BUDAPEST, Hungary — The Central European University in Hungary’s capital still looks the part.
Its limestone entrance rises above a grand 1820s mansion, its newer additions all hard modern lines and confidence. It has won architecture awards. It was built to suggest a certain kind of Hungary, too: outward-looking, liberal, at ease with the West.
Today it is eerily quiet.
Founded by George Soros after the fall of communism, the university says the authoritarian government of Viktor Orbán forced 90% of its teaching operations out of the country in 2019, leaving behind a stark symbol of how far the nation has moved during the prime minister’s 16-year regime.
“This should be full of students but as you can see it is almost empty,” Márta Pardavi, one of Hungary’s most prominent human rights advocates, said while showing NBC News around the building this week.
When the Central European University moved academic activities to Vienna, 130 miles west over the border with Austria, its then rector, Michael Ignatieff, described it as a “dark day for freedom in Hungary” and for academia.
Someone with a different view of the strongman’s education crackdown is Vice President JD Vance, who was in Hungary this week trying to boost Orbán’s flagging polls ahead of a crucial election Sunday. Vance has championed Orbán as what conservatives can achieve if they get tough on the liberal indoctrination he believes is rife in American colleges and universities.
“The closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said in 2024, then a Republican senator from Ohio. “I think his way has to be the model for us — not to eliminate universities, but to give the choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”
On a wider level, Sunday’s vote is not just an inflection point for Hungary, but it is also a key moment in the trajectory of Orbánism, and its ability to act as a hard-right ideological ally of Washington inside the European Union, which both Orbán and Vance routinely condemn.
Asked for comment, Vance’s office referred to his previous remarks on the issue. The vice president discussed the idea again this week, telling an Orbán rally in Budapest on Tuesday that “children should be able to go to school and get educated and not indoctrinated.”
His host, Orbán, has long railed against the Central European University, accusing it of “cheating” by issuing both Hungarian and American qualifications, and using foreign funding to outcompete domestic institutions and unduly meddle in Hungarian life.
In 1989, the Hungarian leader actually received a Soros Foundation scholarship to study at Britain's University of Oxford. But much of Orbán’s criticism of the Central European University has been directed personally at Soros, who is Jewish, often deploying antisemitic tropes in what has become a crusade against the billionaire philanthropist.
He has accused Soros of spearheading a “shadow army” of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations and civil society groups, labeling them “insects” that have “survived for too long.” Painting Soros as a “globalist,” he has used terminology since adopted by conspiracy theorists in the United States and beyond. The university was finally driven out, it said, after Orbán’s government passed legislation demanding it comply with a series of practically impossible requirements.
Orbán’s office did not respond to requests for comment. He has previously denied allegations of antisemitism, branding Hungary as the safest place for Jews in what he described as a European continent rife with anti-Jewish hatred. He points to his funding of a research institute to tackle that problem and also his strong alliance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 2018, the year before the university relocated its campus, Soros’ Open Society Foundations also moved its international operations from Budapest to Berlin, citing the “increasingly repressive political and legal environment” imposed by the Orbán regime.
Today’s Hungary is no longer considered a full democracy, but is rather classed as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” by the European Parliament, of which it is a member, having squeezed the independence of its courts, media and other institutions.
For Republicans and Europe’s hard-right, Orbán is seen as a trailblazer. Since 2022, there has been a satellite Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, held in Hungary each year. And Orbán has credited himself with being involved in the “program writing” for Trump’s policies and strategy.
That’s deeply alarming for Trump’s opponents.
In a speech last June, former President Barack Obama said Trump’s government was “not consistent with American democracy; it is consistent with autocracies. It is consistent with Hungary under Orbán.”
Obama added that the U.S. was “not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that.”
If Peter Magyar, leader of the Tisza party, wins Sunday, he will be expected to follow through on his promises to restore the independence of education and other institutions.
Some observers are uneasy that his proposals lack specifics.
“Peter Magyar has really given a positive energy to a lot of people. They have been turning away from disillusionment and apathy and speaking about politics but no longer in a hushed tone,” Pardavi, the rights activist, said. But in terms of the details, she added, “there is a lot missing.”
On the bright, chilly morning after Vance’s speech boosting Orbán, NBC News visited the Central European University.
Behind its angular limestone entrance, this is an inviting complex of courtyards, corridors and “flying” staircases — glass, steel and brick — all designed to echo the city’s own beguiling layout. It is a marriage of old and new, its vast, wedge-shaped glass atrium slotted into buildings that form part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“The building you’ve just walked into was purpose-built brand-new,” said Pardavi, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, one of several NGOs and other groups that have recently moved into the vacated spaces in the university. “It has an amazing library, and it really is magnificent and quite beautiful.”
When award-winning Irish architects Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey designed this 21-million euro ($24.5 million) project, they imagined it would “encourage interaction and collaboration between academic departments.”
The university is quick to point out that just because its teaching operations have gone, and it can no longer be considered a campus, the building is still home to academic research, public lectures and other events. And it has also become a home for organizations like the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, one of the country’s top human rights groups that provides free legal assistance to marginalized people such as refugees and the LGBTQ community.
Pardavi says she is going nowhere.
“What does a Hungarian organization do? You are not going to leave,” she said. “You stay here. You do your job, because this is what the organization has set out to do,” she added.
Statistics hint at a brain drain coinciding with the Orbán regime.
Last year, a record number of Hungarian students — about 18,000, according to UNESCO-cited estimates — chose to study abroad, a striking figure in a country of fewer than 10 million people. In 2024, a record 41,294 Hungarians emigrated, according to official statistics, bringing the total number of emigrants during Orbán’s years in power to more than 360,000.
Much of Hungary’s slow population decline can be explained by low birth rates and a stagnant economy, growing just 0.4% last year, coupled with the opportunities offered by the free movement of the European Union. But experts have said that part of it is clearly down to the political climate.
In 2019, the world-renowned mathematician László Lovász, then the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, predicted that “the Hungarian scientific community will suffer irreversible damage” because of Orbán’s policies. “Unpredictability will make the most talented and excellent young scientists leave the country.”
