Hungary offers olive branch to Brussels in bid to reenter Erasmus scheme

Hungary has proposed a new draft law that it hopes will resolve its ongoing dispute around Erasmus student exchanges with Brussels by banning ministers, MPs and mayors from top positions in public university.

Budapest hopes the move will allow the affected universities to regain Erasmus and Horizon funding, with one top politician announcing Wednesday he’s stepping down to “help the government successfully negotiate with the European Union” to resolve the issue.

As POLITICO reported in early 2023, 21 Hungarian universities were blocked from signing new EU grants because they were in the hands of public trusts filled with people from Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party. 

When the news broke, all the ministers who held positions in the trusts resigned from their university posts, but other ruling party politicians stayed on. The bill, which was published Tuesday and has now been submitted for public consultation, would prevent them from serving on the boards in the hope of reaching an agreement with the EU.

However, the Ministry of Culture and Innovation, which oversees higher education, isn’t convinced the law will do the trick, even if it’s passed.

The ministry admitted that it hadn’t yet reached an agreement with the European Commission and that the current draft law simply articulates a compromise that Brussels has already indicated is insufficient — but they’re going with it anyway.

“Despite the government’s openness and initiatives,” the European Commission “has refused to act on the matter for almost a year,” the ministry said in a statement.

Tibor Navracsics, the minister who led earlier negotiations with the Commission, told the Polish news agency PAP in January 2024 that the negotiations had reached a “dead end” and claimed that the European Parliament was blackmailing the Commission to reach a consensus on the issue. 

Commission spokesman Balázs Ujvári confirmed in September that the situation had not changed, but “we have made our position very clear to the Hungarian government,” they have had several discussions and “they know what we expect.”

September marked the beginning of the first academic year in which students from Hungarian public foundation universities could no longer participate in Erasmus student exchanges. However, the ban had already led to complaints in 2023 about the loss of millions of euros for universities: although they were not excluded from Horizon Europe research partnerships, they could only participate in them without EU funding.