Should An Elite Business School Be Orbán’s Willing Partner? Don’t Ask Berlin’s ESMT
Last Friday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, less than two weeks before his “illiberal state” assumes the rotating European Council presidency. The reception at the Chancellery was barebones; there was not even a joint press conference for the two leaders. If Orbán hoped for a more enthusiastic reception in the German capital, he should have visited the State Council building. That building is home to the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), a private business school underwritten by Germany’s leading companies that, last year, entered a high-profile partnership with one of Orbán’s signature initiatives: the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC).
The MCC offers thousands of scholarship-holders an educational training program to supplement their high school and university studies. At the same time, it serves as an extremely well-funded think tank committed to Orbán’s illiberal principles. (In 2020, the MCC received an endowment of more than one billion euros via shares of MOL, the Hungarian quasi-national oil and gas company.) The chairman of MCC’s board of trustees, Balázs Orbán, is Prime Minister Orbán’s very talented political director and a member of the Hungarian National Assembly; he steers the MCC directly from his seat in government. The MCC is Viktor Orbán’s answer to the Central European University (CEU), established in Budapest in the early 1990s by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros to train the next generations of elites to uphold democratic and open societies. Orbán himself benefited from a Soros scholarship to study at Oxford. Some within Orbán’s inner circle, such as his chief international spokesperson Zoltán Kovács, hold CEU degrees themselves.
But ideologically non-conformist institutions have been a thorn in Orbán’s side ever since he swapped his liberal roots for the “illiberal state” project. The Hungarian prime minister has kept state universities on a tight leash by directly intervening in matters related to personnel, funding and administration. Orbán forced the privately financed CEU to move from Budapest to Vienna. In 2017, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned that we must not “remain silent if civil society, even academia – as is now the case at the Central European University in Budapest – is to be deprived of the air it breathes.”
The Berlin business school ESMT – whose supervisory board includes representatives from some of the most influential German companies, like Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Mercedes Benz, and Allianz – takes a completely different view. The ESMT is not only silent about the restrictions on academic freedom in Hungary; it also legitimizes the MCC, Orbán’s crown jewel, through their comprehensive partnership. ESMT President Jörg Rocholl, who also serves as Chairman of the German Finance Ministry’s Scientific Advisory Board, celebrated the cooperation agreement alongside Balázs Orbán at a June 2023 ceremony in Budapest. The German ambassador to Hungary, Julia Gross, also gave her blessing at the ceremony – joining Rocholl in ignoring President Steinmeier’s admonitions.
The financial details of the cooperation between the ESMT and the MCC remain confidential. What we know of the agreement is that it brings 20 MCC scholarship-holders to study at the ESMT each year, and that it funds guest residencies for MCC researchers as well as an MCC-endowed chair (the “MCC Professor in Strategy”). Combined, these initiatives surely add up to a considerable sum transferred to the ESMT by Orbán’s flagship institution. In return, MCC Director General Zoltán Szalai has received a seat on ESMT’s International Advisory Board, which is chaired by Mercedes boss Ola Källenius.
Szalai waxes lyrical about the similarities between the ESMT and the MCC’s approaches to education and academic life. To be sure, the MCC does offer space for different opinions and invites critical voices to events – the two Orbáns are too clever to exclusively feed the scholarship-holders New Right fare. However, helping the New Right build international networks is indeed an important strand of the MCC’s work. Earlier this month Donald Trump Jr. was a guest, following Tucker Carlson and Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s radical right-wing son. Last week, Balázs Orbán proudly published a photo he took with Jordan Bardella, the prime ministerial candidate for Rassemblement National, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, and wished him every success in the upcoming French parliamentary elections. At the opening game of the European soccer championship, the Hungarian prime minister posed for a selfie with Tino Chrupalla, the co-leader of the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). The ESMT, along with the myriad businesses that support it, normalizes these activities through its partnership with Orbán’s MCC.
For the ESMT’s leadership, there is only one way to regain credibility and prove that it does indeed stand for the “open, democratic world view” it claims. ESMT President Rocholl should immediately end the partnership with the MCC and donate all the money already received to support independent media and civil society in Hungary.
A German-language version of this commentary first appeared in the Tagesspiegel on June 20, 2024.
