Hungary leads the far-right charge on free speech

Pedro Frazão is a Portuguese far-right politician who fancies himself as something of an orator. At the Battle for the Soul of Europe conference in Brussels last December, the youthful 50-year-old cut a dynamic and sharp-suited figure as he outlined his vision. He called for “patriots” across the continent to fight for its fragile, inherited freedoms. Without the courage to fight, he suggested, the whole edifice of Western civilisation could collapse.

He ended with a flourish: “The West is here and being reborn.” Commenting on his YouTube channel immediately after the conference, Frazão refined his message: “Global elites buy media, hide truths and try to silence those who defend sovereignty, family and national identity. We cannot give in. It is up to us to protect the homeland, the borders and freedom. Portugal needs patriots who will not bow down.”

The conference was organized by MCC Brussels, an offshoot of the Matthias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian institution with close links to the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Politico has described the MCC Brussels as “the EU’s most prominent hard-right pressure group”. Far-right revivalists such as Frazão claim they are fighting for key enlightenment values, including free speech, which they say are under threat from a tsunami of wokery, driven by European Union bureaucrats.

The line-up at the conference was a Who’s Who of the European far right, including the British academic Matthew Goodwin, who later announced he would be standing for Reform UK in the recent Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election (which he lost). Goodwin told delegates there was “a political revolution under way”, which would destroy the traditional two-party system in the UK. “We will root out diversity, equality and inclusion policies or woke ideology from taxpayer-funded institutions,” he said, warning that a Reform government would look more like Donald Trump’s second administration in the USA than his first.

Other speakers included Alice Cordier, the French anti-immigration activist and founder of the Collectif Némésis; Patrick Deneen, the prominent conservative author of Why Liberalism Failed; and the Polish Christian philosopher-politician Ryszard Legutko. The star turn at the Battle for the Soul of Europe was former Czech president Václav Klaus, a key dissident ally of Václav Havel during the Cold War who has tacked further and further to the right in recent years.

MCC was founded in 1996 as a private higher-education institute by the conservative, anti-communist Tombor family and has grown into a hugely influential network of interlinked bodies. Combining the functions of a university, a youth movement and a think-tank, it has also developed a programme of political education under the banner of “talent development”.

MCC Brussels is headed by the Hungarian-British academic Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in the UK and a former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Fredi’s latest book, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History, is a staunch defence of the legacy of Western values and history against attacks sustained during the culture wars. He sees his role, which he took up two years ago after a chance meeting with the Hungarian prime minister’s political director Balázs Orbán (no relation), as providing a counterbalance to European liberal orthodoxy.

The links to the Fidesz government are explicit, with more than $1bn of government funds transferred to MCC at the beginning of the 2020s. Last year, the Brussels arm of the organisation received $6m from sources allied to Viktor Orbán, according to Politico. Balázs Orbán is its chairman.

In an interview with Index last year, Furedi said: “We are funded by two companies, the oil company MOL and Gedeon Richter, the pharmaceutical company. Now, you could argue that MCC Hungary [the orginal MCC] has got a close association with the government and it empathises with the government’s politics. Our particular organisation is entirely autonomous. That was the condition on which I took the job or set it up…”

Furedi is a staunch supporter of the idea that there is media freedom in Hungary despite Fidesz and its allies owning 80% of media outlets, according to Reporters Without Borders.

He also said: “I do think the attacks on Orbán’s government and Hungary over the free media are misconceived … You have a situation where there are TV channels in Hungary that are anti-government and have a very large viewership. You have a situation where the opposition has got a far greater presence on social media, on social media platforms, than the government has. [If] you go to Budapest and you go to newspaper shops, you’ll find that there are plenty of newspapers, not one, two or three, [that are] hostile and critical to government, so I don’t see it the way it’s represented.”

Since it was established in 2022, MCC Brussels has pumped out a stream of anti-EU literature. In 2025 alone, the think-tank has published 11 substantial reports in an attempt to expose the supposed woke bias of the EU as it wages a war against the free speech of the silent majority. These include ‘Mission Creeps: How EU Funding an Activist NGOs Captured the Gender Agenda’, ‘Brussels’s Media Machine: EU Media Funding and the Shaping of Public Discourse’, ‘Rule of Lawyers: How the ECHR is Hampering Action on Migration’, and ‘Indoctrinating Children: How Brussels Embeds Gender Identity in the Classroom’.

The ideological direction of travel is clear, but these reports are not the intemperate ravings of the traditional extreme right. These are detailed arguments honed over the years by the intellectual allies of Furedi as he made his way from the hard left to the populist right.

The consistent message at Battle for the Soul of Europe was this: European civilisation is under threat from the combined forces of mass immigration and political correctness. Free speech for people wishing to raise these issues is being stifled. Patriots of sovereign nations need to wake up and fight for the Christian values of the West and come to some kind of understanding with Russia. Just a week after the conference, Trump made it clear that his national security strategy’s Europe policy was based on precisely the same principles.

