Péter Krekó

Dr. Péter Krekó is a political psychologist. He is the director of Political Capital and Associate Professor at ELTE University in Budapest. He is affiliated with two policy institutes in Washington DC, as a Reagan-Fascell Fellows at the National Endowment for Democracy and a Senior Fellow at the Central for European Policy Analysis. Before that, he was a Europe’s Futures Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Erste Foundation, and a non-resident Associate Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Institute of Policy Research. During 2016-2017, Péter worked as a Fulbright Visiting Professor in the United States at the Central Eurasian Studies Department of Indiana University. The main focus of his interest is the political psychology and institutional background of disinformation, political tribalism and authoritarian influence. He defended his thesis on the social psychology of conspiracy theories at the ELTE University in 2014, and did his habilitation in 2020. He was the co-chair of the PREVENT working group at the EU Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) between 2013 and 2016. He is the author of two books. The first is entitled The Hungarian Far Right, which was co-authored by Attila Juhász. The book was published by Ibidem Verlag in 2017 and it is being distributed by the Columbia University Press. His second book on fake news and conspiracy theories was published in Hungarian in 2018, becoming a social science best-seller, currently under re-print. He is a regular commentator in the leading international media, and published pieces, among others, in Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, Newsweek, and Guardian. He is the owner of Political Capital Institute.