Weeks after the collapse of Europe’s most prominent hard-right think tank, a new group with the same staff and similar mission has emerged to take its place.
MCC Brussels announced the creation of the Freedom & Sovereignty Initiative (FSI) Europe on 23 September, a fresh entity that promises to “carry forward” its predecessor’s aims, and according to its slick new website, provide “the intellectual infrastructure for the European patriotic movement”.
This Wednesday (14 October) will mark the organisation’s official launch in central Brussels. The talk and drinks reception is being trailed as a “a rare opportunity to bring together representatives from patriotic, sovereigntist and genuinely conservative political forces to ask whether the European right is merely a political vibe or ready for a serious breakthrough”.
Two far-right MEPs, French National Rally politician Virginie Joron, and Alternative for Germany’s Christine Anderson, are listed as speakers.
But questions persist over who’s funding the once cash-rich group, which in 2024 received €6.3 million euros from its parent company, Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Hungary’s largest private education institute and think tank. After Viktor Orbán’s resounding defeat in the Hungarian elections in April, new Prime Minister Péter Magyar has sought to dismantle Orbán-era institutions such as MCC, which pushed Orbán’s agenda at home and built up a network of allies abroad.
In July, Magyar dissolved the trust that manages the think tank, nationalising its assets. This included returning a 10 percent stake in national oil and gas company MOL and pharmaceutical firm Gideon Richter, worth an estimated €1.5 billion, that were gifted to the group under Orbán.
At the end of August, Frank Furedi, then-director of MCC Brussels and regular contributor to the right-wing online magazine Spiked, resigned from his post “with immediate effect,” claiming that the group had been unable to pay its staff.
Yet, company records indicate that FSI Europe was incorporated by Furedi, the group’s president, in Belgium on 14 August, registered at the same address as Politico Europe, which was voted the most influential news organisation in Brussels last year.
“It begs the question where FSI Europe got the money, if MCC Brussels was out of money, to rent property in one of the most sought-after pieces of real estate in the EU lobby bubble on a very short timeline,” said Nick Aiossa, director of Transparency International EU.
Olivier Hoedeman, research and campaign coordinator for lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory, suggested that “likely suspects” could include U.S. funders of the MAGA movement or the Trump administration, referring to a funding opportunity put out by Donald Trump’s State Department to fund European NGOs to “develop civilizational bonds.”
The Trump administration has already allocated $12 million to two UK organisations founded by conservative figures, former MP Jacob Rees-Mogg and commentator and House of Lords member Toby Young. Another $4 million is reportedly earmarked for supporting right-wing media in Europe.
However, in August, MCC Brussels then-communications director John O’Brien told Politico that neither it nor its parent group would be applying for U.S. grant money.
In an emailed statement to DeSmog, O’Brien added that: “Private donations fund FSI Europe. We take no money from any government.”
Daniel Freund, a German Greens MEP who focuses on anti-corruption and transparency, said: “Orbán’s propaganda machine, MCC, has not disappeared. It has simply given itself a new look.”
The Hungarian government’s 2021 transfer of state-owned assets to MCC in shares and real estate has been widely criticised. A fellow at the German Marshall Fund, an American NGO focused on transatlantic cooperation, told the Financial Times the move amounted to “a sort of dispossession of public wealth in Hungary by the governing party”.
“The FSI provides a platform for far-right MEPs,” Freund added. “In doing so, it continues to nurture the far-right network that MCC built up” using extensive Hungarian government funding, he said.
In his statement, O’Brien described FSI Europe as “a new, independent think tank with its own board, staff and programme”.
“Several of us worked at MCC Brussels, and we are proud of that work,” he said. “But suggesting we are the same thing in a new tin is lazy and untrue.
“We exist to defend free speech, national democracy, and Europeans’ right to disagree with Brussels. Debate does not threaten democracy. Shutting it down does.”
Funding and Transparency
MCC Brussels was until its collapse one of the best-funded lobby groups in the EU, financed by MCC, which in 2023 made €50 million in dividends from shares granted to the group by Orbán’s government.
O’Brien told Politico that the group was “open to receiving funding from anyone who supports our cause”, but added: “experience shows that when governments fund organizations, they do so often for their own reasons”.
“MCC Brussels enjoyed freedom and independence over the past four years, and this is one element of its legacy that we are very keen to preserve,” he said.
Despite this, FSI’s predecessor had close institutional, as well as financial, ties to the Orbán regime. MCC’s chair until June 2026, Balazs Orbán, took a seat in the European Parliament on 18 September for Fidesz, the party of Orbán’s government. He served as political director in Viktor Orbán’s (no relation) government, and resigned from MCC over the Magyar government’s attempt to dismantle MCC.
FSI Europe’s second event on 23 October will be held in partnership with The Foundation for a Civic Hungary, the official party-affiliated think tank of Fidesz.
