LONDON — For the first time since the government of Hungary threatened to shutter the university he founded in Budapest, the American financier and philanthropist George Soros criticized the country’s right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, saying he has presided over a “mafia state.”
In a keynote speech
Thursday at the annual economic forum of the European Commission, Mr.
Soros cited “the deception and corruption of the mafia state the Orban
regime has established” and praised those who protested a law passed in April that seemed designed to close the school, the Central European University.
Mr.
Soros, a benefactor of civil society groups in his native Hungary and
elsewhere, founded the C.E.U. in 1991 and endowed it to operate as an
independent American institution in Hungary. The law passed by the
Hungarian Parliament in April would effectively force the closing of the
university because it does not operate a campus in the United States,
where it is registered.
The
law was widely viewed as a crackdown on free expression and liberal
values under Mr. Orban, who has called the university a fraud and
accused Mr. Soros of fomenting dissent against the government.
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In
his speech Thursday, Mr. Soros denied he was trying to interfere in
Hungarian politics, and chastised Mr. Orban for trying to cast him as an
enemy.
“He
sought to frame his policies as a personal conflict between the two of
us and has made me the target of his unrelenting propaganda campaign,”
Mr. Soros said of the Hungarian prime minister. “He cast himself in the
role of the defender of Hungarian sovereignty and me as a shady currency
speculator who uses his money to flood Europe — particularly his native
Hungary — with illegal immigrants as part of some vague but nefarious
plot.”
Mr. Soros added, “This is the opposite of who I am.”
Opponents of the law have said it threatens not just C.E.U. but academic freedom in Hungary. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Budapest in April to protest the law. The European Commission took legal action and the European Parliament voted to begin a procedure that would penalize the Hungarian government for violating the bloc’s fundamental values.
The situation had been at a standstill for months until last week, when Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor of New York, where the university is registered, said in a statement
that the state was open to negotiations. Hungary has said the same, and
the government sent responses to the European Commission’s legal
concerns in the case.
Mr.
Orban, once a recipient of a Soros-funded scholarship, has repeatedly
criticized Mr. Soros for his pro-democracy efforts in Hungary and
elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Populist leaders across the
continent, echoing President Trump’s criticism of Mr. Soros, who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, have accused Mr. Soros of trying to manipulate politics in their countries.
Mr.
Orban’s chief of staff, Janos Lazar, said Thursday that accusations of a
“mafia state” apply better to the nongovernment organizations that
receive funding from Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
“These
organizations, financed by George Soros, have operated like mafia,” Mr.
Lazar said at a news briefing in Budapest on Thursday, repeating
allegations of lack of transparency.
Defenders
of human rights, refugees and those who promote the fight against
corruption that sometimes get support from Mr. Soros have in recent
years been the targets of government scrutiny. One such organization,
the Hungary branch of Transparency International, which receives less
than 10 percent of its funding from grants supported by Mr. Soros,
lauded his comments Thursday.
“Open
Society foundations is a very important partner, and we take Mr.
Soros’s words as encouragement,” Miklos Ligeti, the group’s legal director, said in a phone interview from Budapest.
Mr. Soros, whose speech was focused more broadly on changes to the European Union,
called on the bloc’s institutions to act against the challenges to
democracy posed by Hungary and Poland, where the governing party, led by
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has taken a similar course against N.G.O.s.
European
legal experts have said that the European Union’s efforts to counter
the Hungarian law are unlikely to lead to effective sanctions, or change
the course of Mr. Orban’s government.
In
his speech Thursday, Mr. Soros said, “Democracy cannot be imposed from
the outside; it needs to be asserted and defended by the people
themselves.”
He
acknowledged that in responding to challenges to its core values, the
European Union “is cumbersome, slow-moving and often needs unanimity to
enforce its rules.”
“This
is difficult to achieve when two countries, Poland and Hungary, are
conspiring to oppose it,” he said. “It will require resolute action by
European institutions and the active engagement of civil society.”
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