Viktor Orban finds a new target: international NGOs

IN A speech in 2014 that substantiated his liberal opponents’ worst fears, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, said he planned to turn the country into an “illiberal state”. On June 13th Hungary’s parliament took its latest step in that direction, passing a law that requires NGOs which receive foreign funding to register with a court, and to declare the fact on websites and official publications. The law applies to all groups that receive more than €24,000 ($29,000) a year from abroad. The law is part of a concerted campaign by Mr Orban against liberal and human-rights organisations, especially those supported by George Soros, a Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist. State and pro-government media have spent months railing against Mr Soros and his Open Society Foundation, painting Mr Soros's support of more generous European asylum policies as a liberal plot to flood the continent with migrants and destabilise Hungary.

The law has already provoked international anger. In an unusually strong statement, the American embassy in Budapest said the new law “unfairly burdens” civil-society organisations and will “have a chilling effect on the ability of Hungarians to organise themselves”. Martin Schaefer, a spokesman for the German foreign ministry, said Hungary had joined the rank of countries like Russia and China whose governments see NGOs which accept foreign funds as enemies. European Union officials said they would study the law to ensure it was compatible with the rules of the internal market and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Human rights and civil-society groups were dismayed. The law is a “serious attack on Hungarian democracy, unprecedented anywhere else in Europe”, said Goran Buldioski, director of the Open Society Initiative for Europe. Two major civil-rights NGOs, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, say they will defy the law, which they believe to be unconstitutional, and refuse to register.

Government officials said the law simply aims to ensure transparency and accountability. “Hungarian citizens must be given the right to know about public actors, who they are, and who pays them,” said Mr Orban. Civic groups are “an essential part of every democratic society”, says Zoltan Kovacs, a government spokesman, but they need to be transparent when they are funded by a “foreign interest”.

The Venice Commission, a European legal advisory body, followed the government’s reasoning to an extent: it said ensuring transparency of civil-society organisations to prevent undue foreign political influence, money-laundering and financing of terrorism was, in principle, legitimate. But the commission still thought that the law caused “disproportionate and unnecessary interference” with basic political freedoms.

The real aim of the law is not to improve public transparency, but to fire up the voting base of the ruling right-wing Fidesz party. “The government wants Hungarians to feel besieged, that their core values are under attack,” says Tamas Boros of Policy Solutions, a think-tank in Budapest. The wave of migrants who arrived in Europe in 2015-16, which served Mr Orban as a useful bogeyman, has abated, and the fractured opposition is too harmless to serve as a foil. Fidesz is hunting for a new enemy, says Mr Boros: “It used to be the European Union and the IMF, now it’s George Soros and the NGOs.” An article Mr Soros wrote in September 2015, in which he called for the European Union to accept “at least a million asylum-seekers annually” and provide each with a stipend of 15,000 for two years, has served Mr Orban as ammunition.

Mr Kovacs compared the NGO law to America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires those engaging in political activities on behalf of foreign principals to register and disclose their activities. That is a distortion: the American act only applies to lobbyists for foreign governments, political parties and similar actors. An NGO engaged in aid, education or advocacy of social causes would not be touched by it.

Meanwhile, another law is threatening to close down Budapest’s Central European University (CEU), which was founded by Mr Soros in 1991. On April 4th parliament passed legislation requiring all foreign-accredited universities to have a campus in their home country. The only university that meets that description is the CEU, which is accredited both in Hungary and in the American state of New York, where it has no campus. On June 23rd a Hungarian government official will meet in New York with a representative of Andrew Cuomo, the governor, to discuss the university’s future, according to a university spokesperson.