Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office accuses EU’s CERV programme of funding Soros-affiliated pressure groups
The European Commission’s Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (CERV) is the “Brussels-based arm of the Soros organisations” used to finance political pressure campaigns, the Sovereignty Protection Office said on Wednesday.
The office’s statement said its analysis of the CERV programme launched in 2021 had found that the EC in recent years had allowed members of the “Soros network” to obtain funding directly from Brussels. The programme’s framework for applications was significantly modified “in line with the Soros network’s interests” so that they could be granted the EU funds intended for civil groups, the office said.
The Sovereignty Protection Office said CERV was actually being used to finance political pressure campaigns. The office said its analysis found that in Hungary, most of the funding distributed as part of CERV had gone to political pressure groups affiliated with the “Soros network” instead of Hungarian civil organisations. Fully three-quarters of CERV funds went to the “Soros network” despite these groups making up only a quarter of the civil organisations, the statement added.
The office said that over the last two years, the groups in question had used the close to HUF 5 billion (EUR 12.2m) they obtained in CERV funds to shape the public discourse “according to their client’s interests”, had “spread misinformation disguised as expert opinion”, and applied international pressure on countries deemed rebellious by the EC.
The most significant consequence of this for Hungary, the office said, was that the country had only received a fraction of the EUR 22 billion it is entitled to in the current EU financial cycle. The Sovereignty Protection Office said Hungarian taxpayers had no say in how their tax money was spent, adding that this seriously violated the sovereignty of member states and went against the interests of Hungarians and Europeans.
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