\u201cThe closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s approach in Hungary,\u201d Vance said in 2024, then a Republican senator from Ohio. \u201cI think his way has to be the model for us \u2014 not to eliminate universities, but to give the choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n
On a wider level, Sunday\u2019s vote is not just an inflection point for Hungary, but it is also a key moment in the trajectory of Orb\u00e1nism, and its ability to act as a hard-right ideological ally of Washington inside the European Union<\/a>, which both Orb\u00e1n and Vance routinely condemn.<\/p>\n Asked for comment, Vance\u2019s office referred to his previous remarks on the issue. The vice president discussed the idea again this week, telling an Orb\u00e1n rally in Budapest on Tuesday that \u201cchildren should be able to go to school and get educated and not indoctrinated.\u201d<\/p>\n His host, Orb\u00e1n, has long railed against the Central European University, accusing it of \u201ccheating\u201d by issuing both Hungarian and American qualifications, and using foreign funding to outcompete domestic institutions and unduly meddle in Hungarian life.<\/p>\n In 1989, the Hungarian leader actually received a Soros Foundation scholarship to study at Britain’s University of Oxford. But much of Orb\u00e1n\u2019s criticism of the Central European University has been directed personally at Soros, who is Jewish, often deploying antisemitic tropes in what has become a crusade against the billionaire philanthropist.<\/p>\n He has accused Soros of spearheading a \u201cshadow army\u201d of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations and civil society groups, labeling them \u201cinsects\u201d that have \u201csurvived for too long.\u201d Painting Soros as a \u201cglobalist,\u201d he has used terminology since adopted by conspiracy theorists in the United States and beyond. The university was finally driven out, it said, after Orb\u00e1n\u2019s government passed legislation demanding it comply with a series of practically impossible requirements.<\/p>\n Orb\u00e1n\u2019s office did not respond to requests for comment. He has previously denied allegations of antisemitism, branding Hungary as the safest place for Jews in what he described as a European continent rife with anti-Jewish hatred. He points to his funding of a research institute to tackle that problem and also his strong alliance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.<\/p>\n In 2018, the year before the university relocated its campus, Soros\u2019 Open Society Foundations also moved its international operations <\/a>from Budapest to Berlin, citing the \u201cincreasingly repressive political and legal environment\u201d imposed by the Orb\u00e1n regime.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Hungary is no longer considered a full democracy, but is rather classed as a \u201chybrid regime of electoral autocracy\u201d by the European Parliament, of which it is a member, having squeezed the independence of its courts, media and other institutions.<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1775595775162_now_mtp_clip_hungary_260407_S3_1920x1080-fqdah0.jpg\")
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