Soros-funded university's exile is inseparable from the Orbán regime's antisemitic campaign

CEU — accredited in the United States and Hungary — says though it tried for over a year to comply with the law, Budapest “made it clear it has no intention of signing” an agreement negotiated with the State of New York, “which would ensure CEU’s operations in Budapest”.

Meanwhile a deal between CEU and the Austrian and Viennese governments — which see the arrival of CEU as a coup, cementing Vienna’s status as the academic centre of the German-speaking world — had been in the works for months.

Monday’s announcement confirmed the inevitable and Vienna’s mayor Michael Ludwig and Austria’s education minister Heinz Faßmann naturally offered their warmest welcomes when it finally came.

The CEU law and the university’s exile from Budapest are inseparable from the antisemitic propaganda campaign the Orbán regime has waged against Mr Soros for years. Reporting its departure, pro-government mouthpieces like Origo called CEU the “George Soros university.”

But CEU’s closure is more so seen in Hungary as an attack on academic freedom and an institution that was founded to aid the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1990s and impart the values of an open society, including respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Along with the anti-Soros campaign, moves against foreign-funded NGOs, and attempts by local authorities to shut down the Jewish-run community centre Auróra, not to mention the clientelism and consolidating the media in pro-government hands, CEU’s closure is one more step in Hungary’s transformation into a simulacrum of a democracy inside the European Union.

Manfred Weber, lead candidate for the centre-right European People’s Party (of which Mr Orbán’s Fidesz remains a member) in next year’s European elections, previously said they would fight CEU’s closure “at any cost”.

With legal proceedings against Hungary related to the CEU law simmering away, the future remains in the EU’s hands.