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Hungarian President János Áder signed into law Monday a bill that Central European University says could force it to close its campus in Budapest, Bloomberg reported. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated Sunday in support of the university in what Bloomberg described as one of the largest anti-government rallies since Prime Minister Viktor Orbán took office in 2010. The passage of the law, which was fast-tracked through Parliament in about a week, has been widely seen as part of Orbán’s project to end liberal democracy in Hungary in favor of what he calls an “illiberal” state.
CEU, which was founded in 1991 by the liberal financier and philanthropist George Soros, issued a statement on Monday promising it “will immediately seek all available legal remedies.” The university described the law as “targeted at an American institution in a flagrantly discriminatory manner” and as “a premeditated political attack on a free institution that has been a proud part of Hungarian life for a quarter of a century.”
The university says the legislation “seeks to make it impossible for CEU to offer American-accredited master's and doctoral degrees, as it has done with the full agreement of Hungarian authorities for many years.”
