The acronym “TERF” — shorthand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” — is emblazoned in graffiti-style letters across one participant’s jumper. Beside her, another attendee sports a black T-shirt with “Frau” (German for “woman”) in white, followed by a dictionary-style definition.
Both women are attending a November conference in a tucked-away European Parliament meeting room hosted by right-wing Fidesz MEP András László. The event pledges to expose what organisers claim is the European Union’s attempts to push a pro-trans agenda in classrooms.
Conservative-leaning gatherings are hardly unusual in the EU’s political capital. But what distinguishes this European Parliament event — both for the extremity of its content and its intellectual polish — is the guiding hand of MCC Brussels, a well-funded Hungarian think tank that champions ideas and speakers largely shunned by the EU’s political mainstream.
Armed with fear-mongering tactics packaged in polished messages, MCC Brussels is working to redraw the boundaries of acceptable discourse in EU politics. Riding the electoral gains of conservative forces across Europe and the Parliament’s rightward shift, it is using this growing legitimacy to seed right-wing talking points into Brussels debates.
MCC wants to build “an alternative intelligentsia, an alternative political culture”, that “challenges the dominant, centrist outlook on public life”, MCC Brussels’ Executive Director Frank Füredi told Contexte.
Supporters cast the organisation as a defender of free speech. But critics say it acts as a megaphone for Hungary’s strongman leader, Viktor Orbán — exporting to Brussels the eurosceptic, far-right ideology that has reshaped Hungary under Fidesz.
Building an ‘alternative intelligentsia’
Unlike many Brussels think tanks focused solely on the minutiae of EU legislation, MCC Brussels targets broader cultural flashpoints, from the EU’s alleged democratic deficit to climate change. Migration is also at the top of that list.
Rather than providing detailed policy prescriptions, the think tank wants to challenge the basic assumptions underpinning EU policymaking, MCC’s Füredi said.
Addressing a 300-strong crowd in early December during MCC’s flagship conference, various speakers — including Spanish MEP Jorge Buxadé of the far-right Patriots for Europe (PfE) group — warned about the impending doom of Western values amid uncontrolled migration, drawing strong applause.
The messaging mirrors common themes in right-wing populist rhetoric across the Atlantic, including the Trump administration’s recent warning that mass migration could lead to European “civilisation erasure”.
The conference — titled “Battle for the Soul of Europe”— took place amid tight security after self-described anti-fascist activists disrupted last year’s event.
“When we arrived in Brussels, people said: ‘It’s pointless Nobody’s going to listen to you,” said Füredi, a Hungarian-Canadian scholar who was a “far-left activist” in the 1970s in the UK, according to this biography. “We managed to break out of that.”
EU transparency filings show MCC Brussels operates on a budget of just over €6.3 million, placing it among the city’s richest think tanks. By comparison, the European Policy Centre and the Centre for European Policy Studies — major Brussels think tanks — operate with budgets of €5.7 million and €6.2 million, respectively.
Almost all of it comes from MCC’s Budapest-based parent organisation, Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a private university aligned with the nationalist ideology of Fidesz.
MCC’s wealth is fuelled by lucrative assets granted by Hungary’s Fidesz-led parliament in 2020, including a 10% stake in oil giant MOL and shares in pharmaceutical firm Gedeon Richter — holdings that generate tens of millions in dividends. MOL, one of Hungary’s most profitable companies, continues to import oil from Russia due to exemptions from the EU’s sanctions regime.
Growing concerns
MCC’s presence in Brussels is causing unease among moderate voices.
Klára Dobrev, a Bulgarian-Hungarian lawmaker with the centre-left S&D group, told Contexte that MCC is “a prime example of how the Orbán regime is trying to skew the public debate”.
“They are not a mere ‘participant in the democratic debate’,” she said. “They are the opposite: an instrument of propaganda whose objective is to undermine democracy.”
“Propaganda” is also how some in the powerful centre-right European People’s group (EPP) — the political family of Tisza’s Péter Magyar, Viktor Orbán’s chief rival in Hungary’s April elections — describe MCC’s work.