Writing in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, Nick Cheeseman, Matias Bianchi and Jennifer Cyr identified the concept of The Illiberal International, which brings together far-right politicians to reshape the global order. They identified key gatherings of the far right such as the Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid in February 2025, hosted by the right-wing party and MCC ally Patriots.EU. The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which met in Hungary in 2022, met again in Budapest on 21 March 2026 – just before parliamentary elections – with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the keynote speaker. These set-piece events provide a forum for what the Foreign Affairs authors describe as “narrative diffusion”.

December’s Battle for the Soul of Europe was just such an event. The Illiberal International article describes this process brilliantly: “Attendees endorse each other in speeches, cultivate networks of contacts, and share ideas, building international connections that provide visibility and legitimacy for domestic movements. And because these events include both conventional conservative discourse and outright disinformation, they can blur the boundary between the two, making authoritarian messaging appear more palatable to mainstream audiences.”

Viktor Orbán’s concept of “illiberal democracy” has often been cited as an inspiration for the Trump regime, and in recent months the ideological links between Budapest and Washington have become increasingly explicit.

At the beginning of February, MCC welcomed an investigation by the USA’s House Judiciary Committee into alleged EU censorship. A statement from MCC Brussels claimed “internal communications from major technology platforms provides incontrovertible proof that the European Union’s regulatory framework is a ‘censorship operating system’ designed to systematically throttle free speech”.

For some time, MCC Brussels has warned of an alliance between unelected EU institutions, tech companies and state-funded NGOs to stifle rightwing political speech. As far as the US committee and the European right are concerned, the EU’s Democracy Shield – an initiative launched in November 2025 by the EU Commission to target disinformation, fake news and foreign interference – is a cover for silencing dissent by the liberal orthodoxy.

In response, it launched the Democracy Interference Observatory to counter what it sees as EU meddling in elections taking place in sovereign European states. It has announced that its first test case will be April’s Hungarian elections, where it will target EU attempts to identify foreign interference and electoral malpractice.

The battle lines have been drawn. Opposition candidate Péter Magyar has already warned of Russian interference in the forthcoming election and has urged a stronger EU response. Meanwhile, Magyar’s chief of staff, Márton Hajdu, has called for the application of the EU Digital Services Act to counter disinformation. The latest AI-generated political advert from Viktor Orbán’s party shows a father being executed by a soldier in what looks like German uniform because the EU has dragged Hungary into the war in Ukraine.

Few MCC authors are mainstream academics, and most are referred to as “independent researchers”. The most prolific of these is the Italian journalist and author Thomas Fazi, who writes on EU propaganda and media manipulation. His report on Brussels’s Media Machine is a direct challenge to the EU consensus on disinformation and dissent, arguing that it closes down genuinely alternative voices. He says Brussels funding is used to bolster mainstream media narratives within the EU and, significantly, beyond its borders.

His arguments mirror those used by the Trump administration to cut funding to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United States Agency for Global Media.

“The EU funds media outlets in Ukraine, the Western Balkans, the South Caucasus and Russian/Belarusian exile media. These efforts, under the guise of ‘supporting democracy’, often reflect geopolitical and strategic goals, mirroring methods associated with USAID-style influence campaigns,” he said. Fazi also pushes the MCC Brussels line in mainstream media outlets and is a regular contributor to the British publication UnHerd. Here he is last November on the European Democracy Shield: “[This] is just the latest vision in unfreedom: suppressing dissent and policing speech under the pretext of defending democracy from foreign interference and fake news.”

EU commissioner for democracy, justice and the rule of law Michael McGrath told critics in the European parliament in November: “To those who question the Shield and who say it’s about censorship, what I say to you is that I and my colleagues in the European Commission will be the very first people to defend your right to level robust debate in a public forum.”

Zalán Zubor of the Hungarian investigative non-for-profit publication Atlatszo, has been tracking the activities of MCC for several years. He said there was a common methodology to its work, where it identified freelance writers and paid them yearly grants to undertake unspecified research while writing specific articles adhering to the MCC line.

He explained the forthcoming election was a high-stakes moment for the organisation as Magyar has pledged to set up an agency to prosecute groups that have been the beneficiaries of state largesse. “The MCC is going to be the target,” said Zubor.

The future of MCC Brussels is unclear, but it is possible that it is part of the global strategy of the Hungarian far right in case Viktor Orbán loses the election. For Zubor, this would be an obvious next step for the Hungarian leader. “It is very clear he sees himself as an international figure, the Hungarian leader of the far right.”

While a storm is coming for the MCC and its Brussels branch if Magyar wins the election, the same may be true for independent media if Fidesz returns to power in April. At present, Hungarian citizens can donate 1% of their taxes to civil society groups, including non-profit media organisations such as Atlatszo. The government recently withdrew proposals to make it illegal for these donations to be made to organisations judged “political”, which would have effectively bankrupted independent media. But if Fidesz wins, there is every possibility it will reintroduce the measure.

This article was first published in Index on Censorship 1/2026