An X user—under the name of MagaBabe—has been posting undercover interviews with the heads of the U.S.-based NGO Action for Democracy (A4D) for the past few weeks, revealing that the main financial driver behind the organization’s leftist agenda is none other than the billionaire George Soros.

According to the Action for Democracy’s website, the NGO’s modus operandi is to identify “key battleground states” where democracy is supposedly in peril from allegedly authoritarian conservative forces and to “fund important mobilization campaigns and then channel resources directly to front-line activists and organizations” there to help their cause. The rest is up to these local actors, but the goal is clear: toppling conservative governments.

“We are actually not shy in criticizing authoritarian leaders and tendencies like Bolsonaro, like Orbán in Hungary, like Kaczynski in Poland. We are supporting civil society organizations on the ground who are quite critical of these government actors very, very often,” A4D Executive Director David Koranyi said in one of the videos.

Koranyi and A4D treasurer Chris Maroshegyi are both members of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank started with seed money from Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

Koranyi explained that A4D would “never say” that it would directly contribute to opposition campaigns but given the values of the organizations that are selected for funding, “it’s fairly obvious that eventually … they will probably play into the hands of the opposition.”

Interference from Poland to Brazil

While A4D has a global scope (being active in Turkey and Brazil, for instance), Koranyi said it was focusing on Central and Eastern Europe in particular, primarily in Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia.

“Right now a lot of effort is going into Poland because they are about to have elections that are really critical,” A4D Chairwoman Kati Marton confirmed in another interview, apparently done sometime in mid-2023, before the Polish elections where the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party came first but lost its majority and was ousted from power by a liberal coalition.

In the run-up to the Polish elections, Koranyi revealed that A4D was funding twelve NGOs on the ground to mobilize young and female voters in particular. He added that they are preparing to finance the same number of organizations that advocate against Robert Fico’s nationalist government in Slovakia and that they have been doing the same in Hungary against Viktor Orbán since the 2022 elections, “with unfortunately limited success.”

Apart from funding these NGOs on the ground, Action for Democracy is also engaging in “policy advocacy” in Washington and Brussels, and even cooperating with U.S. media to “tarnish the reputation” of PM Orbán and others in the eyes of the American audience, in particular Republicans for whom Orbán’s Hungary represents a successful conservative model.

Follow the Money

Action for Democracy says it merely connects local civil society actors to international donors that they otherwise could not reach out to. However, it doesn’t specify who these private donors are—for good reason, as it turns out.

As the videos posted by MagaBabe on X revealed, the vast majority of Action for Democracy’s funds are coming from George Soros, who gained a reputation for spending billions on global leftist activism through his Open Society Foundations (OSF).

What’s different in this case is that Soros appears to be funding A4D privately, and not (only) through his NGO, whose leadership he passed onto his son, Alexander Soros last year. Upon taking up the mantle, Soros Jr. said he was not as interested in Europe and would instead turn OSF’s focus on other regions, but that doesn’t mean his father can’t use his private wealth to keep influencing European democracies through NGOs like A4D.

What makes the revelations even more profound is that Action for Democracy was the organization that was caught illegally channeling over $10 million into the united opposition parties’ electoral campaign during the 2022 Hungarian elections. This blatant interference prompted Budapest to pass a similar law to the U.S.’ Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which was just recently used by the European Commission to launch another infringement procedure against the country for daring to protect its electoral integrity.

Back then, the opposition claimed the money came from private “microdonations” of Hungarian expats in the U.S., but the evidence showed there were barely more than a dozen of these donations, likely averaging around $25. No one knew where the rest came from for sure—until now. Because of the U.S. law that guides transparency regarding donors for this type of organization, the claims cannot be independently verified.

“Our funding is coming from some pro-democracy [actors]—you can probably imagine who they would be,” Marton said. When the undercover journalist asked if she was referring to Soros, she answered, “Yes… Don’t even say that.”

“I strongly suspect that [A4D] had one or two very substantial single donors,” another interviewee, the Democratic political consultant and A4D associate Eric Koch said. “I think we both know who I am talking about, a very famous one.” “Soros?” “Yeah. … I believe that he was overwhelmingly the largest donor.”

Koranyi was more careful. “We are also a 501(c)(4) in the U.S., which means that we don’t actually have to disclose the names of our donors,” he said. Nonetheless, he explained that giving $2 million was enough to “bring you into the pantheon of the biggest donors,” who are also allowed to dictate “priorities, action items, and programs” to how the money should be spent, allocating around 80% of their donations to very specific goals and countries.

In the fourth and most recent episode posted last week, the investigators talk to retired General Wesley Clark, a former head of NATO’s European division, who was approached by Kati Marton some time ago to help Action for Democracy with his Cold War expertise. Clark also has a long personal history with Soros, and was working closely with him during the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine, where Open Society Foundations was particularly active.

According to Clark, it’s not the U.S. government that’s behind A4D and similar organizations’ activism in Europe. “It’s just private individuals that are interfering in other countries elections,” the general said, adding later that there’s “none like George” among them when it comes to Central Europe.

“[Soros] funded the efforts in Bosnia. He funded the efforts in Hungary, that’s why Viktor Orbán hates him,” Clark said, adding that it makes sense that Orbán doesn’t want an American entrepreneur “controlling the politics in Hungary.”