On Monday (August 30), the Hungarian election authorities approved the mayor of Budapest’s proposal to hold a referendum on the planned campus of Fudan University in China, which was a blow to the prime minister Victor Orban, who supported the project.
“The National Electoral Commission (NVB) has approved my Fudan referendum,” the liberal mayor of the Hungarian capital Ghergéli Carraccioni said on his Facebook page.
Karácsony said that if NVB’s decision is not challenged in court, it will start collecting 200,000 signatures next month to trigger the referendum process.
Citizens will be asked if they wish to repeal a law passed by Parliament earlier this year-led by Orban’s right-wing Fidesz party-giving the green light to the plan.
According to the agreement signed between the Orban government and Shanghai University, the Fudan Budapest campus is its first campus in Europe, covering an area of 500,000 square meters (5 million square feet).
Orbán believes that a well-known outpost of Fudan University will allow thousands of Hungarian and international students to obtain high-quality qualifications.
But the complex, scheduled to be completed in 2024, has sparked street protests and opposition accusations that Orban is forcing an unpopular project in the city and endangering previous plans to build student dormitories in the same area.
According to project documents leaked to the Hungarian investigative news website Direkt36.hu, the Fudan project estimates that most of the 1.5 billion euros will also be covered by a 1.3 billion euro loan provided by China to Hungary.
Carraccioni, 46, intends to challenge Orban in the elections early next year. He also accused the 58-year-old prime minister of having been in power since 2010 and turning Hungary from the European Union to China and other Eastern powers.
In June, Caraggioni, who won the mayor of Budapest in 2019, renamed the streets around the campus “Free Hong Kong Road” and “Uyghur Martyrs Road” to highlight China’s human rights pain points.
A few days later, Orbán seemed to succumb to the clamor of more and more referendums, but said that the referendum could only be held after the final project plan was announced at the end of 2022.
Critics also said that Orbán wooed Fudan, who deleted the reference to “freedom of thought” in the 2019 charter, which also exacerbated concerns about academic freedom in Hungary.
In 2018, the Central European University, founded by Hungary-born liberal billionaire George Soros, stated that it was “forced” to move from Budapest to Vienna after a fierce legal dispute with Orban.
