Péter Krekó is a social psychologist and political scientist. He is a senior affiliate and former director of of Political Capital, a policy research, analysis and consulting institute founded in 2001 in Budapest, Hungary. The institute has developed an extended network of professional partners domestically and internationally, and has become one of the most influential think tanks in Central and Eastern Europe.

Mr. Krekó is currently a Fulbright visiting professor at the Central Eurasian Studies Department of Indiana University in the United States. He is also associate professor of social and political psychology at Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences (ELTE) in Budapest. His main research interests focus on Russian soft power policies, political populism and extremism in Europe, the social psychology of conspiracy theories and political violence, and the politics of Central and Eastern Europe.

Mr. Krekó is also a member of the presidential board of the Hungarian Political Science Association. In addition, he is an expert member of European Commission’s Radicalization Awareness Network (RAN) Center of Excellence, where he was previously co-chair of RAN PREVENT, the working group on early interventions to prevent violent extremism. He is a member of the International Consortium on Closing Civic Space (iCon) project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He completed a master’s degree in psychology in 2004, another in political science in 2008, and a Ph.D. focusing on the social psychology of conspiracy theories in 2014, all at ELTE University, Budapest. He is a regular commentator in the international media, and a regular contributor to the Reconnecting Europe Series of Heinrich-Böll Stiftung European Union in Brussels, alongside numerous academic journals.