When we talk about global ideological alignment and global movements, there is often a tendency to evoke the name of another famous Hungarian, George Soros. His Open Society Foundations had their roots in the anti-Soviet opposition in Eastern Europe and, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, played a significant role in the construction of a liberal order. One of the beneficiaries of the Open Society was a then-young scholar, Viktor Orbán. While the international dimension of the Open Society is well publicized by friends and foes alike, the international dimension of Viktor Orbán’s own movement is less openly discussed.

At an intellectual level, Viktor Orbán uses Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to frame the liberal world order as a dominant or totalizing cultural force that must be dismantled through a long-term “war of position.” This subversion of Marxist discourse has enchanted the American and European right in ways not often addressed, not least in the Caucasus. In March 2026, the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) in Brussels published a report on Orbán’s “Counter-Hegemony” transatlantic laboratory. The author is Gábor Scheiring, an Assistant Professor of comparative politics at Georgetown University in Doha, having previously taught at the University of Cambridge, Bocconi, and Harvard. Formerly, he served as a Member of the Hungarian Parliament (2010-2014). We seek him out to understand Orbán’s bridge to the Caucasus, particularly Georgia.

In the 1990s Budapest was known for the Central European University and George Soros. This was often referenced with apocalyptic enthusiasm, as the seat of a global movement that would profoundly and irreversibly change Eastern Europe? What transformed Budapest into the capital of the anti-liberal order. 

The main idea behind of this study commissioned by FEPS was to systematically review Viktor Orbán’s outreach beyond Hungary, an issue that has drawn the attention of think tanks and investigative journalists. Orban, like Erdogan, were part of the liberal movement. In the early 2000s, Erdogan combined a discourse of liberal Islam with pro-EU stance.  In the 1990s Victor Orban was a typical right-of-centre liberal politician. They both gradually shifted to the right. 

Orban first served as Prime Minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002, when he championed economic reforms, EU and NATO integration. He led a technocratic government but eventually lost the elections. His diagnosis of this defeat was that governments were stripped of meaningful power. He and his entourage had a sociological understanding of power, in contrast to leaders like Barack Obama, who thought of power in terms of institutions and networks. Orban believed that the vacuum of socialism was filled in the 1990s and 2000s by a global alliance of liberal intelligentsia and a transnational capitalist class. You had competing political factions, but the centre of policymaking was firmly defined by this liberal, technocratic mainstream, plus foreign capital, which dominated the whole economy. This limited the scope for a national capitalist class to emerge. 

This liberal mainstream saw in local politics corruption and championed foreign investment as emancipatory, calling for opening of the economy for investment. Even before the 2008 financial crisis, this model was showing signs of exhaustion. Hungarian employment rate was the lowest throughout the whole OECD during the 2000s despite record levels of foreign investment. Income inequalities were widening and the labour market was precarious. The financial crisis just crowned existing vulnerabilities. Working masses were frustrated with the transition. Just to give you one figure: the middle classes did not see levels on income comparable to the 1980s before the middle of the 2010s. Hungarians experienced three lost decades in terms of real wage improvement. 

Following his major comeback to power in 2010 with a super-majority, Orban’s project focused on the unravelling of liberal hardware, colonising media and independent institutions, and also the software, that is, generating narratives that would challenge the hegemonic foundations of liberalism. This is the origin of culture wars. His university thesis was on Antonio Gramsci Hegemony, and his entourage did a lot of work to use this scheme to launch a national-conservative movement. 

This counter-hegemonic project becomes the darling of the American right in the 2020s. 

The Republican Party played a role in in the rise of Fidesz in the 1990s, when that party was a regular anti-communist and nationalist Liberal Party. As soon as Orban moved further to the right, a big part of the Republican Party, like Senator John McCain, were suspicious. That was even the case during Trump’s first term. Orban never really managed to infiltrate the Maga network early on. Then he realized that it's one thing to talk about illiberalism on the far right and another to rally Donald Trump’s support. 

So, he invested in that objective. He contracted various lobbying firms, started forging partnerships with American think tanks, setting up his own in the U.S. Gradually, he repositioned himself.  His biggest success is drawing the attention and securing the favour of Steve Bannon. While the Biden Administration was a frosty period for his relations to Washington, he was riding it out, waiting for Trump’s return, a comeback largely expected. Upon Trump’s re-election, Orban’s project was seen as a blueprint of how to achieve real power, making an enemy of the “deep state,” controlling not only government but all the administrative apparatus that frames and holds power in check. 

The whole of Europe expects the second coming of Trump, and some political leaders invest in it. We have two recruitments from the social democratic movement: the Slovak and the Georgian governments. What is the international dimension of this? 

In the post socialist space, one of the biggest questions in terms of power, hence, politics is how a political movement is positioned vis-a-vis “liberal globalism,” the dominant world order of the 90s, led by the U.S. At the time, Social Democracy and the centre right offered different flavours of the same project, committed to the same vision. This vision experienced symptoms of crisis at the end of the 2000s. Vladimir Meciar was part of the first wave of politicians questioning the liberal orthodoxy of the 1990s, being a typical illiberal who sought to appeal to the very workers that feared rapid transition and economic liberalisation, or the IMF textbook, complete with neoliberal austerity. 