FSI Europe is likewise staffed by vocal defendants of Hungary’s former autocratic leader.
Furedi stated in 2025: “Hungary, and Orbán, is invariably accused of democratic backsliding time and again – I just don’t see that.”
In August 2026, following Orbán’s defeat, FSI Europe researcher Thomas Fazi criticised anti-corruption efforts by new Prime Minister Péter Magyar, stating that there was “no defensible logic” for limiting prime ministers to a lifetime term limit of eight years. Orbán had been prime minister for a total of 20 years and five terms at the time of his defeat.
When DeSmog asked Füredi about MCC Brussels’ funding in 2023, he said he was “prepared to take money from the devil, because I think I’ve got enough integrity, that you know, I’m not going to play to their tune.”
Half of FSI Europe’s staff are British, despite the UK leaving the EU back in 2021, and all but two FSI Europe’s 12 staff members have written for Spiked, a British online magazine that regularly publishes attacks on climate science and policy. Between 2015 and 2018 the website received $300,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, an arm of oil giant Koch Industries and a major funder of climate science denial.
“There is a disproportionate number of British staff members, in an organisation that is clearly looking to dismantle the EU, pushing a nationalist, sovereigntist agenda,” Aiossa of Transparency International added.
Campaigners have also accused FSI Europe of exploiting a loophole in the EU lobby register to evade transparency rules.
“They’ve pulled their old trick again,” said Aiossa.
“By reincorporating the same organisation with a different name, even if they were going to register on the EU lobbying transparency register, they’re not going to have to disclose any financial information until March 2028 at the earliest,” he said.
Under the EU lobby register’s transparency rules, newly incorporated organisations can classify themselves as a “newly formed entity,” which means all financial reporting requirements are suspended for two years.
When MCC Brussels entered the register in January 2024, it had already been active in EU politics since at least November 2022, yet was still able to register as a newly formed entity.
In 2025, Corporate Europe Observatory accused MCC Brussels of deliberately exploiting the loophole and filed a complaint with the transparency register, which the group denied in an exchange with DeSmog.
MCC Brussels was suspended from the lobby register in June 2026 for violation of “single registration” rule, because both it and MCC had separate registrations, a decision it said it would challenge in court but has yet to act on.
In a statement, O’Brien told DeSmog: “We will follow the EU Transparency Register’s rules and publish our funding as required. We have always done this.”
‘Far-right Network’
MCC nurtured a network of hard-right allies across the world until its funding cuts earlier this year. At MCC Feszt 2025, the group’s annual festival, Palantir founder Peter Thiel took to the stage, and the leader of Germany’s extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, was spotted in attendance.
At its first public event under its new name, FSI Europe will be hosting Christine Anderson, an AfD MEP who was the party’s delegation leader in 2024, and Virginie Joron, a French MEP from the hard-right Rassemblement National (RN), who has previously spoken at MCC Brussels events. Joron has been accused of pro-Kremlin sentiment and became prominent on social media during the Covid-19 pandemic for her critical views of vaccinations.
“The line-up of speakers at its first event shows that, like MCC Brussels, FSI Europe continues to align very closely with the most far-right MEPs,” said Olivier Hoedeman from CEO.
In 2023, Christine Anderson spoke at a “Freedom Convoy” rally in Canada – a far-right trucker movement that emerged in opposition to Canada’s Covid-19 lockdown measures. In 2022, the group staged a months-long protest by the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, with some of the city’s residents saying that they were targeted because of their race. Pierre Poilievre, the Trump-aligned leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, has since sought to distance himself from Anderson.
In 2021, the European Parliament reprimanded and placed restrictions on Joron and several other hard-right MEPs, after it emerged that they had undertaken an unauthorised “election monitoring” trip to Russian-occupied Crimea in 2020. Joron said at the time that she could not remember who had invited her on the visit – during which Joron and others “observed” a referendum on Russian constitutional reform that gave Vladimir Putin power until 2036.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joron repeatedly voted against proposals by the European Parliament condemning Russia, until March 2022 when Marine Le Pen reportedly intervened, asking RN members to vote in favour of the proposals.
In September 2026, Joron posted an image of her sitting next to Balázs Orbán following his election to the European Parliament. The caption praised him as “A strong voice for nations, sovereignty, and a Europe of the people”.
Joron and Anderson did not respond to DeSmog’s requests for comment.
O’Brien of MCC Brussels told DeSmog: “At our launch, we will hear from MEPs whose parties millions of Europeans voted for. We make no apology for giving elected representatives a platform.
“Criticising our ideas is fair game, and our door is open to anyone who wants to argue with them. Too often, though, critics would rather smear the messenger than answer the message. That’s a shame.”
Frank Furedi and Thomas Fazi were also approached for comment.
