Hungarian government slams EU budget: “This proposal will die quickly”
The European Commission’s proposal for the European Union’s multiannual financial framework (MFF) budget is “unacceptable” not just to Hungary, but several other member states as well, in its current form, János Bóka, the EU affairs minister, said in Brussels on Friday.
Arriving at a meeting of the General Affairs Council, Bóka told reporters that he believed the proposal in its current form “will die within a short amount of time”, and EU institutions and member states will have to restart negotiations.
Bóka said though some figures from the draft budget were known, the details were still being analysed “because the devil is in the details.”
He said the draft’s “two clear winners” were Ukraine and the EC itself, arguing that preliminary calculations showed that some 20 percent of the budget would flow into Ukraine. “That means every fifth euro in the budget, directly or indirectly, will end up in Ukraine,” he said. Bóka said the EC was another winner, with a plan for more than 2,000 new hires for the purpose of speeding up Ukraine’s EU accession.
But the draft budget also proposes significant cuts to farm subsidies, “while the market would have to make way for the Ukrainian agriculture sector”, the minister said. Also, he noted, the EC planned to strengthen the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism, enabling the swift suspension of member states’ EU funds.
In response to a question, Bóka said he disagreed with the assessment that Hungary had been a major beneficiary of the current budget cycle. “Some of our funds have been suspended for clear political purposes, for blackmailing and pressuring. This is something that I cannot interpret as a positive,” he said.
Meanwhile, Bóka said that though “the numbers look big”, they were to be taken at current prices and did not factor in the impact of inflation. Also, because 10-12 percent of the budget would be spent on interest and loan repayments, “this money is not that big”, he added.
“But to me, the most important thing is whether member states can get access to these funds in a fair and objective manner, and whether these funds could be channelled to activities that actually contribute to solving the challenges the European Union is facing,” Bóka said. “I don’t see that in the current proposal.”
Bóka said Hungary was sticking to its position that the EC should “go back to the drawing board” on its budget plans.
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