The same kind of anti-austerity politics, accompanied by massive deindustrialisation and skyrocketing inequality, was rejected in Slovakia after the liberal period in the 2000s. Within the ranks of the social democratic movement, you had the rise of leaders who flirted with nationalism. The same is the case in Romania, with a decisive move towards nationalist socialism already before 1990, then an illiberal postsocialist left in power during the 1990s. Now this left competes with the hard right for workers in Romania.

In Poland you had the emergence of a more globalist left, implementing austerity measures and losing ground. The reaction came from the right. That is particularly the case with unions, which as a historical agent of resistance against communism were already associated with conservatism. In Hungary too, you have a firmly neoliberal left triggering a countermovement from the right. 

You've got a country like Georgia, which is a liberal utopia with near-zero corporate tax, free economic zones, and no unions, being asked in fact to raise labour standards to join the Single Market. Orban is following similar strategies: low corporate tax, very flexible labour market, and a return to church and the nuclear family. What is anti-globalist in this project? 

Yes, that is an interesting twist in the story. These protest movements emerge in opposition to liberal globalism, but they are not progressive counter hegemonies. They're not interested in undoing the whole system. It's more of an elitist revolt of the national business elite. This being Eastern Europe, these national business elites didn't have too much room to make money in the market, and they seek to forge a relationship with the state. That is the pattern from Georgia to Hungary. 

And the CPAC events in Hungary offer Georgians access to American conservatives. Budapest gave the Georgian Dream government a centre stage role in the conservative gathering for consecutive years. Kobakhidze’s visits allowed him to platform Tbilisi as an ideological power with a role in transatlantic discourse. This may have had an economic dimension. The oligarch behind the Georgian Dream, who made his money in Russia and France, was offered protection, which may or may not have come at a price. That is not unprecedented for Orban’s government. 

There is also policy learning between the two movements. Russia introduced the foreign agent law. Hungary followed. Then Georgia. There was an illiberal blueprint, the recycling of policies designed to create an “anti-hegemonic” discourse. The new government of Péter Magyar seems committed to dismantling this counterhegemonic network. We’ll see how it goes, it would be a critical step on the road to new democracy and not just in Hungary.

Given the political origins of Péter Magyar, is there a real chance the new government will trigger ideological disruption?

The key point is that Magyar didn’t simply win the election — he secured a two‑thirds majority. That gives him, as Orbán once had, the capacity to challenge the core institutions of Orbán’s anti‑hegemonic infrastructure. These are conservative bodies that the previous government captured and then supercharged to perform a specific ideological function.

This is significant because it means he can now target institutions like the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) — an educational and ideological stronghold that owns a university campus in Vienna and operates a network of think tanks working on media, geopolitics, law, society, and economic policy across Hungary, Brussels, Berlin, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Ukraine. They were established with a budget larger than that of the Ministry of Education — roughly €1.1 to €1.7 billion. There are also smaller foundations, such as the Batthyány Lajos Alapítvány (BLA).

These are the fortifications of illiberalism. For the new government to dismantle them, it must confront Orbán’s 2021 law on public‑interest private foundations, which allowed him to transfer — essentially privatise — public revenue by endowing these institutions with dividends from state‑owned companies, all without parliamentary oversight. This structure was designed to be permanent and irrevocable. 

But Magyar’s two‑thirds majority means nothing is irrevocable. Until now, they believed only Fidesz could ever secure such a majority. The new government now has an open door.

Is this comparable to the pressure Orbán placed on the Soros‑founded Central European University, which eventually moved to Vienna? Will similar pressure now be applied to the institutions he created?

In this case, the state actually has more control. The previous government quasi‑privatised state assets into these special public‑purpose foundations, appointed boards filled with Fidesz loyalists and handed them significant state property to manage. The new government has already signalled that it may repeal the 2021 law — and legally, it can. If that legal framework disappears, the assets revert to the state.

Would Budapest risk the international relationships built around these institutions?

These foundations primarily fund U.S. and European experts. They are a major artery of the “alternative right” in both Brussels and Vienna. If the legal and financial basis collapses, these networks will no longer be viable.

If this dismantling proceeds, what is the future of platforms like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the largest transatlantic network of the far‑right?

CPAC is independent — an American brand — but it did receive annual support. Even if MCC survives in some form, I doubt CPAC will return to Budapest. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement has lost its key champion in Hungary.

Do you see CPAC remaining in Europe — perhaps shifting to Bratislava or Sofia?

Until recently, many would have guessed Italy, under Meloni. Now it seems more likely that CPAC will leave Europe altogether. Informal networks will remain relevant, but there is no institutional successor capable of hosting it at the same scale.

Georgia relied on Budapest for its Atlantic ties and for protecting a kind of multi‑vector foreign policy that aligned with Orbán’s. What happens now for Tbilisi? Could Bratislava take over?

I don’t see a suitable successor capable of playing the same role. Slovakia is a smaller country, and Robert Fico is not particularly interested in the international dimension of this narrative. Poland could have taken the lead within the conservative movement, but it remains a more Euro‑Atlantic‑oriented actor. The Patriots will continue to exist as a force, with the French component being the most prominent, but the group is not large — and the AfD sits outside any parliamentary group. The far‑right, especially the pro‑Russian right, remains a significant political force, with the AfD polling ahead of the Christian Democrats. But at the governmental level, there is no clearly illiberal administration at the moment — only coalition partners here and there. Austria may be the country to watch in that respect.

Interview conducted by Ilya Roubanis for Caucasus Watch