Far-right harassment spurs move of billionaire Soros's foundation
The decision by Soros’s foundation to uproot its Budapest office and move to Berlin — an echo of its effective expulsion from Russia in 2015 — was a wrenching one, said spokesman Csaba Csontos.
By LAURA KING/LOS ANGELES TIMESUpdated: AUGUST 15, 2018 15:50
(TNS) - BUDAPEST, Hungary — Inside a sleek but unobtrusive office building a few blocks from the River Danube, conference rooms and executive suites that once buzzed with activity will stand vacant by the month’s end.What was previously the second-largest international outpost of the Open Society Foundations, a sprawling international philanthropic and pro-democracy network, is in the final stages of pulling up stakes in Budapest and moving to Berlin. The exodus was propelled by unrelenting official harassment targeting its staff — but ultimately directed at its 87-year-old founder, George Soros.Soros, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is among Hungary’s most famous native sons. A Holocaust survivor and a billionaire many times over, he has directed the bulk of his personal fortune to his foundation, which advances progressive political causes and supports an array of human rights, health and education initiatives across the globe.But for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the darker and more conspiratorial corners of the internet, Soros’ name is synonymous with a vast and sinister network spanning decades and vaulting continents.He is portrayed as a baleful puppet master out for world domination, a wily architect of perfidious acts such as currency manipulation and plotting the slaughter of Christian children. Crude anti-Semitic tropes call attention to his Jewishness, and an often-invoked smear accuses him — falsely — of colluding with the Nazis in his youth.Sometimes it seems he is everywhere: name-checked last month in Helsinki, Finland, by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, his face looming over Budapest on anti-migration billboards, reviled in a Roseanne Barr tweet, feverishly invoked by followers of the QAnon movement that has lately begun capturing media attention.For a time, it seemed that large historical forces favored Soros’ pro-democracy aspirations for his native region, just as hedge-fund fortune had smiled upon him. Liberated from Communism, former Soviet satellites such as Poland and Hungary moved to embrace political pluralism as they began to recover economically. Civil society groups backed by his foundation took root and flourished.But watershed political events of the last two years — Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency, Britain’s vote to exit the European Union and the rise of populist nationalism in Europe — fly in the face of the ideals advanced by Soros, who believed that the collapse of the Berlin Wall and an opening of the “closed societies” behind it would energize democratic and liberal forces to the benefit of all.It’s been a dizzying reversal, and one that Soros himself ruefully acknowledges. “Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong,” he declared in a Paris speech in May that centered on Europe but alluded to wider woes.The worldwide financial shocks of 2008 helped loosen democratic moorings, he said. The wave of migration that washed over Europe in 2015 was exploited by “unscrupulous leaders … even in countries that have accepted hardly any refugees” — including Hungary, whose autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been in ascendancy.