from conservative and populist movements in recent years.
The Brussels-based think tank says that while it works across the EU, it considers that “countering the challenges posed by woke extremism” has “rightly become a significant concern for Scottish people”, and supports Scottish academics and campaigners “with the courage to fight back” against progressive policies and rhetoric.
MCC Brussels claims it is independent and told The Ferret it was “no-one’s mouthpiece”. But much of its work is in line with the politics of self-proclaimed “illiberal democrat” Orbán and his Fidesz party, which has pitched itself as the “anti-woke” conservative voice of Europe, and taken a hard line on policies that impact minority groups from asylum seekers to the LGBT+ community.
MCC Brussels is funded through a grant of an undisclosed amount by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), which in turn has been given assets worth billions of euros from Orbán’s government. In 2020, it received £1.3 billion – about 1% of the country’s gross domestic product – which was slammed as “legal theft of public funds”, involving the transfer of publicly owned shares to the foundation.
The Hungarian government has been accused of spreading misinformation on culture war topics and leaning into conspiracy theories such as the Great Reset – a theory that claims the world is run by an authoritarian socialist global government of powerful capitalists and politicians.
Some critiques revolve around poster campaigns run by the Hungarian government criticising Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros – a familiar target of anti-Semitic conspiracies. One poster showed EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen with Soros’ son Alex, who chairs the family’s Open Society Foundations, which funds progressive causes, with the slogan: “Let’s not dance to their tune.” Critics say the posters pushed the idea of EU politicians as part of a “shadowy cabal” of global elites.
In a 2022 speech, Orbán warned of “the great European population replacement programme, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilisations”. It has been interpreted as a direct reference to the Great Replacement Theory.
The theory alleges that migrant-friendly policies, combined with the promotion of trans rights and pro-choice abortion laws, are aimed at ensuring white
people become a minority in Europe and other Western countries.
While not accusing MCC Brussels of spreading misinformation directly, critics claim the MCC network helps spread Orbán’s ideas to bolster and legitimise hard-right thinking. NGO researchers claimed Hungary’s conservative policies – such as the banning the promotion of LGBT+ issues in schools and crackdowns on the media – had a “chilling effect”. It was ironic, they said, that MCC Brussels supported such policies while claiming to be in favour of free speech.
However MCC and its supporters insist it provides an essential platform for free speech and academic discourse and a healthy counter balance to EU and UK “cancel culture”.
MCC Brussels has taken on topics including migration – one report titled Multiculturalism In Flames links migration to crime. Critiques of the European Commission have also featured – its Silent Coup report asserts that the under von der Leyen, the EU Commission “used the Covid-19 and Ukraine crises to enact a creeping transfer of competences from the national to the supranational level through a series of “silent coups”.
Other reports have looked at farming, and MCC has profiled organisations such as No Farmers, No Food, which has been at the forefront of campaigns by UK farmers against inheritance tax changes by the Labour Government. It is co-ordinated by James Melville, a PR consultant from a Fife farming background, who campaigned against Covid lockdowns, has boosted false claims about people being forced by the World Economic Forum to “eat bugs” and expressed scepticism around net zero climate targets. Melville did not respond to a request for comment.
MANY of MCC Brussels fellows, report authors, experts and speakers have links to its executive director Furedi – a Hungarian-born professor emeritus at Kent University. A revolutionary communist turned self-proclaimed populist, he once wrote for Living Marxism and is a regular contributor to its libertarian successor, Spiked online. He is a trustee of UK think-tank Ideas Matter, which organises the Battle of Ideas festival, an annual UK festival promoting “no-holds-barred discussion of all the big issues of our time”. It is organised by the Institute of Ideas, founded by Claire Fox, former co-publisher of Living Marxism.
Many of Fuerdi’s team have links to the festival. They include chief of staff Tony Gilland, who formerly headed up the Battle of Ideas. Jacob Reynolds, now head of policy for MCC Brussels, was previously the partnerships manager at the Battle of Ideas. He continues to support its sixth form competition Debating Matters as well as helping to convene Living Freedom, a summer school “for young people interested in the philosophy of freedom”.
MCC Brussels figures with links to Scotland include Ashley Frawley, whose PhD at Kent University was supervised by Furedi. Now a visiting lecturer at the University she is also a paid research fellow of MCC Brussels. In 2020 she campaigned against the smacking ban in Scotland as a spokesperson for campaigning group Be Reasonable and appeared regularly on videos released by the Christian Institute, which part-funded the campaign.
