Former leader of UK's Revolutionary Communist Party to head Brussels branch of Fidesz – affiliated MCC

Even after the late-eighties' regime change in Hungary, the British sociologist of Hungarian origin, who has been appointed to head the Brussels branch of the Fidesz-affiliated Mathias Corvinus Collegium, still held communist views, 24.hu reported.

Frank Füredi was born in 1947, and in the 1970's founded the Revolutionary Communist Party. He only broke with communist ideas in the second half of the 1990s, around the age of 50.

"Any man who is not a communist in his youth has no heart", Balázs Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister's political director and chairman of MCC's board of trustees, answered 24.hu's question about the paradox between the mandate and Füredi's past with a Bernard Shaw quote.

The writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 – and later made bold statements that could be associated with Nazism and eugenics – originally said, “Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool.” Füredi was well into his thirties when he was still an active communist at the head of his party of a few dozen members.

• Füredi joined the British International Socialists in 1970, from which he was expelled in 1973.
• In 1978 he and some of his friends founded the Revolutionary Communist Party. Although it was not Stalinist – and even though after Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation Brezhnev's Soviet leadership tried to moderately reinvigorate the Generalissimo – they looked to Lenin and Trotsky as their role models.

Füredi was also the main ideologue of the small party, and on several points stood in direct opposition to what Fidesz professes:

"Füredi believed in uncontrolled migration, free abortion and homosexual rights. It is interesting to note that Frank Füredi's wife Ann Füredi ran an abortion clinic and still defends the right to abortion."

– 24.hu noted.

A communist refugee of 1956

Füredi's communism is also surprising because his family left Hungary in 1956 precisely because of the Soviet intervention. He explains his own left-wing views by saying that Western socialism and how Marx is approached in the West has nothing to do with what was professed in the Soviet bloc – which explains why he founded the monthly Living Marxism at the dawn of the regime change in 1988.

During the Gyurcsány government, he claimed that MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party) was not very different from Fidesz. "The left, despite calling itself socialist, is politically completely pragmatic. You don't see them interested in the future, believing that life will be better in the future," 24.hu quoted him as saying in an earlier interview.

EU criticism may have brought him close to Fidesz

Although his career has been full of significant ideological twists and turns, he has typically always spoken out against the established order, be it the British rule in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the unipolar world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the European Union. Criticism of the latter may have been the main argument for his appointment to head the Brussels Institute of MCC, the organisation endowed with hundreds of billions of forints in Hungarian state assets.