Fidesz MEP vows legal action to expose EU’s funding of activist groups
The Patriots’ European Parliament group will use legal means to force the disclosure of EU contracts on the support of activist organisations, an MEP of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz said in Strasbourg on Thursday.
Speaking to Hungarian journalists during a break in the plenary session of the European Parliament, Csaba Dömötör said more and more information was emerging on how the EP and the European Commission were funding hundreds of activist groups across Europe. These groups, he added, represented the liberal politics of Brussels in every member state rather than the will of the voters.
“Well-funded activist groups echo the Commission’s position against farmers, argue in favour of the war against the advocates of peace, or, together with illegal migrants, sue member states defending their borders,” Dömötör said. Organisations representing the ideology of the “radical left” could also have received substantial funding, he added.
It had also become clear in connection with a scandal linked to Frans Timmermans, the former EC executive vice president, that the organisations that had received funding had to stage demonstrations against decision-makers or governments with a different opinion, Dömötör said. He said the system was similar to the financing system of American aid agency USAID, but in Brussels the operation took place through several programmes.
“I could also say that the US Democrats and the financier Soros also had a big coffer in Brussels, and European taxpayers kept throwing money into it, even though they might not even know about it,” he said. He said the European Parliament was also involved in this operation. For example, Dömötör added, it had been revealed that prior to last year’s European Parliament election, the EP had distributed the equivalent of 53 billion forints (EUR 131.6m) among liberal media outlets across Europe, in a non-transparent manner.
Citing a Hungarian example, Dömötör said the Hungarian Helsinki Committee had received funding from eight different programmes in 2023 alone, amounting to hundreds of millions. “We will force the disclosure of contracts with public interest data requests,” he said, adding that besides MEPs, European citizens also had the right to file such requests.
“We encourage everyone to exercise this right,” he said. “Let’s start a European popular uprising for transparency. We need to know who was paid and what they asked for in return. We also need to know which activist groups in Hungary are pursuing policies contrary to Hungary’s interests based on foreign orders.”
Dömötör pointed out that this was not just a dispute between EU organisations and politicians, insisting that these organisations represented policies that fundamentally went against the will of the voters on issues such as the economy, war, immigration and child protection.
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