The Hungarian government’s measures taken to tackle the health and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic have proved to be effective, the minister of foreign affairs and trade said on Monday.
Péter Szijjártó said that the government had “not taken the textbook approach; it wanted more than the EU’s vaccine purchases and it did not aim to compensate growing unemployment through providing benefits”.
Instead, the government launched a programme to promote investment and prevented mass unemployment through tying assistance for companies to job retention.
Szijjártó insisted that “if we had applied the leftist, textbook responses forced on us by Brussels, we would now have many thousands more deaths, many tens of thousands more infected, and many hundreds of thousands without jobs”.
Currently, Hungary is having the worst death rate in the world (in proportion to the population) and has become the country with the second-worst coronavirus mortality rate in the world after the Czech Republic if we look at it from the beginning of the pandemic.
Featured photo by Lajos Soós/MTI
