Nobody should believe that a party-state will spontaneously change

We must create a situation where the ruling party is unable to use aggression against us. There is no other method.

Build structures that constrain the people in power, Viktor Orbán argued, or nothing you win at the ballot box will last.

He was talking about the communist party-state – but thirty years later, it was his own government that had almost perfected the principle.

The university governance structures Orbán built were designed to do exactly what the 1989 speech warned against – entrench the ruling party’s preferences so deeply that even an election loss wouldn’t dislodge them.

On Sunday, he lost that election – in a landslide. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won 138 of 199 parliamentary seats, a two-thirds supermajority that gives the incoming government the power to amend the constitution, restructure ministries, and reverse Orbán-era institutional arrangements.

Magyar grew up with Orbán’s poster on his bedroom wall, joined Fidesz at university, spent years as a regime insider running state-owned enterprises including the Student Loan Centre, and only broke with the system in 2024 after the pardoning of a convicted child abuser’s accomplice blew a hole in the party’s family values brand.

He’s promised to recreate a dedicated education ministry – Orbán had folded it into a sprawling culture and innovation portfolio – and has explicitly linked his programme to rule-of-law repair and rebuilding Hungary’s relationship with the EU.

The Hungarian story matters because it’s the clearest case study we have of what happens when a government decides that universities are political battlegrounds rather than autonomous institutions, and of how hard it might be to undo once the architecture is in place.

Institutional capture

Orbán returned to power in 2010 with a parliamentary supermajority, and wasted no time. As Princeton constitutional law scholar Kim Lane Scheppele has documented, the government cut university funding by about 40 per cent.

Since almost all Hungarian universities are public, that wasn’t trimming – it was demolition. The regime also introduced a requirement that students receiving state-funded places sign declarations committing to work in Hungary for a period equal to their study duration, or repay the cost of their education.

The government’s defence was that public investment in graduates deserved a return. Critics pointed out that the policy addressed brain drain through legal compulsion rather than by improving the conditions that were causing people to leave.

Bursars were appointed to supervise university expenditure. Demonstrations followed, but the structural direction was set.

The 2017 higher education law – commonly known as “Lex CEU” – imposed conditions on foreign-accredited universities that the Venice Commission criticised as unjustified and that the Court of Justice of the EU later held to have infringed EU law and academic freedom.

Central European University, founded by George Soros, whom Orbán had branded an enemy of Hungary, moved its accredited teaching to Vienna in 2019, saying legal changes had made staying in Budapest untenable.

A professor who completed his PhD at CEU described the expulsion as:

…a personal tragedy… a huge part of my personal identity is connected to this institution.

There’s a line in Orbán’s 1989 speech about the communist state forcing Hungary into “an Asian dead end, from which we try to find our way out again.” Forcing one of Budapest’s most internationally prominent universities to relocate to Austria was an odd way of finding the way out.

In 2018, gender studies programmes were banned nationwide – the clearest example of the state directly dictating what could and couldn’t be taught at university level. Research on corruption, as Hungarian Academic Staff Forum representatives have noted, also became unfavourable for funding purposes.

Publicly funded research was increasingly channelled away from fields the government regarded as ideologically hostile. Eva Fodor, a sociology and gender studies professor at CEU, has argued that:

…total destruction of the higher education system is the goal of the government, because universities are where students learn tolerance and liberal values.

The young Orbán who warned in 1989 that the state had “ordered our education from the books that have falsified the revolution” grew into the leader whose government decided which disciplines were permissible and which weren’t.

The model change

But the structurally significant play was the “model change” (modellváltás). From 2019 onwards, many public universities were transferred out of direct state ownership into privately governed “public interest trust” foundations, each overseen by a board of trustees controlling budget, strategy, and senior appointments.

The government insisted this had been driven by universities themselves, voted through with two-thirds majorities in their senates, and framed as a flexibility and competitiveness reform. Hungary’s minister for culture and innovation, Balázs Hankó, has said:

…when you are a state-owned university your structure is so strict, but when you are talking about education and innovation there should be flexibility.

The flexibility argument might have been more persuasive if the government hadn’t openly acknowledged what the flexibility was for. Orbán said the government would appoint board members with “a national approach” while excluding anyone with an “internationalist, globalist” outlook. Some trustees were appointed for long or lifetime terms – designed to outlast any change of government.

The European University Association concluded that the Hungarian foundation model had become so far removed from standard public university governance that it couldn’t even be scored in its usual autonomy framework. As Reuters reported at the time, the reform looked less like modernisation than a mechanism for extending the government’s ideological imprint beyond the reach of elections.

