PM Orbán and FM Szijjártó afraid that Hungarians will “pay the price” of EU supporting Ukraine
The European Commission’s president is waging a “frontal attack” on Hungary and central Europe by trying to ban Hungary from buying cheap Russian gas and oil, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Thursday.
Orbán’s concerns
The EC proposal would “bankrupt Europe” and put an “unbearable burden” on families, Orbán said in a video statement uploaded to Facebook. Gas supplies “are an economic issue, not a political one”, he said, adding that Hungarian households would end up paying twice or 2.5 times the current price overnight.
“This is the Brussels surcharge,” he said, adding that his Slovak counterpart, Robert Fico, had also taken a stand against the EC plan. Orbán said Hungarian families should not have to pay the price of Ukraine’s EU accession. The video contains a caption about the VOKS 2025 Hungarian referendum on the latter issue.
Szijjártó’s concerns
Brussels wants to send even more weapons and money to Ukraine “but we will not allow them to make Hungarians pay the price for senseless support for Ukraine”, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in Warsaw on Thursday.
During a break in the informal meeting of the EU foreign affairs council, Szijjártó said “a pro-war atmosphere” had been prevalent among his colleagues, who argued that more money and weapons should be sent to Ukraine. He said Hungarian voters would pay the price.
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“The Hungarian government will make every effort to prevent this. Our position is that the focus should be on peacemaking and to exit this war instead of ploughing further in. And people’s money should not be poured into a bottomless pit,” a ministry statement quoted Szijjártó as saying.
He said the current Polish presidency of the EU had proposed establishing a new financial instrument to fund the armament of Ukraine. “Hungary does not support any initiative that aims to send even more money and weapons to Ukraine, especially when the bill must be paid by us, Hungarians, he said.
He added that neither would the government support the proposal for EU staff to train Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine because this “crosses a red line” and would present a serious risk of escalation. “Nor do we support financing Ukraine’s defence industry from European monies. European taxpayers should support the European economy … instead of developing Ukraine’s defence industry,” he said.
Szijjártó criticised plans by Brussels to allocate a separate chapter of several hundred billion euros to finance Ukraine in the EU’s next seven-year budget, despite the fact that the country is not yet a member of the bloc. “And they are obviously trying to prevent Hungary and the Hungarian people from participating in decision-making and preventing such a decision,” he added.
“Now the great champions of democracy, those who call to account others in Brussels, are destroying Europe’s democracy by trying to find a workaround in matters where EU rules stipulate unanimity,” he added.
He said EU-US relations had also been on the meeting’s agenda, and added that a “ridiculous stream of complaints” had been heard about how Washington interfered in the domestic affairs of various countries. “I consider these ridiculous because it was actually President Donald Trump who put an end to the US government using US financial resources in various parts of the world to harshly interfere in domestic political developments,” he said.
He welcomed the stop in the flow of USAID money used to “interfere” in Hungary’s domestic affairs “on political and ideological basis”, and added that nobody in Brussels had objected to the several tens of millions of dollars received by the Hungarian opposition before the 2022 election from the US, and former US Ambassador David Pressman “bad-mouthing the government on a daily basis”.
“Nobody complained about interference in domestic political matters when Manfred Weber made it clear that his wish was for a Tisza Party puppet government to be formed in Hungary,” he added.
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