On a campus in Budapest that once held one of Hungary’s best-known international universities, the halls are nearly empty. The Central European University says the authoritarian government of Viktor Orbán forced 90% of its teaching operations out of Hungary in 2019, driving academic activity 130 miles west to Vienna.
“This should be full of students but as you can see it is almost empty,” Márta Pardavi said, standing in the quiet space that remains behind. For Michael Ignatieff, who described the move to Vienna as a “dark day for freedom in Hungary,” the university’s exile has become one of the clearest symbols of how far the country has moved under Orbán’s 16-year regime. The school says it was finally driven out after the government passed legislation demanding it meet a series of practically impossible requirements.
The timing gives the story immediate political weight. JD Vance was in Hungary this week trying to boost Orbán’s polls ahead of a crucial election on Sunday, and he told an Orbán rally in Budapest on Tuesday that “children should be able to go to school and get educated and not indoctrinated.” That line echoed comments he made in 2024, when he said Orbán’s approach to universities should be the model for conservatives in the United States. He said then that “the closest conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with the left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” adding that “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.”
The clash has long been personal as well as political. Orbán has accused the Central European University of cheating by issuing both Hungarian and American qualifications, and he has also accused George Soros of spearheading a shadow army of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations and civil society groups. He has even used the term insects for groups he says have survived for too long. That hostility reaches back to 1989, when Orbán received a Soros Foundation scholarship to study at Britain’s University of Oxford, years before he turned Soros into one of the defining targets of his politics.
CEU’s removal from Budapest now stands as more than an institutional loss. It is a marker of the country’s turn under Orbán, and Sunday’s vote is now a test not just of his hold on power but of the harder-right model he has offered as an ally inside the European Union. If he is to extend that project, he will do it with the memory of a university pushed out of its home city still sitting in plain view.
