Hungary poised to rejoin flagship EU research program

PRAGUE— Hungary said Thursday it is on track to rejoin the EU’s flagship research program, Horizon Europe, potentially unlocking millions in European funding that had been blocked under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Hungarian Science and Tech Minister Zoltán Tanács told POLITICO that all legal barriers to accessing EU research funding have been cleared by changing how its higher education is governed, meeting the technical criteria agreed upon with Brussels. “Legally, we are back again,” Tanács said, speaking on the sidelines of the Central and Eastern Europe Artificial Intelligence Summit in Prague. “We have restructured our university management. We have eliminated all those strange structures that have been set up by the former government.” A European Commission spokesperson said Brussels has “not been formally notified yet” by Hungary. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in late May, during a meeting with new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar, that the country would be “gradually phasing out” the so-called public-interest trusts, a series of asset-management foundations set up by the Orbán government to control parts of how higher education was administered. Those trusts raised conflict-of-interest concerns and triggered a 2022 EU decision to shut Hungary out of many of the Europe-funded research projects. Hungary being locked out of the EU’s €95 billion research program Horizon Europe “created huge damage,” Tanács said. Asked about the timing to access the funding, he said there was still some “administration” to be done, but he was confident that Brussels would unlock the funds by the end of the year and rejoin both Horizon Europe and the higher-education program Erasmus+. Since his resounding April victory, Magyar has pushed to bring Hungary back into the EU fold and tap into European funding that had largely dried up during the latter phase of Orbán’s nearly two decades in power, marked by open conflict with Brussels. Hungary has touted its ambitions to invest heavily in artificial intelligence for whenever access to European research collaboration is restored. “We want to establish hundreds of new AI professorships that can be done internationally,” Tanács said.