Before the sovereignty hysteria, Fidesz-linked organizations accepted a lot of German grants

While the Hungarian prime minister threatens civil society over foreign founding, he has no hangsup about his party’s organizations taking money from abroad. German foundations spents hundreds of millions of HUFs to fund groups linked to the government and the ruling party – a fact that they are now trying to scrub from the internet.

Since the start of the year, the Hungarian government has threatened an unprecendented crackdown on civil society and independent media. Enboldened by the Trump administration’s defunding of USAID, Orbán focused his speech at the March 15 national holiday celebration around threats to „foreign backed” actors – widely interpreted as a sign of punitive measures, an elevation of similar threats by the so-called Sovereignity Protection Office.

Similar measures are already in the law to prevent political parties from accepting support from foreign organisations. Since December 2023, when the Law on the Protection of Sovereignty came into force, it has been punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment for anyone who accepts such funds, either directly or covertly. This is called „illegal influence on the will of the electorate” – and recently, this phrase has been used by politicians and the Sovereignity Protection Office to describe the activities of NGOs and media organizations, including Transparency International Hungary and Átlátszó.

According to the logic of government propaganda, if a media outlet performs a task that the government is unwilling to fund, and uses foreign tender money to do so, it is a serious violation of Hungarian sovereignty. To follow up on this idea – which we believe to be false – we looked at the kind of funding that the governing parties and their affiliated organisations receive from abroad.

In a previous article, we showed that the Federalist Society, which is close to the US Republican Party, has funded the activities of the Common Sense Society Foundation in Hungary on several occasions. Among the contributors to the domestically registered foundation was András László, who was later appointed “government commissioner responsible for investigating political corruption funds paid by USAID to Hungarian entities”. In this section, we will look at the funding from Germany.

Konrad Adenauer Foundation: summer camps, study trips for organisations close to Fidesz

The governing parties and allied organisations have recently been trying to remove the names of their foreign supporters from their websites, but this has not been entirely successful. A list of supporters of the governing Fidesz’s party’s foundation, the Alliance for a Civic Hungary Foundation, can be found on the Internet, according to which the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS), which is linked to the German CDU, supported them with around 250,000 euros between 2004 and 2012, or around 100 million forints at today’s exchange rate.

List of funders of the Civic Foundation for Hungary 2021 by Átlátszó on Scribd by atlatszo on Scribd

We contacted the KAS Budapest office to find out how many times, how much and for what purpose it has supported organisations in Hungary. In his reply, Michael Winzer, head of the KAS Budapest office, wrote that, in accordance with data protection regulations, accounting documents older than 10 years are destroyed, so they can only provide information on the last 10 years, during which time they have not supported any institutional partners in Hungary, but have only occasionally cooperated with local institutions in events and activities.

According to Winzer, KAS paid the costs incurred in this context (e.g. interpreter, room rental, etc.) directly to the service provider and not to their partner. When we asked which of these partners’ events these were and how much they had incurred, we did not receive a substantive answer, but were directed to the KAS website and social media pages where all their events are available.

These revealed that the 2022 international summer camp of the MCC, a publicly funded ideological workshop supporting the government, was also supported by the German CDU party’s foundation. During theis event, 25 German and Hungarian youths had the opportunity to exchange ideas about the relations between the two countries, the European Union and listen to lectures. The programme was completely free of charge for the young people and the costs were covered by the MCC and the KAS, among others. The camp was held again in 2023 and 2024, but KAS was no longer a sponsor, although they provided speakers.

In 2024, on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Pan-European Picnic, the German-Hungarian Summer Academy was organised in cooperation with the German-Hungarian Youth Office, attended by the President of the Republic Tamás Sulyok and the President of the Federal Republic of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

In addition to the camps, KAS’s Budapest branch has also received funds to organise study trips, and in 2018 a study trip to Berlin was organised for the members of Fidesz’s youth wing (Fidelitas) to discuss important issues concerning the future of the EU. Last year, the youth organisation of the smaller governing party, KDNP had the opportunity to travel to Berlin and Brussels at the invitation and, of course, at the expense of KAS, where they had the opportunity to meet with members of the European Parliament and the Bundestag, as well as representatives of think tanks, EU institutions and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

They discussed current European policy issues, future security policy, EU enlargement and competitiveness, and the future of European Christian democracy.

In addition, the National University of Public Service is a permanent partner of the KAS. They hold regular events with and at their premises and, according to the reply from Michael Winzer, they finance these events by covering the costs. Recent events have included the presentation of joint opinion polls by the Institute for Public Opinion and the Hanns Seidel Foundation (a foundation of the Bavarian CSU party), the War and Peace Conference last October, and a series of seminars on the importance of IT as a key element of public services, also last autumn.

The NKE event included big names such as Ágoston Sámuel Mráz, head of the Nézőpont Institute, or Bence Bauer, director of the MCC German-Hungarian Institute, and even the Prime Minister’s aid Gergely Gulyás.

Hanns Seidel Foundation: projects in the field of home affairs and law enforcement, support for disadvantaged people and minorities

Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSS), the party foundation of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, CSU, also has an extensive network of partners in Hungary. Spokesman Hubertus Klingsbogl also pointed out in a reply to our paper that the HSS does not provide financial support to organisations in Hungary, but only works together on a project basis, where the foundation takes over the costs of project-related services.

It did not take much research to see that this is not entirely true. According to the HSS website, the focus of their work is on intensive cooperation with Hungarian law enforcement agencies. The foundation is funding a forum by the Hungarian Police where a scholarship scheme for Roma youth was presented. In addition to regular financial support, this scheme also guarantees that the young people supported will start their careers in the police as fresh graduates after graduating from college or university. Clearly, a grant for an application is no longer just about covering the costs of an event or project-related services.

The HSS is concerned with the inclusion of disadvantaged people, especially the Romani, which is why it was able to support a 2023 event by the Dialogue Foundation, which was held by the KDNP-affiliated Dialogue Foundation, with the main topics being equal opportunities, Roma inclusion, social support and challenges.

Among the speakers were Fidesz MEP Lívia Járóka , Lászlóné Radomszki, Deputy State Secretary for Social Inclusion at the Ministry of the Interior, and István Antal, Director of the MCC Roma Talent Programme.

The HSS’s support for the interior and social affairs even earned the gratitude of the Prime Ministers’ chief political advisor Balázs Orbán,

who thanked the network of Christian Romani colleges. The cooperation between the MCC and the HSS is not new: since 2012, the Hanns Seidel Foundation has organised camps for disadvantaged children, which are regularly attended by the director of the MCC’s Roma Talent Programme.

The Bavarian foundation also has a close relationship with the Nézőpont Institute, run by Samuel Ágoston Mráz. Every year, the two organisations jointly produce the German-Hungarian Barometer, which provides an insight into the current mood between the two countries. But this is not the only study they produce together. It has also become a tradition for them to prepare a joint study on corruption prevention.

Balázs Orbán also expressed his gratitude to the HSS for the Gyula Andrássy German Language University of Budapest. Students here have the opportunity to listen to lectures by German-speaking professors and to attend parallel courses at the University of Passau. In addition to the HSS, the KAS also actively contributes to the functioning of the university, and in addition to numerous conferences, the KAS also supports selected students with scholarships every year.

Government propaganda often accuses opposition organizations for being under foreign influence over similar camps or study trips funded from foreign subsidies. They are painted as tools for foreign influence over Hungarian domestic politics. Thus, we would like to call the attention of the Office for the Protection of Sovereignty to the above projects and grants: investigate what the foreign financier expected in return from Fidesz-linked oranizations.