Visit of the College of Visegrád at the IDM

On April 11, 2025, 32 students from Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland visited the IDM. The visit was part of the “College of Visegrád” program organized by the Hungarian National University of Public Service (NKE), which held a weekend seminar in Vienna. The students were accompanied by Gergely Prőhle, former State Secretary of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and current Director of the John Lukács Institute, as well as by Zsuzsanna Fernbach-Czibók, the program director of this institute. 

Sebastian Schäffer, Director of the IDM, welcomed the students and introduced them to the history and activities of the institute. This was followed by a lecture by Péter Techet, a research associate at the IDM, on the cooperation between the Visegrád countries and Austria, as well as on Austria’s perception of the Visegrád Group in the context of political debates about illiberalism and neutrality. Afterwards, Schäffer and Techet answered lot of questions; the students were particularly interested in how the public opinion in neutral Austria perceives the countries of Central Europe and how it responds to antidemocratic tendencies, also in context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.