EditFugitive Polish politician’s Budapest institute received generous public money for little work
Money was earmarked for a “working group”, but the institute’s only publicly named staff member was Marcin Romanowski, a former Polish deputy justice minister
A research institute created for a Polish politician who fled to Budapest received 350 million forints (roughly €920,000–€950,000) in Hungarian public funding in 2025. A large share of that money went to fees for members of a mysterious Hungarian-Polish working group whose names and exact tasks are still unknown.
The money came from the Batthyány Lajos Foundation and was paid to the Center for Fundamental Rights, a right-wing think tank close to Fidesz. The Center used the grant to set up and run the Polish-Hungarian Institute of Freedom from May to December 2025. It contributed no money of its own.
The institute’s only publicly named staff member was Marcin Romanowski, a former Polish deputy justice minister. Polish authorities are seeking him on corruption charges. He left Poland in 2024, received political asylum in Hungary from the Orbán government, and worked at the institute until he left the country after Fidesz lost the April 2026 elections.
According to the funding documents examined by Átlátszó, 142 million forints (about €370,000–€390,000) was earmarked for fees paid under civil contracts to members of a “Hungarian-Polish working group.” The papers give almost no detail on who belonged to the group or what work they actually did. The Center for Fundamental Rights did not answer questions about it.
Romanowski himself received 17.5 million forints (around €46,000) for the year, according to his official Polish asset declaration. That leaves most of the contracted fees unexplained by any visible results.
The institute’s public output was limited. Its website lists a short greeting from Romanowski and just 13 English-language documents (plus a few translations), totalling fewer than 300 pages. Several of the texts first appeared on his personal Substack newsletter, which has only 11 subscribers. There is no public record of conferences, books or other events that the grant was also supposed to finance.
The funding contract described the project as a permanent platform for cooperation between Hungarian and Polish “sovereigntist” forces. In practice, the results that reached the public were modest compared with the size of the public grant.
A longer original version in Hungarian by EUalive’s partner Átlátszó can be found here.
Caption: The headquarters of the Center for Fundamental Rights [ Átlátszó]
Updated: August 13, 2026 - 16:31
