Part I — Situation overview

On Thursday, 3 September 2026, Politico wrote that Hungary is “on track” to rejoin the European Union’s largest research programme, Horizon Europe (the EU research and innovation framework programme for 2021–2027). Zoltán Tanács, Minister for Science and Technology, told the paper that with the transformation of university governance “legally we are back”, and that he is confident the restriction will be lifted by the end of the year. The next day Judit Lannert, the minister responsible for education, announced that Erasmus+ (the Union’s education and student mobility programme) is returning to every Hungarian university, because the 21 institutions affected by the restriction already have a valid mobility grant for the 2026/2027 academic year. On the same day the science ministry presented the complete overhaul of the research and development (R&D) system at a background briefing.

The antecedent is the conditionality procedure, that is, the EU rule-of-law mechanism under which the Union may suspend payments if the sound management of funds is not guaranteed in a member state. In this procedure the ministers of the member states (the Council of the European Union) prohibited at the end of 2022 any new EU commitments with public-interest asset management foundations (KEKVA) and the institutions they maintain — among them 21 universities that had changed their operating model. Telex’s clarification is important: no one excluded Hungary from Horizon Europe. The universities concerned could take part in calls for proposals, but could not receive EU funding, and consortia (groupings of applicants made up of institutions from several countries) typically did not count them among the mandatory EU participants. The previous government requested an assessment in autumn 2024, but the European Commission rejected it; the loss was mitigated by domestic replacement programmes. Under the rules the Commission has one month for the assessment, and the Council a further month for the decision. According to the Commission’s answer to Politico, the government had not yet requested the assessment by early September.

MIAK’s reading: rejoining means two different things, and in the public debate the two are blurred. One is legal status — a Council decision restores this. The other is actual participation: how many Hungarian institutions get back into winning consortia, how many coordinate a project, and how much money arrives. No decision restores the latter, only years of work. The risk, therefore, is not that the lifting fails to happen, but that after the lifting no one measures whether Hungarian research has returned to international cooperation. There is also a risk that the restored conditions can be dismantled in a following term just as easily as they were created.

Part II — Foundations in the literature

Three sources illuminate the three layers of the topic. According to the European Commission’s report Education and Training Monitor 2025 (the Union’s annual review of the state of education), those Hungarian graduates who went abroad for credit mobility did so almost without exception through an EU programme. No other channel, therefore, made up in any meaningful way for the loss of Erasmus. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) survey Economic Surveys — European Union 2021 shows that framework programme funds flow to regions with more developed research systems, because evaluation is based on excellence. For catching-up countries, therefore, domestic co-financing and the redeployment of cohesion funds for research purposes are the decisive instruments. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (economists, leading authors of institutional economics; awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2024) write in their book Why Nations Fail (2012) that the survival of inclusive institutions is secured by the “virtuous circle”. In their view the true test of pluralism is whether it can resist attempts to concentrate power in one hand. The detailed treatment of the literature — by author, with quotations — is in section 6.4 Literature in detail.

Part III — MIAK’s concrete proposal

MIAK proposes three measurable measures. The first makes the timetable of rejoining public, the second attaches a system-level performance yardstick and domestic co-financing to the legal status, and the third secures the durability of the restored conditions. All three can be implemented within the framework of the existing EU procedure, within the powers of the government and the National Assembly — the fulfilment of the conditions continues to be established by the European Commission, and the Council decides on the lifting.

3.1 A public re-association timetable and list of conditions (within 30 days, before requesting the Commission’s assessment)

MIAK proposes that before the request for assessment to be submitted to the Commission, the government should publish an itemised list of the elements needed to lift the restriction. The list should start from the reasons for the Commission’s rejection decision of autumn 2024 — according to Telex this listed a dozen problems — and should show, item by item, which piece of legislation or measure addresses it, when it was adopted and what is still outstanding. The science minister himself mentioned to Politico “administration” that is still to be done; the public must also know what this consists of. The list should also contain the planned date of submission. Counting with the one-month Commission deadline and the one-month Council deadline, it is worth submitting the request by the end of October at the latest if the aim is lifting by the end of the year. The list should also settle the fate of the domestic replacement funding: according to Telex, the replacement paid from the domestic budget can in principle be reimbursed once the procedure that ordered the ban is closed. This amount and the reimbursement process must be recorded publicly. The proposal applies the EU participation target of the KP1 EU digital frontier programme point and the logic of KP17 issue-based coalition-building: the Council decision requires the support of the member states, and a public, verifiable list is the strongest negotiating argument.

