Hungary is seeking to undo cronyism and influence networks that flourished under the 16-year rule of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party.
The house-cleaning includes a proposed National Asset Recovery and Protection Office to investigate wealth accumulation and allegedly misappropriated public assets.
Steps also are underway to undo vast gifts of public assets to universities and institutions that were made to lock in Orbán's and Fidesz's influence.
The marquee example is a gift, worth an estimated €1.3 billion in 2020, made to a private conservative educational institution, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium.
Hungary’s new prime minister, Péter Magyar, has called the gift for the Collegium, better known as MCC, "a crime" and he is now seeking to undo it.
The European Commission has also made dismantling so-called public‑interest asset‑management foundations, like the arrangement benefitting the MCC, a condition for Hungary to receive billions of euros under a massive financial support programme.
In addition, the crackdown calls into question the future of MCC Brussels, a think tank financially dependent on MCC Hungary, which has become a megaphone for reactionary viewpoints within the EU bubble.
And Magyar’s new broom is not the only challenge facing MCC Brussels.
Suspension
Last month, MCC Brussels was marked as suspended in the EU Transparency Register, a database operated by the three big EU institutions — the Commission, Council and Parliament — that allows European officials and institutions to track lobbying.
That means MCC Brussels can no longer enter the European Parliament without prior invitation; it also puts meetings with Commission and Council officials out of bounds since they generally will not meet with lobbyists unless they are on the Register.
MCC Brussels has branded the suspension as political while commentators, including the writer of this recent op-ed, see a dictatorial approach.
For one thing, MCC Brussels is not alone on the naughty step. But its suspension is a serious reputational blow, and the proceedings against it are ongoing.
The probe was triggered more than a year before the Hungarian election, in February 2025, when a watchdog group, Corporate Europe Observatory, which receives philanthropic funding, filed a formal complaint against MCC Brussels.
The watchdog was irked at how MCC Brussels was leading an attack on civil society organisations – calling for them to have their EU funding withdrawn – while its own finances weren’t listed.
The watchdog alleged that MCC Brussels had improperly restarted the clock on a grace period for disclosure of its lobbying budget by replacing one registration with another, thereby delaying requirements to publish financial activities.
MCC Brussels says it already has been exonerated from that claim.
It also says it's been arbitrarily singled out under the registration rules, since many prominent NGOs, including the environmental group WWF and the global charity Caritas, have multiple entries.
Russian oil
The European Commission acknowledges its single registration rules are enforced on a “case-by-case” basis when needed “to ensure the greatest level of transparency”.
But concluding that this is solely a case of partisan score-settling glosses over how MCC Brussels got to be a think tank in the first place, and then managed to gain traction in Brussels.
The answer says a lot about how ultraconservatives flush with funding — in this case substantially derived from Russian oil — can push fringe political conversations into mainstream Brussels discourse.
The Mathias Corvinus Collegium was founded in 1996 in Budapest as a private educational institution. For more than two decades it was mostly known for talent-development.
Things moved up a gear in 2020, when Balázs Orbán, Viktor Orbán’s former political director, took over as chair of MCC’s board and set out to make the institution a strong voice for Orbánite illiberal values. (The two men are not related).
Viktor Orbán's political party, Fidesz, used its supermajority in the Hungarian Parliament to transfer 10% of the state's shares in energy company MOL, and shares of a pharmaceutical business, as well as some real estate, to the MCC Foundation.
MOL relies heavily on buying relatively cheap Russian crude oil — a business contested by the EU for the role it plays in keeping the Kremlin’s war going in Ukraine.
MOL's most recent dividend to MCC has a value of around €66 million. That was decided just days before the recent election – though Magyar's victory has led to the payout being delayed.
As to MCC Brussels, it has an annual budget of €6.3 million, almost all of which comes from MCC in Hungary. The largesse has put MCC Brussels among the best-funded think tanks in Brussels.
Dissolving the EU
MCC Brussels's activities have included characterising the EU's digital laws as a threat to free speech; seeking to remove barriers to far-right parties at the European Parliament; supporting the attack on environmental laws by farming groups; and platforming speakers who spread false information about climate science.
As well as crowbarring MAGA-adjacent messaging into the Brussels conversation, MCC also uses grand civilisational narratives about a supposed threat to Western values from migration, echoing talking points used by US Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk about Europe.
At the same time, MCC has been involved in discussions aimed at reducing the roles of the European Commission and European Court of Justice — and even gradually dissolving the present-day EU.
MCC Brussels also has garnered attention with its claims about cancel culture.
A case in point is from 2024 when MCC Brussels helped stage a National Conservatism conference that met with ferocious opposition from local politicians in Brussels. But efforts to shut down the conference backfired when the bans ended up amplifying rather than diminishing their message.
Fast forward to the present day, and MCC Brussels appears to be using suspension from the Transparency Register as fresh evidence of bias against an underdog.
But those pleas ring increasingly hollow given the very substantial financial resources that have been made available to MCC Brussels.
Sympathy also is in short supply because of MCC's close association with Orbán, who spent the last years of his premiership blocking aid to Kyiv and vetoing sanctions on Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Lasting reversal
Magyar, the new prime minister, and part of the same conservative political family as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, has taken a far more EU-aligned position on Ukraine.
MCC Brussels insists its gripes about the EU go far beyond politics – one of its core criticisms being that the EU mainstream is simply afraid of open debate.
But the question is complicated by how MCC Brussels consorts with the very people who want to tear up the present-day European system — or certainly important aspects of it — as well as diminish recognition for the work of antiracists and decolonisers and downplay the concerns of vulnerable minorities including trans people and LGBT communities.
Seen in that light, the suspension of MCC Brussels is less important as a fight over how the EU transparency rules are enforced, or over unwillingness by the EU to engage in painful criticism, or over who's in or out of political favour, and more important as a sign that the EU is now prepared to strike meaningful blows at a soft‑power and propaganda ecosystem that can create vectors for hostile influence.
In other words, what may really be at stake in the fight over MCC Brussels is the lasting reversal of the way a relatively small EU member state like Hungary became a global beacon for nativist ideology with nodes in an international network that may pose strategic and informational risks to our democracies.
US slush fund
The path ahead is unlikely to be a smooth one.
People associated with MCC and its supporters are "thinking in very grand geostrategic terms," Olivier Hoedeman of Corporate Europe Observatory, which brought the complaint against MCC Brussels, told me.
Hoedeman also said MCC Brussels is well positioned to tap alternative income sources including from sources like the US Heritage Foundation, or even the Trump administration.
The US State Department has already signalled support for likeminded groups in Europe, like Orbánite illiberals, by way of a slush fund.
In other words, MCC Brussels may be down, but it's certainly not out.
Or as John O'Brien of MCC Brussels told me this week: it's "important you know we will never surrender".
