Globalist billionaire George Soros’s international grantmaking network is closing its Hungary office and will relocate to Germany in response to the government’s crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs.
“Faced with an increasingly repressive political and legal environment in Hungary, the Open Society Foundations (OSF) are moving their Budapest-based international operations and staff to the German capital, Berlin,” the network confirmed in a statement on Tuesday.
The decision to shut down operations in Hungary comes as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “prepares to impose further restrictions on nongovernmental organisations through what it has branded its ‘Stop Soros’ package of legislation”, according to the statement.
Hitting out at the proposals, which would tax foreign NGO income and clamp down on so-called civil society efforts to promote illegal immigration, OSF President Patrick Gaspard blasted Budapest for “using tactics unprecedented in the history of the European Union” to “denigrate” and “repress” the group’s work.
As well as bemoaning “burdensome” transparency requirements on funding from abroad, the group registered its particular anger over measures in the package invoking national security interests, such as rules which would require NGOs working with asylum seekers to be licensed by the government.
“The Foundations will pursue all available legal avenues to defend the fundamental rights that are threatened by the legislation,” OSF said in the statement, vowing to continue the organisation’s work in Hungary through funding from the German capital.
When news of the foundation’s possible exit from Budapest emerged last month, Orbán remarked on public radio: “I think you will understand if I fail to cry over its decision to close the headquarters in our capital.”
“The fight against Soros, its liberal ideology, its initiatives on migrants, will continue wherever the foundations of its foundation are,” he told MR1.
Pointing to recent meetings in Brussels between the Hungarian-born financier and high-level EU representatives, the government has said it is “crystal clear” that Soros remains committed to subverting politics, including his goal of flooding Europe with third world migrants, despite a landslide victory for Fidesz earlier this year giving a massive mandate to the party to stop plans to make the nation “multicultural”.
Declaring an end to ‘the era of ‘liberal democracy’ in the inaugural speech of his new parliamentary term at the weekend, Orbán vowed to learn from the West’s mistakes in building a “21st Century Christian democracy which guarantees human dignity, freedom, and security, protects the equal rights of men and women [and] the model of the traditional family”.
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