Balazs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director, said on Facebook on Saturday that the "Soros network" is relocating its headquarters from Washington to Brussels, adding the Patriots for Europe grouping was ready to "repel the Soros network at the European level", and the Hungarian government would "push them out of Hungary".
Orbán said it was "hard to keep up" with the pace at which US President Donald Trump was "winding up the Washington-based international liberal network" since assuming office. "Trump immediately turned off the money taps, and liberal organisations worldwide have been left without their incoming dollars," he said.
Orbán said it had come to light that the previous Democratic US administration had been using American aid agency USAID to "undermine democratically-elected governments" and "shape societies to its own taste by spreading liberal-progressive ideologies".
He said American taxpayer money was being used "to carry out the goals of the Soros network". He cited the example of the East-West Management Institute, which, he said, had received more than 260 million US dollars from USAID to spend on carrying out left-wing political goals in Serbia, Georgia, Albania and Uganda.
Orbán said the Soros network had not been eliminated with the Democrats’ election loss in the US, and was still expanding. He cited Alex Soros, the chair of the Open Society Foundations, as telling the Financial Times in an interview that the network had given some 85 million dollars to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign and that he had given 32 billion dollars to his foundation.
Citing remarks by Liberal MEP Daniel Freund and reporting by EUObserver, Orbán said the "Soros network" was now planning to relocate its headquarters to Brussels and have the role of USAID be taken over by European institutions.
"The Patriots will be fighting the expansion of the Soros network at the European level, and we will also push them out of Hungary," Orbán said.
"The practice of the US embassy handing out dollars to the left-wing press is over," he said. "And we certainly won’t allow Freedom House, Amnesty International, the Helsinki Committee or any other Soros organisation to tell the Hungarian people how they ought to live. This will be the great battle we will have to fight in the coming period. We will defend Hungary’s sovereignty!"