Hungary’s election authority on Monday approved a bid by Budapest’s mayor to hold a referendum over a planned campus of China’s Fudan University, in a blow for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who backs the project.
“The National Election Committee has approved my Fudan referendum question,” Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony wrote on Facebook.
A drive to collect 200,000 signatures required to trigger the referendum process is to begin next month if the decision is not challenged in court, Karacsony said.
Photo: Reuters
Citizens would be asked if they wish to repeal a law adopted earlier this year by parliament — which is dominated by Orban’s Fidesz party — that gave a green light to the plan.
According to a deal signed between the Hungarian government and the Shanghai-based university, Fudan University’s Budapest campus, its first in Europe, would be a 500,000m2 complex.
Orban argues that a prestigious outpost of the university would permit thousands of Hungarian and international students to acquire high-quality qualifications, but the complex, planned for completion by 2024, has sparked street protests and opposition accusations that Orban is forcing an unwanted project on the city and endangering a prior plan to build student accommodation in the same area.
According to project documents leaked to Hungarian investigative journalism site Direkt36.hu, most of the Fudan project’s estimated 1.5 billion euros (US$1.8 billion) cost would also be covered by a Chinese loan to Hungary of 1.3 billion euros.
Karacsony, 46, who aims to challenge Orban in an election early next year, also accuses the 58-year-old prime minister, in power since 2010, of steering Hungary away from the EU toward China.
Karacsony, who won the Budapest mayoralty in 2019, in June renamed streets around the campus site to “Free Hong Kong Road” and “Uyghur Martyrs’ Road” to highlight Chinese human rights abuses.
Days after, Orban appeared to bow to mounting clamor for a referendum, but said it should happen only after the final project plans are made public by the end of next year.
Critics also say Orban’s courting of Fudan University, which deleted references to “freedom of thought” from its charter in 2019, also fuels concerns about academic freedom in Hungary.
Central European University, founded by liberal Hungary-born US billionaire George Soros, in 2018 said that it was “forced out” of Budapest to Vienna after a bitter legal dispute with Orban.
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