Soros Foundation ends most EU operations
August 17th, 2023A right-wing analyst predicts that liberal Hungarian NGOs will not be left without western funding, while a liberal observer lambasts a government luminary who compares the Soros network to an occupying army.
The Open Society Foundations announced that most grants to NGOs within the EU will be terminated, because EU institutions ‘are already allocating significant resources to human rights, freedom and pluralism’. Reacting to the announcement, Cabinet Minister Balázs Orbán wrote on Facebook that he would believe the news about ‘the departure of Soros’s occupation forces when the last occupying soldier leaves Europe and Hungary’.
On hvg.hu, Gábor Horn a former leading liberal politician and founder of the Republikon thinktank enumerates various projects financed by the Soros Foundation since the mid-1980s in Hungary and dismisses it as tasteless to compare the Open Society Foundations to the Soviet Army which held Hungary captive for four decades. He also finds it regrettable that instead of stepping in to replace the OSF in supporting NGOs, the government is ‘looking for new enemies’.
On Mozgástér.blog, Zoltán Kiszelly writes that the European Union will replace the Soros Foundations in financing those whom he calls ‘globalist NGOs’, as it is already devoting large funds to them. EU institutions often base their political decisions on the opinions of those NGOs and in exchange finances their operations, he adds. In his concluding remark, Kiszelly writes that just as Radio Free Europe has re-started its Hungarian service (in the form of a multi-media website), the Soros Foundations might also return to Hungary one day.