Inspired by 'Trump-tornado', Hungary vows NGO crackdown
Orban, one of Trump's closest allies in the European Union, praised the president's move to hobble his government's humanitarian agency USAID, describing it as a "cleansing wind" and a "Trump tornado".
"All money coming from America should be disclosed and those who receive it should be sanctioned. Money from abroad cannot be accepted to influence Hungarian politics," Orban said in his weekly interview with state radio.
The nationalist leader has long accused political opponents, NGOs and media outlets of serving foreign interests, and called USAID money a "tool of political influence".
USAID, the aid arm of US foreign policy, funds health and emergency programmes in around 120 countries, including the world's poorest regions.
Orban said Hungarian NGOs receiving funds from USAID "specifically supported issues that were linked to the left-wing parties" and were financed to "bring down the government".
"Now is the moment to eliminate these international networks, to wipe them out, to make their existence legally impossible," he said.
Governing parties passed a law in 2017 targeting NGOs receiving funding from abroad, but had to repeal it after a formal notice from the European Union.
Separately, Orban has also hinted that the central European country might quit the International Criminal Court (ICC), after Trump announced sanctions against the institution.
"It's time for Hungary to review what we're doing in an international organisation that is under US sanctions!" Orban wrote on X.
In November, he publicly invited Benjamin Netanyahu to Budapest in defiance of an ICC arrest warrant against the Israeli prime minister.
Hungary signed the Rome Statute, the international treaty that created the ICC, in 1999 and ratified it two years later during Orban's first term in office.
But the government says it is not bound by the statute owing to legal technicalities around its adoption into Hungarian law.
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