Zsuzsanna Szelényi

Zsuzsanna Szelényi is a Hungarian foreign policy expert, author, and former Member of the Hungarian Parliament. She currently serves as the Program Director of the Democracy Institute Leadership Academy at the CEU Democracy Institute, as well as a Senior Fellow in the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

Prior to joining CEU, she was a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy and a Europe’s Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), where she focused on polarisation, populism, and autocratisation in the European Union. From 2014 to 2018, she served as a liberal Member of the Hungarian Parliament, focusing on foreign policy, migration, and constitutional affairs. She is the author of Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary.