The team that ran MCC Brussels has launched Freedom and Sovereignty Initiative Europe (FSI Europe), a new independent think tank that says it will argue for a Europe of sovereign nation states and support what it calls the patriotic movement with research and media.
The announcement came on September 23.
A public event is planned for October 14.
FSI Europe is a Belgian non-profit association, or vzw, with a website at fsieurope.org.
Frank Furedi, the Hungarian-born British sociologist who directed MCC Brussels, is president.
John O’Brien, its former communications director, holds the same brief.
The published roster also names Tony Gilland as external affairs director, Richard Schenk as research director and Jacob Reynolds as policy director.
Senior advisers include Zsófia Tóth-Bíró of The European Conservative, Sabine Beppler-Spahl of Germany’s Freiblickinstitut and University of Bath professor Bill Durodié. Ashley Frawley and Thomas Fazi are listed as senior research fellows.
The group says it is building its own funding and partnerships and is already fundraising. Donations are solicited on the site.
Furedi said Europe was at “a pivotal moment” and that challenger movements still lacked “a comprehensive intellectual and political alternative”.
O’Brien said the EU “exercises enormous power over speech” and funds “an extraordinary network of NGOs to monopolise the voice of civil society”.
The first large project advertised is an intervention on what FSI Europe calls the EU’s attempt to control and influence upcoming elections in France, Germany, Poland, Spain and elsewhere.
Research themes listed on the site include election control, free speech, immigration, culture and family, energy and farming, regulation and defence.
The launch statement blamed the closure of MCC Brussels on what it called a campaign by the Hungarian Government of Péter Magyar and the European Commission against its Budapest parent.
MCC Brussels opened in late 2022 as the EU-capital arm of Budapest’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium.
It declared more than €6 million in 2024, almost all of it a grant from MCC Hungary, an educational foundation that had received transfers of state assets under Viktor Orbán, including 10 per cent stakes in oil company MOL and drugmaker Richter Gedeon.
Euronews put its budget at about €5 million in 2025, with staff numbers falling from a peak of 25 to 12 this year.
Furedi said the project was intellectually independent and existed to test right-wing ideas in a city dominated by left-leaning and federalist institutes.
It soon grew to be the most prominent conservative think tank in Brussels and published reports on EU-funded NGOs, farming and nuclear power, hosted conferences and made documentaries.
The 2024 National Conservatism conference in Brussels, which it backed, was briefly halted after the mayor of the Brussels municipality of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode intervened, then allowed to proceed by Belgium’s Council of State.
On June 12 the EU Transparency Register suspended MCC Brussels after a complaint filed in 2025 by Corporate Europe Observatory about funding disclosure. The suspension meant it could no longer enter the European Parliament without an invitation.
The think tank called this a selective political attack, arguing that other NGO networks that had done the same thing never faced any pushback.
The money stopped after Péter Magyar defeated Orbán in April 2026, ending his 16-year tenure, and pledged to dismantle the previous government’s think-tank network.
Budapest ordered MCC Hungary dissolved and sent in a liquidator. The foundation ceased to exist on July 31 by decision of Bálint Ruff, the minister heading the Prime Minister’s Office, and its educational work passed to a new National Talent Centre on August 31.
The government said scrapping such foundations was needed to meet EU rule-of-law conditions and regain access to EU funds.
Staff in Brussels went unpaid in July and August.
Furedi resigned on August 31, saying contractual obligations had been “irreversibly” breached and calling the wind-down “unprofessional and childish”.
He told Euronews he was already working on a smaller initiative with alternative funding.
COMMENT: Brussels bureaucracy’s war on dissent: Why they are coming for MCC Brussels, writes @Furedibyte https://t.co/FJQO942nv1
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) June 23, 2026