Not every university went quietly. ELTE – one of Hungary’s oldest institutions, and incidentally the one where Orbán himself studied law in the late 1980s – refused to adopt the model. It continued to access EU funding, but received significantly less government funding than universities that made the switch.

As one ELTE political scientist put it: “I would always go for more autonomy.” The financial penalty for that autonomy was substantial. “The single biggest problem is that we were underfunded and we remained in the same situation.” But for him, the trade-off was worth it.

The effect on academic life inside the model-changed universities was subtler than outright censorship. Gergely Kováts, an associate professor at Corvinus University who has researched the foundation model’s weaknesses, describes the mechanism as “smart repression” – the goal isn’t to silence academics directly but to make self-censorship the rational choice.

Those who participate in public debate “are subjected to attempts to discredit, devalue, or pigeonhole them, thereby making an example of them to deter others.” The result, as a former CEU professor now at Maastricht University put it, is that “you can study gender if you call it family studies.” Certain topics didn’t disappear – they just learned to disguise themselves.

The parallel institution

Then there’s the Mathias Corvinus Collegium story, which may be more striking than the foundation model – because it isn’t about capturing existing universities but building a parallel system alongside them.

MCC was originally a modest educational charity founded in 1996. In 2020, the Hungarian parliament transferred 10 per cent stakes in the oil company MOL and the pharmaceutical company Gedeon Richter to the MCC Foundation, along with cash and property – a total endowment valued at $1.7 billion, which was nearly one per cent of Hungary’s GDP.

Le Monde pointed out that this single transaction surpassed the 2019 budget of all 27 of Hungary’s public higher education institutions combined. MCC is chaired by Balázs Orbán (no relation to Viktor), the Prime Minister’s political director, who has written:

…it is our goal for Hungary to become an intellectual powerhouse, in which MCC plays a key role.

MCC now operates across more than 35 locations in Hungary and internationally. It has a Brussels outpost that received over €6.3 million in 2024 – larger than all other political think tanks operating in Brussels except Bruegel.

It acquired a Vienna-based university, Modul, in 2022. It runs programmes from primary school through to university and postgraduate level. A former MCC fellow described it in The Guardian as “a powerful tool for far-right propaganda,” reporting an expectation that graduates would go on to “propagate Orbán’s positions to an audience in their home nations.”

MCC’s Brussels operation was launched under the leadership of Frank Furedi, whose network of former Revolutionary Communist Party members and Spiked contributors has become a reliable supplier of talking heads for Orbán-aligned events.

In the UK, the connections are direct. The Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, whose trustees include the Spectator editor Michael Gove and Reform UK’s policy chief James Orr, received over £512,500 from MCC – more than 90 per cent of its total funding.

MCC runs an annual summit at King’s College London. Matt Goodwin is listed as a visiting fellow. Since 65 per cent of MOL’s oil comes from Russia, this means Russian oil profits have been used to fund an international conservative network that reaches into British universities.

Tisza’s manifesto explicitly pledged to “recover the state assets granted to the MCC and end the practice of political network-building with public funds.” Whether that pledge survives contact with the legal complexity of unwinding a $1.7 billion endowment remains to be seen.

The consequences were real

The EU’s response to the foundation model turned what might have remained a domestic governance controversy into something with direct material consequences for Hungarian students and researchers.

The European Commission’s 2022 conditionality measures and the 2023 joint statement on Erasmus+ meant that legal commitments could no longer be signed with Hungarian public-interest trusts and the entities they maintain.

In practice, this cut many model-changed universities off from new Erasmus+ mobility agreements and parts of Horizon-linked research cooperation, because Brussels saw unresolved conflict-of-interest and rule-of-law risks in the governance structure.

Even after the Hungarian government requested that the freeze be lifted, pointing to legislative amendments, the Commission concluded that the changes:

…do not adequately address the outstanding concerns on conflicts of interests in the boards of public interest trusts.

Hungarian students at affected institutions lost access to exchange programmes that their peers across the rest of the EU took for granted. Researchers were excluded from the bloc’s flagship funding instruments.

But the sanctions didn’t play out as Brussels might have hoped. Viktor Lőrincz, vice-president of the Hungarian Academy Staff Forum, has noted that university rectors and presidents “did not attack the Hungarian government because of this – they attacked the EU.” The president-rector of Corvinus went further:

…I don’t understand the logic and the collateral damage means they hit precisely those they want to support with this ban.

