Democracy Digest: A Week of Illiberal Rants, Threats to Sue And Hands Across the Aisle

According to the reports, the institute will be launched with a staff of around 20-30 people and - as is typical for these Fidesz ventures - financed out of taxpayer money. Its goal is ostensibly to carry out research and polls and organise events, but behind the scenes will also foster international relations between Orban's Fidesz party - now free of the EPP - with predominantly Christian political movements elsewhere in Europe and the world.

Critical newspaper Nepszava reported that some well-known international personalities - such as former European commissioner Günther Oettinger, former Bavarian prime minister Edmund Stoiber and former Canadian leader Stephen Harper - are being approached to serve as members of the board. The institute will be chaired by ultra-conservative Italian politician Lorenzo Fontana, the deputy federal secretary of Salvini's Lega, and a little-known politician of Hungary's Christian Democratic People's Party, Jozsef Meszaros (unrelated to Orban's favourite oligarch Lorinc Meszaros).

The institute is yet another example of Fidesz channelling public money to proxy institutions. Fidesz has already set up at least half a dozen of these - including the Centre of Fundamental Rights, Migration Research Institute and alternative right-wing history institute Veritas - over the past few years, some rivalling each other, but all used for building up and strengthening the government's ideological narratives without offering any real space for debate or criticism.

Another recent development is the launch of a semi-scientific bimonthly magazine called Hungarian Conservative, also financed heavily from the state budget, to promote Fidesz's conservative, pro-family, anti-immigration, anti-liberal ideology.

Should Orban...

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