She also campaigned against the
Suggesting that my ideas are somehow imported from Hungary, or that I am a hypocrite because I argue for free speech in Scotland but not in Hungary, is not really convincing
proposed assisted dying bill in Scotland in 2022 and is a spokesperson for Better Way, which uses the Canadian increase in numbers opting to end their own lives as a cautionary tale. MCC Brussels staff including Furedi and Reynolds have raised the need to hear dissenting voices on assisted dying proposals. Frawley did not comment.
Other Scottish-based academics commissioned by MCC Brussels include Carlton Brick, who wrote the MCC Brussels report: How Did The LGBTQ Lobby Take Over The EU, in which he argues that “Europe’s LGBT+ NGOs” have become “a vehicle … by which global elites problematise the necessarily national foundation of democratic sovereignty”.
The debate over LGBT+ rights has become a prominent “culture war” topic in the EU. In 2021 Hungary passed a law to prevent the “promotion” of LGBT+ content in schools, which have in turn been challenged in the European courts.
A University of the West of Scotland lecturer in sociology, Carlton Brick claimed that the issue had become increasingly “embedded” in Scotland, and has been critical of Scottish Government guidance about the balance of the rights of the young person to change their gender identity at school without teachers consulting families and the right of the parent to know.
Dr Brick told The Ferret that his work offered a balance to “the hypocrisy of so-called gender advocacy groups” whom he said threatened free speech. He claimed Scotland’s Hate Crime Act, for example, was “amongst the most authoritarian in Europe, claiming it “openly criminalises gender critical viewpoints”.
“Organisations such as MCC Brussels provide a much-needed bulwark against the cancel culture that is enveloping academic institutions within and without the EU,” he added. He said he supported its “commitment to open enquiry and non-ideological, evidence-based research” when academic expression was being “comprehensively compromised”.
Dr Diego Muro, a senior lecturer in international relations at St Andrews University, was also a visiting fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium between April and June 2022 and has attended conferences as a guest speaker since that date. Some of his work looks at the link between terrorism and migration, a link that has also been made by the Orbán government.
Dr Paul Gilfillan a sociology lecturer at Queen Margaret’s University, was a paid visiting fellow at MCC’s Budapest campus between September 2021 and February 2022. Gilfillan has written for the European Conservative, presented research into family life at a Scottish Family Party conference and is interested in “working-class nationalism” and its role in the rise of populism. He met Furedi in Budapest in 2021 and has stayed in touch since, he said.
Furedi has also had an influence on several of the academics behind the Scottish Union for Education (SUE), including Abertay University lecturer Stuart Waiton, a former Brexit Party MEP candidate. SUE, set up by a group of academics and parents in 2023, claims young people are being subjected to harmful messages about “critical race theory” and “transgender indoctrination”.
Recently the group gave out leaflets outside one primary school claiming that “lobby groups” like charity LGBT Youth Scotland had been allowed to import “transgender ideology into the curriculum and even into the ‘ethos’ of the school”.
Though Waiton does not work for MCC, he has previously attended MCC’s education summit in Budapest and in May 2024 hosted Furedi at a SUE event, in which he claimed that he had been reading “everything Frank has written over three decades” and uses it in his teaching at Abertay. Waiton was also a member of the Be Reasonable Scotland – the anti-smacking ban campaign group.
He claimed SUE’s interest in the work of MCC Brussels “relates solely to the belief in the need for an education system that focuses on education” rather than politics which “results in schools increasingly becoming places of indoctrination rather than liberal and focused on knowledge”.
He argued that “we don’t need to look to Hungary” to find limits being placed on free speech”.
“Just open your eyes and you can see people being cancelled. In Scotland,
the hate crime legislation, for example, means that anyone could be arrested for saying something ‘hateful’ in the comfort of their own home.”
The Ferret recently looked at Scotland’s new hate crime legislation and found behaviour would need to be reasonably considered “threatening or abusive” for a crime to be committed, rather than simply insulting.
Waiton’s fellow SUE member, Penny Lewis, a lecturer in architecture and urban planning at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, has also attended two MCC Brussels events as a speaker invited to discuss standards in education.
One featured panel members from the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing think tank responsible for pushing Project 2025, a 900-page policy “wish list” of proposals published ahead of the US election that aimed to expand Donald Trump’s presidential power and impose an ultra-conservative social vision.