The sanctions were probably right in principle, but the political dynamics they created on the ground were almost exactly backwards – strengthening the government’s narrative that Brussels was the problem rather than the foundation model itself.

After the election, the League of European Research Universities said Magyar’s supermajority was “crucial” for implementing the “major necessary reforms” required to reverse Orbán’s changes and restore access to EU research funding.

The European University Association said it:

…very much hopes that an improved EU-Hungary relationship will also benefit universities and academic communities.

The damage was European in scope – and so is the potential repair.

That shows what happens when a country’s university governance arrangements fail international credibility tests. The EU didn’t just object in principle – it pulled the plug on concrete programmes that affected real students.

What happens now

Magyar’s supermajority gives him the legal power to reverse the foundation model, restore institutional autonomy, lift the gender studies ban, and re-engage with EU research and mobility frameworks. Kurt Deketelaere, secretary-general of LERU, has argued that undoing the changes:

…will give universities back their institutional autonomy and restore individual academic freedom… for education as well as for research purposes… we can also expect Magyar and his government to be supportive and protective of academic freedom, unlike his predecessor.

But there are reasons to be cautious about the pace and depth of change. The damage to some institutions can’t be undone. CEU’s rector, Carsten Schneider, has already said the university won’t be returning to Budapest – “you cannot move a university twice” – and that what’s needed isn’t demolition but “a vision for how higher education in Hungary should look for the next 20 to 30 years.”

Just imagine, in two years’ time, for whatever reason, Orbán wins again.

Foundation board members with long-term or lifetime appointments won’t leave voluntarily, and the legal process of unwinding those arrangements – some of which were deliberately designed to survive changes of government – will be messy, contested, and slow.

There’s a precedent for this kind of difficulty. Poland elected an authoritarian nationalist government that exerted control over universities before losing power in 2023, and its successor has struggled to undo the damage. Gábor Halmai, chair of constitutional law at the European University Institute in Florence and an emeritus professor at ELTE, has warned:

They entrenched the Constitutional Court, the ordinary judiciary. These so-called enclaves within even a new democratic government are still there.

Hungary’s foundation boards, with their long-term and lifetime appointments, are the same kind of enclave – designed to survive exactly the sort of election that just happened.

A Verfassungsblog analysis published before the election noted that Tisza as a party:

…lacks internal structures of coexisting authorities and altogether consists of about 30 people.

Decision-making is highly centralised around Magyar, and the party doesn’t have a political stance independent of him. A government with an even larger supermajority than Orbán ever held, led by a party with no meaningful internal democratic constraints, could find it very easy to use the same institutional levers in a different direction.

A government that replaces one form of institutional capture with another wouldn’t solve the academic freedom problem. It would just change whose preferences dominate.

Jan Palmowski, a University of Warwick professor, made the point carefully after the result:

…it will also be important for the new government to show restraint when it comes to the teaching and research of academic fields and methodologies – because teaching and research must never be subject to the ideological perspective of a political party.

That applies in both directions. And even if the governance structures can be unwound, the deeper damage may be harder to reach. László Kontler, the pro-rector for Budapest at CEU who watched the expulsion unfold from the inside, has argued that the hardest thing to repair will be:

…restoring the respect for academic work, which has been consistently and severely undermined under a profoundly anti-intellectual regime.

You can legislate for board composition. You can’t legislate for a culture that’s learned to call gender studies “family studies” just to survive.

What’s next?

The Hungarian model hasn’t stayed in Hungary. A Newsweek op-ed by two US conservative thinkers last year held up the foundation model as a template for American HE reform, arguing that the criticism of Orbán’s approach was:

…not technical – since the model has proven successful – but rather political.

The Trump administration’s moves against US universities have drawn direct comparisons to what Orbán did. And the MCC’s UK operations – the Scruton Foundation funding, the fellowship network, the King’s College summits, Goodwin – mean the institutional tentacles reached into British higher education too.

Whether Magyar’s government dismantles that infrastructure, or merely repurposes it, matters to anyone tracking the international relationship between governments and universities.

In 1989, a student stood up and told his country that a party-state wouldn’t spontaneously change – that you had to build structures to constrain the people in power, or nothing you won would last. He was right about all of it. He just turned out to be the person those structures needed to constrain.

Whether his successor has learned anything from that arc, or whether Hungarian universities are about to discover that the machinery works just as well under new management, is the question that Sunday’s landslide hasn’t yet answered.