“MCC Brussels doesn’t serve an ideology; it doesn’t serve an ideal; it doesn’t even serve merely a partisan industry interest — it serves squarely Orbán’s power interest,” said a EPP official, granted anonymity to speak freely.
MCC Brussels’ cooperation with the Fidesz-allied PfE, the third-largest political group in the Parliament with 85 MEPs, enables it to organise events inside the institution — a strategic boost for an outfit seeking legitimacy, said Olivier Hoedeman, a researcher with lobbying watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory.
“They’re able to host events with messaging that would have been considered authoritarian, discriminatory and unacceptable some years ago,” he said. “It’s about mainstreaming, normalising and claiming that space.”
Neither MEP András László, who hosted the gender event, nor PfE responded to requests for comment about their ties with MCC Brussels.
German Green MEP Daniel Freund, a frequent Orbán critic, said that for those who share MCC’s worldview, seeing its events or reports echoed in the Parliament helps nudge the institution further to the right.
He pointed to the recent push by the EPP, the Parliament’s biggest political group, to attack NGOs for a supposed lack of transparency — a major far-right and MCC talking point.
“It started with the extreme right, but then it spills over into conservatives,” said Freund.
The drive for tighter scrutiny of NGO financing has become a flashpoint in the Parliament, with the S&D, Renew and Greens (groups crucial to Ursula von der Leyen’s majority) denouncing the effort as a “witch hunt” and refusing to participate.
For Professor Benjamin De Cleen, an expert on populism and nationalism at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, MCC Brussels strengthens Hungary’s role as the ideological hub of Europe’s hard right.
“Hungary was once a completely ignored country,” he said. “Orbán has turned this right-wing Hungary into a real player — and MCC is one of the tools in that [strategy].”
MCC Brussels rejects claims it takes orders from Budapest.
“If somebody calls me up from Hungary and says, ‘Do you want to speak about this [topic]?’, most of the time I would say no, because that’s not part of our programme,” MCC Brussels head Füredi said. The think tank has “an almost complete degree of autonomy” when it comes to its political and intellectual ideas, he added.
A recent MCC post on X — promoting a video of Balázs Orbán, Viktor Orbán’s political director (not related) and chairman of MCC Budapest — stated that Europe is “sinking” socially, economically and politically. Combative social media posts and videos are a key part of MCC Brussels’ messaging.
Tracking MCC Brussels’ impact
Despite the criticism, the think tank also has firm supporters. Connor Allen, a corporate lobbyist in the electronics sector in Brussels and a popular LinkedIn commentator, sees MCC’s challenge to the prevailing EU consensus as a valuable counter to Brussels’ “groupthink”.
“It’s a free-speech issue, and there’s no harm in having these people active in Brussels, as long as they follow the rules … as long as they’re welcoming and accommodating of disagreement — which seems to be the case,” he said. “What’s the harm of shining a spotlight on [viewpoints] and having a debate on them?”
MCC participants that Contexte spoke to for this story, including university students, also praised the organisation as a defender of free speech.
“I think we’ve done reasonably well,” Füredi said. “The quality of our ideas is accepted even by people who are opposed to us, who would otherwise dismiss us as being just some far-right nutters.”
Others, however, argue that far from influencing the Brussels conversation, MCC’s messaging remains primarily within a far-right echo chamber.
“They spend a lot of money and energy to feed those who are already convinced — that is to say, the patriots,” said Nathalie Loiseau, a French MEP with the centrist Renew group.
MCC Brussels’ resources help make Fidesz’s influence within the PfE “disproportionately strong”, she added.
For the Greens’ Freund, it is too early to tell whether MCC Brussels is moving the political dial. But he’s watching closely.
”Whether they will manage or whether it ends up being a rather large waste of money that doesn’t have that much impact, I think the judgment on that is still out,” Freund said. “But my impression is, they’re just getting started.”
Edited by Anca Gurzu