The Heritage Foundation has other links to Hungary including an agreement with the Danube Institute, of which Furedi has been a regular speaker. It was established by the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, a lobbying and networkbuilding organisation funded directly by Orbán’s government.
Lewis said she spoke “about falling standards in Scottish education and parents’ concerns about the teaching of transgender ideology in schools” at one and on the “curriculum content and classical education” at another.
“The event was attended by leftwing and right-wing educators and campaigners and a wide range of ideas were discussed,” she told The Ferret.
“In Scotland, we have fallen out of the habit of holding this kind of open discussion. And we have sunken into the habit of smearing people we don’t agree with, particularly on contentious issues. It’s very unhealthy, undemocratic and is undermining political life.
“Suggesting that my ideas are somehow imported from Hungary, or that I am a hypocrite because I argue for free speech in Scotland but not in Hungary, is not really convincing.”
The Scottish Government has a stated commitment to anti-racist education and LGBT+-inclusive education. The EIS teaching union told The Ferret it was supportive of its approach. “Despite making significant progress towards a more inclusive and fair society, we still have a long way to go to ensure every child and young person growing up in Scotland will live their lives free from discrimination and inequality,” a spokesperson said.
CRITICS insisted that MCC Brussels has a clear agenda. Olivier Hoedeman, coordinator of the research and campaign organisation Corporate Europe Observatory, said MCC Brussels was organising events “very clearly on all the topics that are the key issues in Orbán’s propaganda war, and very much also designed to back up the claims that he and his and his allies are making about the nature of the European Union”.
He added: “This culture war claims that the Brussels bubble is controlled by woke lobbyists and that the EU institutions are fully captured by proponents of the woke agenda. They are establishing a stronger foothold in Brussels, in the EU quarter, with their messages and nurturing networks of like-minded people.”
In recent years there has been a surge of right-wing populism across Europe. Many EU member states – including Czechia, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia – now have far-right parties in government.
Parties such as Marine Le Pen’s RN in France, Brothers of Italy – now the ruling party – and Germany’s far right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have all adopted sceptical policies on climate action and immigration. Like Orbán, they have faced accusations of leaning into populist conspiracy theories including the Great Replacement Theory. Some have also been accused of promoting conspiracy theories around the idea that climate change is exaggerated and the push for net zero a form of control.
ARMIN Seimel, a political attitudes researcher at the University of Amsterdam, said the network supported by MCC Brussels helped to bolster populist tropes across borders. “Investment in academia appears to be part of a broader strategy to normalise issues such as strong anti-migration narratives, which sometimes escalate to invoking culture war rhetoric,” he said. “Research has demonstrated that the electoral success of far-right parties not only legitimises but also normalizes their narratives.”
Key in these narratives is the issue of LGBT+ rights, which populist movements have branded as an attack on family values and, in an EU context, national sovereignty.
Phillip Ayoub, professor of international relations at University College London argues that the push back against LGBT+ rights is a global phenomenon “based on a set of claims that stir emotion and polarise public debate”.
He added: “They aim to create suspicion and fear and to convince the people that liberal democracy, with its respect for individual human rights, is a less attractive political option than majoritarianism and authoritarian rule, which will keep in place the majority’s core values.”
Demeter Áron, head of research at Amnesty International Hungary is not convinced about the effectiveness of MCC Brussels so far. But he is concerned by the way academics associated with it have fallen back on arguments about free speech in order to close down criticism.
“It’s ironic of course that so many of these academics think of Hungary as a beacon for free speech and it has very possibly become a haven for people who are fed up with progressive ideas,” he argues. “In other places, people might be critical of these ideas and I’m sure they feel under attack.
“But it is absurd to praise Orbán’s Hungary as the land of free speech when his government is shutting down newspapers and harassing journalists and NGOs and banning public discourse around LGBT+ issues,” he added.
“The Hungarian government has trampled on every vulnerable group it can find using all the usual autocratic tools.”
However, John O’Brien, head of communications for MCC Brussels, said: “We do not speak for the Hungarian government or to specific laws they enact or promote. We do think indoctrinating kids in dangerous gender ideology against the wishes and without the knowledge of parents is wicked and wrong.
“We strongly support national sovereignty and are deeply concerned about groups masquerading as ‘human rights’ groups while actively working to undermine family and national values.”
He claimed that it was misleading to claim that “paid, agenda-driven woke lobbyists are in some way arbiters of rights”.
He also suggested The Ferret was funded by organisations “advocating for the woke agenda and opposed to the sort of MCC Brussels standpoint on many issues”.