Hungary offers open hiring for university boards

Hungary is proposing open recruitment for university foundation boards to unlock frozen EU research and exchange funding. The offer sounds reasonable: advertise vacancies instead of filling them through political networks. But the EU's budget-protection rules don't ask whether job postings exist. They ask whether political control over university money has actually changed. So far, the European Commission has treated every earlier Hungarian reform as not enough.

How the money got frozen

The funding cut did not come from an education policy. It came through the EU's conditionality regulation (Regulation 2020/2092), a tool that lets the bloc withhold money when a member state's rule-of-law failures put EU funds at risk.

In late 2022, the Council (where national governments vote) used that tool against Hungary. Its implementing decision blocked new grant agreements and contracts with a specific type of Hungarian body: public-interest asset-management foundations. These are the foundation structures that now legally run many of Hungary's major universities. They control budgets, procurement and staffing. The Commission argued that politically connected trustees, weak conflict-of-interest rules and poor oversight made EU money flowing through these foundations a concrete risk (Commission statement).

The consequence was direct. Programmes like Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe work through grant agreements. If your institution can't sign new agreements, you're out. Hungarian foundation universities lost access not because someone targeted their classrooms, but because the legal entity above them was flagged as a budget risk.

Why open recruitment may not be enough

Hungary's latest proposal would let people apply openly for board vacancies, while keeping the current foundation model in place during a one-year transition. Wider applicant pools are more transparent than closed appointments. That much is uncontested.

The problem is that the Commission's concerns were never about how vacancies get advertised. They covered who makes the final pick, whether politicians can sit on boards, how conflicts of interest are policed, whether trustees can be removed, and who ultimately controls university assets. An open call changes the first step. It does not touch the rest of the chain.

The Commission has not treated Hungary's earlier changes as sufficient and has kept the ban on affected universities in force. A December 2023 update confirmed that conditionality measures were being maintained against Hungary. The pattern is clear: Budapest announces a fix, Brussels examines whether political control has actually receded, and concludes it hasn't.

The cost beyond Hungary

The freeze ripples outward. A Horizon Europe research consortium depends on every partner being eligible. When a Hungarian foundation university drops out, the project has to reroute work packages or find a replacement. For Erasmus+ exchanges, the blockage sits on the Hungarian side: partner universities elsewhere cannot build bilateral agreements with an institution that can't sign.

According to Portfolio, rebuilding trust and restoring programme access could take years. Slovak reporting frames the situation primarily as a fiscal and reform problem rather than a sovereignty dispute (Denník N).

Under the conditionality regulation, only one path leads to restoration: the Commission assesses whether Hungary has fixed the identified risks, proposes lifting the measures, and the Council decides (Regulation 2020/2092, Art. 7). No domestic announcement shortcuts that sequence.

The questions that would matter for restoration remain unanswered. Who selects among open applicants? Can politically connected figures still serve? What happens during the transition year, when existing boards keep control? The EU built the conditionality tool to protect its budget from governance failures. Now it has to decide whether Hungary's open recruitment changes who holds power over university money, or only changes the paperwork around it.