BUCHAREST, Romania — Last winter, in the middle of anti-corruption demonstrations, a television broadcaster accused George Soros — the Hungarian-born, Jewish-American billionaire philanthropist — of paying dogs to protest. The protests in Bucharest, sparked by dead-of-night legislation aimed at decriminalizing corruption, were the largest the country had seen since the fall of communism in 1989. Romania TV — a channel associated with, if not officially owned by, the government — alleged the protesters were paid. “Adults were paid 100 lei [$24], children earned 50 lei [$12.30], and dogs were paid 30 lei [$7.20],” one broadcaster said. Some protesters responded by fitting their dogs with placards; others tucked money into their pets’ coats. One dog stood next to a sign reading, “Can anyone change 30 lei into euro?” Another dog wore one that read: “George Soros paid me to be here.” “The pro-government television, they lie all the time. In three sentences, they have five lies,” investigative journalist Andrei Astefanesei told Foreign Policy outside a gyro shop in Bucharest. “I told you about that lie, that Soros paid for dogs. ‘If you bring more dogs in the street, you get more money.’” He laughed. Romania TV was fined for its false claims about Soros. But the idea — that roughly half a million Romanians, and their dogs, came to the streets because Soros made them do it — struck a responsive chord. It’s similar to the idea that Soros is personally responsible for teaching students about LGBTQ rights in Romanian high schools; that Soros manipulated the teenagers who led this year’s anti-corruption protests in Slovakia; and that civil organizations and what’s left of the independent media in Hungary wouldn’t exist without Soros and his Open Society Foundations. The idea that the 87-year-old Soros is single-handedly stirring up discontent isn’t confined to the European side of the Atlantic; Soros conspiracies are a global phenomenon. In March, six U.S. senators signed a letter asking Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s staff to look into U.S. government funding going to Soros-backed organizations. “Our skepticism about Soros-funded groups undermining American priorities goes far beyond Eastern Europe,” said a spokesperson for Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who led the initiative, when asked if there was some specific piece of evidence of Soros-funded activity in Eastern Europe that prompted the letter or if concerns were more general. Soros has even been linked to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality. “Congrats to Colin Kaepernick for popularizing the hatred of America. Good work, bro,” Tomi Lahren, a conservative commentator, tweeted during the controversy. “Your buddy George Soros is so proud. #istand.” On Twitter, Soros has also been held responsible for the recent Catalan independence referendum and the mass shooting in Las Vegas. But one of the places in which suspicion of Soros is most obvious is Central and Eastern Europe. There, Soros is not unlike the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, except that while the fictional mirror shows what the viewer most desires, Soros reflects back onto a country what it most hates. In Romania, where the head of the ruling party said Soros wants to do evil, the billionaire is not to be trusted because he’s Hungarian. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has reportedly declared that Soros will be a main campaign theme in next year’s general election, he’s a traitor. And everywhere, he is Jewish, his very name a nod to the anti-Semitism that runs deep throughout the region. Now, Soros’s effectiveness as a bogeyman for conservative governments will be put to the test, literally. This week, Hungary is holding a “national consultation,” essentially a referendum designed to condemn Soros and his views on immigration. The government-funded questionnaire will be open to the country’s adult citizens and is meant to solicit their views on the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor. “George Soros has bought people and organizations, and Brussels is under his influence,” Orban said in a radio interview Friday in the run-up to the consultation. “They want to demolish the fence, allow millions of immigrants into Europe, then distribute them using a mandatory mechanism — and they want to punish those who do not comply.” Soros declined an interview for this article, but a spokesperson for the Open Society Foundations, the main conduit for Soros’s philanthropic efforts, chalked up the backlash to his outspokenness. “He’s a man who stands up for his beliefs,” Laura Silber, a spokeswoman for the foundation, told FP. “That’s threatening when you’re speaking out against autocrats and corruption.” Blame and hatred of Soros are, to borrow from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a specter haunting Central and Eastern Europe. But how did an 87-year-old billionaire thousands of miles away become the region’s most famous ghost?

A man and his dog in Bucharest protest against corruption in February. (Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty Images)

Soros started his philanthropy not in Central and Eastern Europe but in apartheid-era South Africa in 1979. There, he gave scholarships to black South Africans to attend the University of Cape Town. Five years later, in 1984, he began the first Open Society in Europe in Hungary.

The name of the foundation was inspired by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Soros encountered Popper as a student at the London School of Economics decades before and was evidently so taken with the philosopher’s ideology that he named his organization after it.

Soros established a network of Open Society organizations across Central and Eastern Europe in part because he was worried about an intellectual exodus, according to Jan Orlovsky, the head of Slovakia’s Open Society, who spoke to FP in his office in Bratislava’s Old Town. Soros wanted the region to be a place where people could see themselves staying — and staying within liberal democratic societies. “’I don’t want people to feel like they need to leave,’” Orlovsky said of Soros’s thinking.

In some cases, paying for that taste of liberal democracy did take on a political flavor. In Slovakia, NGOs backed by Open Society ran the 1998 “Rock the Vote” campaign that encouraged voter turnout and ousted Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, who critics say had allowed the country to become a mafia state.

Paul Stubbs, a British academic based in Croatia, said one criticism of Soros from this time was that the philanthropist wanted to be a regional political player but that he achieved this by giving tremendous money to local elites. “The kinds of figures that he’s supported who have tended to run the local Open Society Foundations … were given an awful lot of autonomy” in the mid- to late 1990s, Stubbs said.

In the ’90s, the idea that Open Society and Soros held some political influence, albeit indirectly, was not strictly a figment of rulers’ imagination. Those given funding were local elites, sometimes opposed to those in power, and often what Stubbs, borrowing from the U.S. anthropologist Janine Wedel, calls “flex actors” — people who can say the right things to whomever they’re speaking if it means they get more power and influence.

However, Soros’s money also helped expose people to Western ideas, which weren’t always accepted back home. Roxana Marin, a high school teacher and Roma and LGBTQ rights activist, was personally backed by Soros in the 1990s, when she went on a one-month trip to Scotland on a Soros grant. Soros and his money were everywhere at that time. “Soros is actually an iconic name,” she said.

But it’s iconic to different people for different reasons. For those who went on a “Soros grant,” he was an icon because he let them get out of the country for the first time, sometimes with more money than they’d ever had before, and learn ideas they’d never encountered. But for those who didn’t, he was a mythical figure of Hungarian origin (in Romania, a nefarious thing) with incredible amounts of money responsible for the introduction of foreign ideas. He was not to be trusted.

Marin was only in Scotland for one month, around age 25, with more money from the grant than she’d ever had before. “It changed my outlook on teaching and society and crap. And it was the first time I ever left Romania,” she said. Which was true for a lot of people in the ’90s. “Everybody [who was on such a grant] goes, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember my Soros grant, my Soros trip.’”

Yet at least in his home country, Soros in the 1990s was popular. Soros was celebrated in Hungary, where he set up the Central European University, funded NGOs, and gave out student grants, including one that, in the 1980s, sent a young man named Viktor Orban to Oxford University.