For nearly two decades, Viktor Orban turned Hungary from a relatively quiet central European state into a global hub for transnational conservative politics, building a sprawling interconnected network of think tanks, academic institutions, and ideological initiatives designed to unite right-wing movements across Europe and North America while expanding Budapest’s soft power influence across the Western world. Following 16 years in office, Orban stepped down last weekend after opposition candidate Peter Magyar, a conservative newcomer, secured a decisive election victory with more than 53% of the popular vote – a result that has cast the entire future of Orban’s ideological project into major doubt.
At the core of Orban’s network are two flagship institutions: the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank focused on engaging Anglophone conservative thinkers, and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), widely described as Orban’s purpose-built ideological training center. Founded by John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Danube Institute has become a key meeting point for right-wing intellectuals from the United Kingdom, funded entirely by the Hungarian government through the state-managed Batthyany Lajos Foundation. The institute primarily hosts British and American visiting fellows, who regularly contribute to leading conservative publications across the Anglosphere including *The Spectator* and UnHerd.
Gavin Hayes, a British visiting fellow at the institute, told Middle East Eye that the center has become more connected to the British right-wing intellectual scene than many domestic London-based institutions. “It’s an intellectual turnstile,” Hayes explained, “I’ve met more prominent right-wing thinkers from London here in Budapest than I ever did in London.” The institute has helped spread interest in the so-called “Orban model” of socially populist, nationalist politics across the British right, he added, providing a space for hard-right British figures to exchange ideas with ideological allies who share their skepticism of mainstream progressive policy. Back in 2019, Tim Montgomerie, former social justice advisor to ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, even used a Danube Institute speech to call for a new “special relationship” between London and Budapest.
The MCC, for its part, has grown into one of the most well-funded nodes of Orban’s ideological network, receiving major state assets during his premiership – including 10% stakes in two large Hungarian companies, among them regional energy giant MOL. The institution has actively cultivated ties with prominent British right-wing figures, including Matt Goodwin, a Reform UK candidate who lost a February Greater Manchester by-election to the Green Party and was scheduled to deliver a talk at MCC just one day after Orban’s election defeat. MCC hosts an annual summit at King’s College London, and has directed more than half a million pounds – over 90% of its total funding – to the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF), an organization named after the late prominent British conservative philosopher.
The RSLF counts former UK Conservative minister Michael Gove, current editor of *The Spectator*, among its board members, and one of its directors is James Orr, a Cambridge theologian who also serves as a senior advisor to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Orr praised Orban’s government during an appearance at a 2023 Hungarian political festival, framing it as a needed counterpoint to what he called the anti-national heritage ideology dominating mainstream British politics. That same event drew a host of other high-profile right-wing figures, including US billionaire Peter Thiel, former Boris Johnson advisor Dominic Cummings, and Goodwin, who hailed Orban’s administration as a rebuke of what he described as “national self-loathing” in British public life.
Orban’s pan-European conservative project has long found particularly fertile ground in the UK, especially within the rapidly rising right-wing party Reform UK, which currently leads national opinion polls ahead of the next UK general election. Farage, Reform’s leader, has repeatedly praised Orban over the years, rejecting criticisms of the Hungarian leader’s authoritarian tendencies and framing him as the future of European politics. “He actually believes in things. He does not sheepishly, slavishly go along with the European project… he firmly believes in the concept of the nation-state,” Farage said of Orban in 2019, and headlined a 2024 National Conservatism conference in Brussels alongside Orban, an event sponsored by MCC’s Brussels office.
Orban’s brand of hardline nationalist politics has also drawn support from leading right-wing figures across the Atlantic, and just last month he shared the stage with Argentinian President Javier Milei at a Conservative Political Action Conference held in Budapest, while former US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered pre-recorded video addresses to the crowd. Despite the network’s rapid growth over the past decade, its future is now unclear, as Magyar’s Tisza Party ran on an explicit platform that promised to end the use of public funds to build transnational political networks.
The party has pledged to draw a clear line between nonpartisan education and ideological propaganda, and has promised to take back state assets currently held by MCC. “No one knows what will happen,” Hayes said of the Danube Institute. “Effectively this is an arm of Hungarian public diplomacy, so the new government could come in and decide there’ll always be the place for an Anglophone institute.” But if the new government follows through on its campaign promises, Orban’s sprawling Budapest-based conservative network will be forced to find new sources of funding and new patrons to sustain its transnational ideological work.