Central European University (CEU), established by George Soros in 1991, is no stranger to forced migration.

In 1993 a political and financial battle between Mr Soros and a Czech government led by right-winger Václav Klaus forced the billionaire philanthropist to relocate his then-$25 million project from Prague to Budapest.

In 2019, after a sustained campaign by one-time protégé turned ultra-nationalist Viktor Orbán against Soros and CEU, it will up sticks again to Vienna, where both city and national governments await it with open arms.

The writing had been on the wall for CEU since the Hungarian government passed the so-called CEU law in April 2017, which aimed to restrict the ability of foreign-accredited universities to operate in Hungary.

CEU — accredited in the United States and Hungary — says though it tried for over a year to comply with the law, Budapest “made it clear it has no intention of signing” an agreement negotiated with the State of New York, “which would ensure CEU’s operations in Budapest”.

Meanwhile a deal between CEU and the Austrian and Viennese governments — which see the arrival of CEU as a coup, cementing Vienna’s status as the academic centre of the German-speaking world — had been in the works for months.

Monday’s announcement confirmed the inevitable and Vienna’s mayor Michael Ludwig and Austria’s education minister Heinz Faßmann naturally offered their warmest welcomes when it finally came.

The CEU law and the university’s exile from Budapest are inseparable from the antisemitic propaganda campaign the Orbán regime has waged against Mr Soros for years. Reporting its departure, pro-government mouthpieces like Origo called CEU the “George Soros university.”

But CEU’s closure is more so seen in Hungary as an attack on academic freedom and an institution that was founded to aid the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1990s and impart the values of an open society, including respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Along with the anti-Soros campaign, moves against foreign-funded NGOs, and attempts by local authorities to shut down the Jewish-run community centre Auróra, not to mention the clientelism and consolidating the media in pro-government hands, CEU’s closure is one more step in Hungary’s transformation into a simulacrum of a democracy inside the European Union.

Manfred Weber, lead candidate for the centre-right European People’s Party (of which Mr Orbán’s Fidesz remains a member) in next year’s European elections, previously said they would fight CEU’s closure “at any cost”.

With legal proceedings against Hungary related to the CEU law simmering away, the future remains in the EU’s hands.