Hungary Hits Back at EU Overreach

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BUDAPEST, Hungary (ChurchMilitant.com) - Hungary is pushing back at the latest efforts by the European Union (EU) to suppress the nation's sovereignty.

The Hungarian government hit back on Monday at the EU's overruling of a 2017 law that had strengthened Hungary's academic autonomy. The 2017 law required foreign universities operating in Hungary to provide courses in their home countries as well as in Hungary. The legislation was seen as a way to curb the influence of the Central European University (CEU), founded and backed by globalist billionaire George Soros.

Hungarian justice minister Judit Varga on Tuesday told the MTI (Magyar Távirati Iroda), a Hungarian news agency, that Hungary will continue to operate on behalf of the Hungarian people.

Responding to the EU's ruling, Varga said:

[A]s always, Hungary will duly implement the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in accordance with the best interests of the Hungarian people. There is no scope for creating a law that would give the Soros university an advantage over Hungarian universities. We find double standards unacceptable, every university in Hungary must equally observe the laws.

Taking a dig at the Soros university without mentioning it by name, she added, "The relevant [2017] Hungarian law affects dozens of foreign higher education institutions operating in Hungary, but for most of them, complying with the law was not a problem."

A key member of the European Parliament Intergroup on LGBT Rights welcomed the ruling. Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield declared Monday in a statement: "Forcing out a university is undemocratic. It goes against European values, and now it's been ruled as illegal."

Delbos-Corfield took a shot at the Hungarian prime minister, saying the ruling "should send a warning to Viktor Orbán that it's time to step back from the brink of autocracy and reverse the Hungarian government's undemocratic path."

CEU was founded in the early 1990s by the Hungarian-American Soros who sought to create "flourishing open societies" and educate people to promote them, according to its website. It was established as a multi-campus, graduate-level university in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw that offered courses in social sciences, law and the humanities. But by 1995 all university activities centered in Budapest. This university, Soros decided, would "become a prototype of an open society."

Despite its mission of promoting "the values of open society and self-reflective critical thinking," the CEU has been criticized for providing leftist education rooted in ideology rather than the open inquiry of facts and ideas.

On Tuesday Breitbart News — in reporting on the EU's ruling — pointed to an "entire" department at CEU devoted to gender studies and critical race theory which, it said, encourages "the deconstruction of traditional European cultures."

Despite the win for Soros, he claimed in a statement on Tuesday the CEU will not return to Budapest.

"We cannot return to Hungary because its prevailing laws don't meet the requirements of academic freedom," the left-wing billionaire opined. "The Hungarian government continues to trample EU law."

He indicated that "the EU is currently debating how to ensure that its funds are used in accordance with the rule of law."

"I call on the EU to make Hungary a test case," he threatened.

The EU's decision comes amid a years-long clash between Orbán and Soros. The prime minister has been a vocal opponent of Soros, claiming the 90-year-old billionaire has a social and political agenda, notably for his support of open borders that seeks to destroy national values.

According to Orbán in a recent essay, "this struggle has to do with Soros' international organizations, most notably the Open Society Foundations, which operate through [the] supranational organization of the EU."

He says that the system, which "they [globalists] tend to call 'rule of law,' is merely a rule of blackmail that is vulnerable to intrusion from Soros' network" and a tool for attacking "national communities" for the benefit of "the big dogs of global capital."

Orbán continued, "The struggle between the global elite and national resistance has not yet been decided," but Hungary represents "a considerable force" in that effort.

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