Is George Soros's Open Society Foundations (OSF) completely withdrawing and ceasing its European activities? No, that's not true: According to Alexander Soros, the new chair of the Board of Directors of the Open Society Foundations and son of George Soros, the OSF is not leaving the EU but plans to reduce its staff and shift part of its focus outside the EU countries by limiting some of its activities in the union from 2024.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok (archived here) published by @user9468715254096 on September 11, 2023.
The title in Bulgarian above the photo reads:
Billionaire George Soros's Open Society Foundations withdraws from the EU
The Bulgarian text overlay reads:
Aww, what will happen to all those who benefited from the foundation's funding?
(Translations from Bulgarian to English by Lead Stories staff).
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Sep 21 05:18:05 2023 UTC)
The TikTok claim is taken from a Bulgarian online news article from August 15, 2023, referring to content published by Reuters on the same date. The headline in the Bulgarian media can be misleading as it leaves the reader with the impression that the foundation is withdrawing entirely from the EU, which is not the case. The Bulgarian article above does not claim that the OSF is withdrawing completely. Also, the cited Reuters article's headline is:
Soros Foundation to limit EU funding in new strategy - internal email.
Although OSF plans to reduce some of its European activities, the foundation does not intend to withdraw from the EU. In an August 31, 2023, op-ed piece published in Politico, the chairman of the OSF, Alexander Soros, author of the text, says:
News reports that the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Soros are 'leaving Europe' are misleading. We are not leaving. Europe remains of huge strategic importance to the work of OSF.
According to an article from The Associated Press dated September 6, 2023, as part of this transformation and shift of the foundation's focus to new priorities, the OSF is granting more than $100 million to establish a new Roma organization in Europe that will be independent of Open Society Foundations. According to Alexander Soros, the activities of the new Roma Foundation will not only help the Roma community and Roma organizations in Europe, but all of Europe will benefit from it.
Moreover, Soros's OSF intends to redirect more of its support to the countries of the Western Balkans, as well as countries such as Ukraine and Moldova.