3.2 A system-level performance yardstick and domestic co-financing for framework programme participation (together with the 2027 budget)

MIAK proposes that simultaneously with the lifting, the government should announce an annual performance yardstick for framework programme participation. The yardstick should consist of four indicators: the number of Hungarian proposals submitted, the success rate (the share of submitted proposals that are funded), the number of Hungarian-coordinated projects, and the EU funding won per researcher. The data source is the European Commission’s public Horizon Europe database (Horizon Europe Dashboard); the baseline value must be recorded by type of institution — with the 21 affected universities separately — for the 2021–2026 period. The yardstick must be accompanied by a co-financing package. According to the OECD’s analysis (see 6.4.2), proposals awarded the Seal of Excellence (the label for proposals judged excellent in evaluation but not funded for lack of resources) received, in the previous framework programme, domestic support amounting to less than 1 per cent of the amount requested. Yet up to 5 per cent of cohesion funds can be transferred to the framework programme for competitively selected projects. MIAK proposes that the government earmark part of the HUF 210 billion of unused EU funds intended for research and innovation over the next two years, as reported by Portfolio, for three purposes: domestic funding of Hungarian Seal of Excellence proposals, support for proposal preparation, and provision of the own contribution. Zoltán Tanács himself raised the latter on 17 September. The proposal attaches an output side to the spending target of the G4 innovation ecosystem programme point, and the annual evaluation fits into the framework of the G20 Drucker audit (an ex-post impact assessment comparing the expected and the actual result).

3.3 Rule-based irreversibility guarantees independent of individuals (in the university governance act replacing the KEKVA system by August 2027)

MIAK proposes that the act laying down the new rules on the maintenance and governance of universities should protect not persons and bodies, but procedures. There are two recent Hungarian examples of the opposite. The KEKVA model made the boards of trustees practically irremovable, and this led to the restriction. And the act on the HUN-REN research network, according to Péter Horváth, state secretary for science policy, was written in such a way that “not even the prime minister can remove the head of the research network”. Both constructions sought to achieve durability by fixing the personal composition, and that is political entrenchment, not a guarantee. According to MIAK’s proposal the act should lay down three elements. The first is a mandatory conflict-of-interest rule for university governing bodies, with public selection criteria — according to Telex’s report the selection criteria of the current transitional boards were not public. Second: the distribution of public research money should take place through a channel based on independent evaluation and operated by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH). Third: amending these guarantees should require a mandatory prior, public impact assessment that specifically shows the effect on participation in EU programmes. The proposition of Acemoglu and Robinson (see 6.4.3) is directly applicable here: durability comes not from an institution being untouchable, but from the cost of touching it being public and politically high.

The three proposals are bound together by a common principle: the success of rejoining is decided not on the day of the Council decision, but in the next rounds of calls and in the next government term. The public timetable makes the lifting verifiable, the performance yardstick the actual return, and the rule-based guarantee the durability — and in all three cases the instrument of verification is the same: public data recorded in advance.

Part IV — Expected effects and risks

Dimension Expected effect Risk
Research and higher education Researchers at the 21 universities can again apply as full consortium partners; the yardstick makes visible which institution returns quickly and which needs help Rebuilding the network of relationships takes years; weak figures in the first two years may become a target of political attack if the yardstick is measured not against the baseline but against absolute targets
Economy and budget Co-financing multiplies domestic forints with EU funds, and supporting Seal of Excellence proposals makes use of the quality of the evaluation Domestic top-up may take over what applicants should win in competition; support distorts if it is not competitively awarded
Foreign policy The public list of conditions lends credibility to Hungarian commitments before the Council decision If the list reveals gaps, this may slow down the lifting in the short term
Institutional structure A procedure-based guarantee does not prohibit future amendment, but makes it costly The impact assessment obligation may become a formality if no one holds its content to account

The main trade-off lies between speed and durability. The fastest route to lifting is for the government to answer every Commission objection at the specific point, with an individual measure. This, however, creates the same fragility that the KEKVA system and the act on HUN-REN displayed: the solution depends on the political majority of the moment. MIAK therefore proposes that the pace of the lifting should not be accelerated at the expense of the guarantees — there is time until the August 2027 deadline to create procedural rules. The other risk concerns the yardstick. The success rate on its own can be misleading: if few but carefully prepared proposals are submitted, the rate is high, yet participation remains weak. That is why the four indicators must be evaluated together, and relative to the baseline.

