"We identified issues that might be breaching [the rule of law] in Hungary and affect the EU budget," said Vera Jourova, the Vice-President for Values and Transparency.Continue reading
Hungary’s government has received from Brussels the letter activating the so-called conditionality mechanism linking European Union funding to the rule of law, the prime minister’s chief of staff said on Wednesday.
The government will review the letter and give a detailed opinion on it at Thursday’s regular press briefing, Gergely Gulyás said in a video on Facebook.
All the government can say for now is that Hungarian voters made a clear decision in the April 3 general election, Gulyás said.
The people made it clear that Hungary needed to stay out of the war in Ukraine, that Hungarians should not be made to pay the price of war and that protecting children from “any form of sexual propaganda” is a priority, he said.
“These issues are red lines for the government on which it can make no concessions,” Gulyás said.
He added that at Thursday’s briefing the government will give a detailed opinion on issues it is willing to compromise on.
Earlier on Wednesday, the European Commission said it had authorised Johannes Hahn, the Commissioner for Budget and Administration, to send a notification letter to Hungary, activating the mechanism linking EU funding to the rule of law.
Contrary to what Gulyás said, the European Commission has concerns about public procurement, the implementation of European budgets, audits, monitoring, clearance of accounts, transparency, fraud prevention, and corruption, but other breaches have also been identified, which aggravate the situation. The latter relates to investigations, i.e. the detection of irregularities.
If the EU’s charges of corruption against Hungary were true, the country’s economic growth would not have been continuous for several years, a European lawmaker of ruling Fidesz said in a roundtable discussion on French television on Wednesday.
Corruption charges against Hungary are yet another example of Brussels using an important issue such as graft and an important ideal such as the rule of law to blackmail a conservative, Christian Democratic government, Balázs Hidvéghi said in the La faute a l’Europe? programme.
Hungary, similarly to France, prosecutes 67 percent of cases forwarded to it by the European Union’s anti-fraud office OLAF compared with the EU average of 37 percent, Hidvéghi said, noting that the ratio in neighbouring Austria is 25 percent. “It goes to show that the EU has no solid point of reference to present when implying corruption”.
Brussels is unable to accept the sovereign decision of the Hungarian people which has been shown clearly by ruling Fidesz’s winning this year’s general election in a landslide for the fourth time in a row.
It shows the success of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s policy and a rejection of accusations and political pressure exerted by Brussels.
In the featured photo: PMO Head Gergely Gulyás. Photo by Gergely Botár/kormany.hu