Orbán’s Hungary drove a top university campus into exile. JD Vance it should be a model for the U.S.

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.