The far-left Mérce, swindled with foreign money, is on the verge of bankruptcy. They expect financial redemption from their readers.
"We're in trouble, but we can get out of it with you!"
- announces the front page of Mérce.hu. The far-left feminist portal turned to its readers for help, according to their claim, they would need an additional HUF ten million in donations to operate this year. It is interesting that this amount is not much less than the annual salary of the senior official of the Kettős Mérce Blog Association, which operates the Mércé.
According to the organization's 2023 report, the president received a salary of HUF 12.7 million, while in 2022 his salary was only HUF 3.1 million, which is a salary increase of more than four hundred percent in a single year. This official is none other than Benedek Gáspár Papp, who took over the management of the organization from András Jámbor in 2020. We first came across the name of Gáspár Papp in a 2013 Vasárnapi Hírek article about the student protests. At the time, he studied philosophy at ELTE and was an activist of the Human Platform and the Student Network.
András Jámbor/Photo: Attila Trenka / Mandiner
Mérce.hu's fundraising is also interesting because in 2023 they received a substantial amount of foreign funds. Through the Hivos Foundation, an organization promoting LGBTQ rights, American, Dutch and EU budget resources arrived last year, Hivos helped Mérc with a total of three million forints.
Almost four million forints came from Brussels within the framework of our Common Values program, Soros University supported Mérc with one and a half million forints, and Journalism.eu supported Mércé with two million forints.
The latter amount was used to discredit Csaba Böjte and the Szent Ferenc Dévai Foundation, which published a woman's false accusations of abuse in cooperation with another news site, Átlátszó Erdylé.
The "cross-border" investigation eventually got a gellert, with the alleged victim, Mónica, publicly apologizing to the Franciscan friar on Facebook, writing: "Finally we managed to remove the toxic people who wanted your head through me."
Returning to Mérce's foreign sources: according to the reports of the foundation that maintains the portal, the Dutch government sent more than six million forints to establish the women's rights section of the editorial office. The Polgár Alapítvány az Esélyekért, which received significant resources from the foundations of György Soros, also transferred HUF 2.5 million to Mérc, but in return they received more opportunities to speak from the portal. In view of the financier, we also counted this with foreign sources.
Such subsidies amounted to HUF 19 million in 2023 in the report of the Kettős Mérce Blog Association.
The portal received a significant part of the funds for multi-year use.
The revenues of the Kettős Mérce Blog Association in 2023 amounted to slightly more than seventy million forints. This is a significant increase compared to the fact that in 2018 the income barely exceeded 33 million. In the sources, 2019 brought the breakthrough: in that year, Gergely Karácsony was elected mayor, who almost immediately offered a job to the portal's editor-in-chief, András Jámbor. Since then, Jámbor has become a parliamentary representative in the Párbeszéd faction.
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