Part V — Measurability and summary

5.1 What is worth following? (suggested KPIs)

MIAK proposes the following key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring. These are proposals, not government decisions:

  • Timetable of the lifting: whether the government submits the request for assessment by 31 October 2026, and whether the Council adopts the lifting decision by 31 December 2026 (yes/no).
  • Framework programme participation: the number of submitted proposals and the success rate of the 21 affected universities in 2027 and 2028, relative to the 2021–2026 baseline recorded under point 3.2; within 24 months it is reasonable to expect the success rate to reach that of the unaffected Hungarian institutions.
  • Co-financing: what percentage of Hungarian proposals awarded the Seal of Excellence receive domestic funding — the proposed target for 2028 is at least 50 per cent.
  • Student mobility: the number of outgoing students of the 21 universities under Erasmus+ in the 2026/2027 and 2027/2028 academic years, relative to the last full academic year before the restriction.

5.2 Summary

MIAK’s request to the government and the National Assembly: rejoining should not end with an announcement, but should start with a public list of conditions, continue with an annual participation yardstick, and be anchored in a governance act that protects procedures, not persons. Restoring the status is the beginning: Hungarian research returns to European cooperation when it wins, coordinates and finds partners again. This can only be measured, not declared.

Two of MIAK’s foundational values are at stake in this topic. Data-drivenness, because today no one measures the success of the return. The public database contains all the necessary data; it is just that no one has committed to publishing them with a baseline and a target value. And accountability, because the price of the restriction — the lost cohorts of mobility and the broken research relationships — was borne not by the decision-makers but by students and researchers. The lasting guarantee is that the cost of the next such decision should be foreseeable and public.

Part VI — Reasoning and further sources

6.1 Press framing by spectrum

In the left-liberal segment Telex provided the most accurate coverage of the topic. In its article on the Politico piece the paper explicitly corrected the international framing. Its headline also indicated that Hungary had not been excluded from the programme, and it also emphasised that if the minister had indeed spoken of “exclusion”, he would have expressed himself inaccurately. The article focused on the procedural timetable and on the fact that rebuilding trust in multi-actor projects takes time. Another Telex article examined the selection of the transitional university boards in a sceptical tone: the concern of university actors quoted was that people of the former leadership could get back in through the senates. 444.hu placed the Erasmus announcement in the context of the EU agreement of late May, and also gave space to the position of former minister Balázs Hankó, according to whom the restriction was unlawful. The paper’s text attributes the suspension to the European Commission, while Telex and Mandiner attribute it to the Council; in public-law terms the latter is accurate.

In the public-affairs segment 24.hu and ATV essentially relayed the ministerial announcement, without substantive background. In the economic segment Portfolio put the transformation of the R&D system in the foreground: raising spending relative to gross domestic product (GDP) to 2 per cent by 2030 and 3 per cent by 2035, the new mission programmes and the use of unused EU funds for research purposes (the body of the article was not publicly downloadable, only its introduction). Portfolio thus framed domestic spending, Telex the legal status, and neither linked the two to the question of how the additional funding could be turned into framework programme participation.

In the conservative segment Mandiner published an MTI-based, factual news item, and added that according to Balázs Hankó’s briefing at the beginning of the year more than 12,000 people had taken part in the domestic replacement programme launched by the previous government. Magyar Nemzet did not raise the topic among its main topics in the period examined. In the international press Politico highlighted the fact of the return, and Euractiv the price of the restriction, using the example of dementia research (the article was not publicly downloadable). What is common across the whole spectrum is that no one wrote about the period after the lifting — about measuring participation and the durability of the guarantees.

6.2 Facts and data

Data Value Source
Imposition of the restriction end of 2022, by the ministers of the member states (the Council of the European Union) in the rule-of-law conditionality procedure Telex, 4 September 2026; Mandiner, 4 September 2026
Universities affected 21 higher-education institutions that changed their operating model (maintained by KEKVA) Telex, 444.hu, 24.hu, 4 September 2026
Content of the restriction in Horizon Europe participation possible, EU funding not Telex, 4 September 2026
Total budget of Horizon Europe some EUR 95 billion (EUR 84.9 billion at 2018 prices) Telex, 4 September 2026; OECD, Economic Surveys — European Union 2021
Earlier request for assessment autumn 2024; rejected by the Commission Telex, 4 September 2026
Procedural deadlines for the lifting Commission assessment one month, Council decision a further month Telex, 4 September 2026
The minister’s expectation lifting by the end of 2026 Politico, as summarised by Telex on 4 September 2026
Erasmus+ the 21 universities have a valid mobility grant for the 2026/2027 academic year announcement by the minister responsible for education, 444.hu, 24.hu, Mandiner, 4 September 2026
Loss of student mobility from the 2024/2025 academic year Mandiner (MTI), 4 September 2026
Abolition of the KEKVA system by August 2027; the mandate of the transitional boards runs until 1 August 2027 444.hu, Telex, 4 September 2026
Replacement of board of trustees and supervisory board members 98 per cent statement of the education ministry at the end of August, Telex, 4 September 2026
R&D spending target from some 1.3 per cent of GDP to 2 per cent by 2030 and 3 per cent by 2035 Portfolio, 4 September 2026
Unused EU funds intended for research HUF 210 billion over the next two years Portfolio, 4 September 2026
Credit mobility of Hungarian students more than 97 per cent of graduates going abroad for credit mobility went with an EU programme European Commission, Education and Training Monitor 2025
EU mobility target 23 per cent of graduates by 2030; EU average in 2023 was 11.0 per cent European Commission, Education and Training Monitor 2025
Domestic funding of Seal of Excellence proposals below 1 per cent of the amount requested (in the previous framework programme) OECD, Economic Surveys — European Union 2021

