George Soros Vows To Keep Funding Hungary Civil Society Groups
Image by Getty Images
Billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations will keep working with and financing NGOs in Hungary despite the Hungarian government saying that any civil society group they should be “swept out,” the head of the Foundations said on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party’s vice chairman Szilard Nemeth told a news conference on Tuesday that “these organizations must be pushed back with all available tools.”
Orban has been criticized at home and abroad for his government’s increasing control over the media, and a crackdown on NGOs, which started in 2014.
“The Open Society Foundations will continue to work in Hungary despite government opposition to our mission of fairer, accountable societies,” Christopher Stone, President of the Open Society Foundations, said in a statement emailed to Reuters.
“In Hungary and around the world we are more focused than ever on working with local groups to strengthen democratic practice, rights and justice.”
The Open Society Foundations have been active in Hungary for the past three decades. Soros has financed foreign scholarships for several Fidesz politicians, including Orban at the time when communism collapsed in Hungary.
Now the Open Society Foundations fund over 60 Hungarian NGOs promoting independent journalism, tackling corruption, and combating discrimination.
Orban has said civil society groups receive foreign money to “organize refugee streams and boost migration.”
The Forward is free to read but not free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
