Within a short time, a coordinated attack was launched in Germany, Austria and Hungary against Central Europe’s most important talent agency, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium – the threads lead to György Soros.
An email exchange has been leaked in which Berlin’s elite business school, ESMT, inquires with the German foreign ministry about how MCC should be evaluated. The answer came from Julia Gross, Germany’s ambassador to Budapest:
The MCC is the cadre factory of the ruling party, Fidesz, a propaganda school.
Active and effective propaganda from MCC
The letter a Correctiv published, but the newspaper itself immediately began to frame what happened according to its own narrative, since in the first paragraph it claims that Viktor Orbán is a “much-criticized right-wing populist”. The portal was created by Spiegel based on his investigative report, he is financed by György Soros’s foundation, and has already received, for example, 100,000 euros in order to expose “fake news spreading on Facebook” – that is, those that are fake news according to the leftist narrative.
Correctiv published further details from the ambassador’s assessment, the diplomat wrote that the MCC manages to attract German speakers from conservative to very conservative, and conducts active and effective propaganda.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in its report that it hopes that studies in Germany will have a significant impact on Hungarian students and will bring them out of the “Fidesz bubble”.
Europe’s top university supports the cooperation
In its response, ESMT – which is supported by companies such as BMW, Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank – defended the partnership with MCC, thanks to which Hungarian students can study free of charge at one of the best universities in Europe with a scholarship.
This is not the first time that in Germany they have tried to prevent the cooperation between the ESMT and the MCC: for example, the author of the Tagesspiegel demanded the immediate termination of the contract, in which he found a supporter in the person of Michael Roth – according to the politician of the Social Democrats, the MCC “is not suitable for free Berlin”.
Moreover, it was not “only” the institutions, the world-renowned experts who were under attack: the management of the German National Academic Foundation, which operates with state funds, was afraid of a single liberal journalist, and therefore did not allow its scholarship holder, Werner J. Patzel, who shares values with Hungary and the MCC, to professor to give a lecture on conservatism.
The lack of a rainbow flag bothered them
Like Germany, Austria is also trying to obstruct the work of the MCC on all available fronts, and they are not selective in choosing excuses for this. The recently operating as a simple program booklet, which has now become a left-wing propaganda sheet financed by NGOs Falter also dedicated a multi-page article to the MCC, in which he formulates the “usual” accusations: the mouthpiece of the Putin-friendly Hungarian government, which operates in a country where there is no democracy, and otherwise echoes the narrative of Viktor Orbán.
The profile of Falter – which previously focused on cinema and theater shows – has changed a lot in recent years, György Soros visited them personally, and countless articles were written about the situation of the Soros foundations: based on the framing, everyone who receives money from them is doing well and is self-destructive , who does not wish to cooperate with them.
Another Austrian liberal newspaper, Der Standard, was previously upset that the rainbow flag was not hoisted at the entrance of Modul University, which was purchased by MCC, in accordance with the rules in force since the establishment of the institution. The chairman of MCC’s board of trustees, Balázs Orbán, responded: the university is not the scene of identity politics and gender propaganda.
Later, Die Presse also wrote a terribly one-sided summary, with which it tried to scold the Austrians, because according to the author, Viktor Orbán’s “Trojan horse” must be expelled from Vienna. The paper also drew attention to the fact that MCC, as a think tank, is gaining more and more influence in the region with clever investments, as well as in the heart of Europe, in Brussels, and its ultra-conservative worldview is also influencing conservatives in Austria.
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2024-09-18 17:26:12