Two data points require a separate note. First: Portfolio’s article of 4 September gives the R&D target for 2030 and 2035, while the minister’s radio interview of 17 September gives it as “within four years” and “over an eight-year horizon”; the two formulations are consistent. Second: according to the monitor’s summary, the Euractiv article also reports further data — the action brought by six affected universities before the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the survey of the Hungarian Young Academy on the intention of early-career researchers to take up positions abroad. As the article was not publicly downloadable, MIAK did not adopt these figures; for further elaboration it is worth confirming them from a domestic primary source.

6.3 Policy dimensions

  • Education (programme points and background material) — the return of Erasmus+ directly affects the goal of the O10 bilingual and global-competence programme, because student mobility is the most important higher-education instrument of language and global competence; publishing participation data at institutional level transfers the logic of O3 data-driven education development to higher education;
  • Economy (programme points) — framework programme participation provides the output yardstick for the spending target of the G4 innovation ecosystem programme point, support for the own contribution and for Seal of Excellence proposals is related to the co-financing principle of G12 venture capital mobilisation, and the annual evaluation is part of the G20 Drucker audit; it is worth aligning the 1.6 per cent baseline of G4 with the 1.3–1.4 per cent published by the government;
  • Foreign policy (programme points) — the KP1 EU digital frontier programme point already contains a framework programme participation target (at least five Hungarian organisations a year in digital and AI projects), and securing the Council support needed for the lifting is a task for KP17 issue-based coalition-building;
  • Digitalisation and AI regulation (programme points) — participation in the digital and artificial intelligence cluster of the framework programme is the research input of the D12 AI productivity strategy; among the 21 affected universities there are several engineering and IT training institutions.

6.4 Literature in detail

6.4.1 European Commission: Education and Training Monitor 2025

In its higher-education chapter the Commission’s annual report examines the EU target for student mobility: by 2030, 23 per cent of graduates should have studied abroad during their studies, whereas in 2023 the EU average was only 11.0 per cent. The report also shows that part of credit mobility is organised outside EU programmes, but in some countries there is practically no alternative to them:

“EU programmes seem to be virtually the only possibility for going abroad for a short period in Latvia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus. Over 97% of credit-mobile graduates originating from these countries went abroad under EU programmes.”

The Hungarian lesson is twofold. On the one hand, this figure shows that the loss of Erasmus+ at the 21 affected universities was not the narrowing of an opportunity, but the practically complete closing-off of short study periods abroad. The domestic replacement programme could only partly mitigate this, and according to the report’s data no other channel made up for it. On the other hand, the same justifies the mobility indicator proposed by MIAK in 5.1: if Hungarian student mobility relies so heavily on a single programme, the success of the return can be measured directly by the number of outgoing students of the 21 universities.

📖 Source: European Commission: Education and Training Monitor 2025

6.4.2 OECD: Economic Surveys: European Union 2021

In its chapter on EU innovation policy the OECD survey writes that the more developed regions absorb the bulk of framework programme funds, because their research systems are more mature and evaluation is based on excellence. For catching-up regions the survey highlights two instruments. One is the Seal of Excellence, about which it states:

“The label is awarded to non-funded high quality Horizon 2020 proposals worthy of financial support from other sources. However, available information suggests that alternative public funding for these proposals stays at less than 1% of the amount they had requested from Horizon 2020.”

The other instrument is the transfer of cohesion funds: under the 2021–2027 rules member states may transfer up to 5 per cent of their cohesion envelope to the framework programme, earmarked for competitively selected domestic projects. According to the survey, national and regional innovation policy should make use of these possibilities. Translated to the Hungarian situation: after rejoining, the cheapest and fastest instrument for increasing domestic participation is not launching a new programme, but funding the proposals that EU evaluators have already judged excellent. This is the direct basis of proposal 3.2: in this way domestic funding builds on the outcome of independent international evaluation, not on domestic discretion.

