Spain’s Vox party has become the latest far-right group to get a loan from a Hungarian bank to finance its political campaigns. Two journalistic investigations by the website “VSquare” and the newspaper El Pais have confirmed that the party led by Santiago Abascal received a loan from Magyar Bankholding (Mhb), an institution whose main shareholders include Lorinc Mészáros, a friend of the former Hungarian minister Viktor Orban.
The loan
The reported loan was initially valued at €9.2 million, but Vox spokeswoman Pepa Millan later lowered the amount to €6.5 million, claiming the money would also be repaid. The loan itself is not illegal, but hiding it is, under the Spanish law on the financing of political parties, which requires the publication of information about the party’s accounts, such as the loans, their amount, the interest rate and the entity involved. This information is public to prevent banks from financing parties illicitly.
Le Pen too
And Vox is not the only radical right formation to obtain loans from Hungary. In the past, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National also received a loan of over 10 million euros from Mkb Bank Nyrt to finance its presidential candidacy. Mkb is now part of Magyar Bankholding, whose major shareholders are a government-controlled state investment company and Lorinc Meszaros, one of Prime Minister Orban’s closest business allies.
Vox in the European Parliament was part of the Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, together with Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, but after the June elections it decided to leave the ECR to join Viktor Orban’s Patriots of Europe , Le Pen and Matteo Salvini’s League. Funding political parties is just one of the ways Orban has sought to support his nationalist allies and support his interests in the bloc.
The foundation
As Bloomberg reports, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, or Mcc, an education foundation that the Hungarian government has endowed with a billion dollars, also serves as Orban’s soft power body. It holds conferences and has several centres, including one in Brussels. Earlier this year Mcc organized a farmers’ demonstration to protest against what it accused of being a European elite distant from their needs.
