Another question is what happens to the infrastructure Orbán’s defeat leaves behind, the infrastructure that once propped MAGA up. It leads, above all, to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium.
Bence Bauer, the 46-year-old head of MCC’s German-Hungarian Institute, is a fast talker who is practiced at explaining Hungary to foreigners. We meet in the college cafeteria one evening in early July. In a city full of imperial facades and grand old buildings, MCC’s Budapest home is a strikingly plain modern block. Inside, a few students are still sitting nearby with laptops and books. European newspapers in several languages lie on the tables, ranging from left-liberal to conservative.
On this day, nothing suggests that the lights could soon go out.
Three months earlier, during his pre-election visit to Hungary, Vance had also stopped at the college, where Balázs Orbán received him in his capacity as chairman. The vice president charmed his hosts by hailing MCC as a rare academic institution devoted to preserving and strengthening the values of Western civilization.
MCC is not a government creation. It was started in 1996 by a wealthy conservative family as a private talent-development institution and named after Matthias Corvinus, the 15th-century Renaissance king who remains one of Hungary’s most celebrated national heroes. Under Viktor Orbán, however, it grew into something much larger and more powerful, helped by Hungary’s so-called KEKVA system: public-interest asset management foundations created under Orbán and endowed with public assets.
In 2020, previously state-held shares were transferred to the foundation behind MCC: 10 percent stakes in two listed Hungarian blue-chip companies, MOL, an oil and gas group, and Gedeon Richter, a pharmaceutical company. The shareholdings alone were worth more than €1 billion at the time of the transfer. MCC’s funding model relied heavily on the dividends from those shares.
Supporters saw the KEKVA foundations as a way to protect universities and cultural institutions from day-to-day politics. Critics saw them as a way to move public wealth into Fidesz-friendly structures beyond the reach of future governments.
MCC says its programs reach roughly 8,000 students and participants, including schoolchildren in weekend and talent programs beginning at age 10. It offers dormitory places, stipends, seminars, research trips and language training.
Still, Bauer acknowledges a “slight challenge”: Balázs Orbán, until very recently MCC’s chairman, had also served as Viktor Orbán’s political director and later as his campaign chief. That overlap, Bauer concedes, gave critics an opening. But he says it represented only a small part of the institution: “99 percent of MCC’s activities are really not political.” Many MCC students, he adds, probably voted for Tisza, the party now threatening the institution’s financial basis.
The new government has moved to dismantle non-university KEKVA foundations. Under the timetable published by the government, the foundation behind MCC is to be dissolved at the end of July. If implemented as announced, its assets would then return to state control.
That does not mean that the college will disappear altogether. In some form, it could continue operating. But without the dividends from MOL and Gedeon Richter, its political and international weight would be radically reduced.
Bauer tries not to sound despairing. If MCC cannot continue in its current form, other structures and other funding will have to be found, he says. “There is always a life after.”
The consequences reach beyond Budapest. MCC Brussels, the institution’s EU-capital outpost, has been one of the most visible conservative think tanks in the city in recent years. But it depends almost entirely on money from MCC Hungary. If the parent institution loses its asset base, the Brussels office has to find new money, too.
To Fidesz, the dismantling of MCC and other Orbán-era institutions looks less like reform than a campaign prepared in advance. During our conversation next to the House of Hungarian Music, Balázs Orbán points to a policy brief by the Wilfried Martens Centre, the official think tank of the center-right European People’s Party. The paper, published in May, describes MCC and similar institutions as part of a transnational illiberal infrastructure and argues that Hungary’s change of government offers the “first opportunity to dismantle parts of this infrastructure.”
It is not a legal blueprint for closing MCC. But for Orbán’s circle, it reads like an intellectual justification for doing exactly that.
“We will fight back,” Balázs Orbán tells me, “with every legal and political tool available.”
Boris Kálnoky also considers the new government’s move against institutions such as MCC a severe blow. He does not, however, sound optimistic about legal resistance. The 65-year-old journalist comes from the Kálnoky family, an old Transylvanian-Hungarian noble house. A former correspondent for the German news organization WELT (which like POLITICO is owned by Axel Springer), he runs MCC’s media school.