📖 Source: OECD: Economic Surveys — European Union 2021

6.4.3 Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson: Why Nations Fail

According to Acemoglu and Robinson, inclusive institutions come into being at critical junctures, and once they have come into being they set off a positive feedback process that increases their chances of survival. The first mechanism of this is pluralism: pluralist political institutions make things difficult for anyone who would want to concentrate power in one hand. The authors cite as an example the attempt of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to escape the oversight of the Supreme Court:

“…the true test of pluralism is precisely whether the system can resist such attempts.”

The essence of the authors’ argument is that Roosevelt’s plan was not stopped by a legal prohibition, but by the fact that legislators belonging to his own party also understood: if the president once undermines judicial independence, that makes them vulnerable too. Durability, therefore, came not from the untouchability of an institution, but from the common interest of the actors. Translated to Hungarian higher education, this is the logic of proposal 3.3. The KEKVA model and the act on HUN-REN sought to achieve durability through the untouchability of the bodies, and both became politically vulnerable precisely because of this: as soon as the majority changed, the construction as a whole was called into question. According to MIAK, what makes the restored conditions durable is that dismantling them has a public, foreseeable price. If a future government touches them, it comes up against the interests of researchers, students and universities, and a mandatory impact assessment makes this visible to everyone.

📖 Source: Daron Acemoglu – James A. Robinson: Why Nations Fail

6.5 International comparison

The best-known European precedent of partial exclusion from the framework programme is Switzerland. After the 2014 immigration referendum the country could take part in Horizon 2020 only through partial association, and in the first years of Horizon Europe, in the absence of an association agreement, it could apply only as a non-associated third country. Swiss institutions could take part in consortia, but could not receive EU funding. The Swiss government responded with transitional domestic funding for researchers who, after winning their proposal, could not obtain EU funds. The structure of the situation is therefore reminiscent of the Hungarian restriction: participation formally remained open, funding fell away, and the domestic budget filled the gap. The Hungarian lesson is the same one that Telex formulated about the domestic institutions: replacement funding replaces the money, not the consortium position, because when putting together a proposal partners choose participants whose funding is predictable. For catching-up member states the OECD (see 6.4.2) recommends the practice of linking cohesion funds to the excellence evaluation of the framework programme. MIAK’s proposal 3.2 connects these two lessons: domestic funding should not replace the lost EU money, but should support the return — through preparation, the own contribution and funding of proposals judged excellent.

Education

  • O3 — Data-driven education development
  • O10 — Bilingual and global-competence programme

Economy

  • G4 — Innovation ecosystem and active development policy
  • G12 — Venture capital mobilisation
  • G20 — Economic-policy impact-assessment system (Drucker audit)

Foreign policy

  • KP1 — EU digital frontier
  • KP17 — Issue-based coalition-building in the EU

Digitalisation and AI regulation

  • D12 — AI productivity impact analysis and strategy

Transparency and anti-corruption policy

  • A8 — Cohesion-policy accountability

Proposed new programme point: Annual yardstick for participation in EU research and mobility programmes and procedural guarantees of higher-education governance — for the Education area, because the area’s programme points do not currently cover higher education and the research career.

6.7 List of sources

Press sources (MIAK topic monitor, 20 September 2026 — topic 3; the original MIAK press monitor, 5 September 2026 — topic 9, as well as MIAK press monitor, 18 September 2026, and MIAK foreign press monitor, 3 September 2026):

Knowledge-base references (books):

  • 📖 European Commission: Education and Training Monitor 2025
  • 📖 OECD: Economic Surveys — European Union 2021
  • 📖 Daron Acemoglu – James A. Robinson: Why Nations Fail

MIAK internal materials:

  • MIAK policy area: Education (background material; programme points; programme point ID: O3, O10)
  • MIAK policy area: Economy (programme points; programme point ID: G4, G12, G20)
  • MIAK policy area: Foreign policy (programme points; programme point ID: KP1, KP17)
  • MIAK policy area: Digitalisation and AI regulation (background material; programme points; programme point ID: D12)
  • MIAK policy area: Transparency and anti-corruption policy (programme points; programme point ID: A8)
  • MIAK topic monitor, 20 September 2026 — topic 3, score: 95/100

Supplementary public data sources:

  • European Commission — Horizon Europe Dashboard (Hungarian participation and success data broken down by institution)
  • European Commission — Erasmus+ Dashboard and annual Erasmus+ report
  • Tempus Public Foundation — Erasmus+ participation data
  • NKFIH — call and fund utilisation statistics
  • Council of the European Union — implementing decisions adopted in the conditionality procedure

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