‘Hungary has submitted the draft contract modifications to the European Commission, and we received the green light from them yesterday,’ Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó announced.
State Secretary for European Affairs János Bóka is confident that about one-third, €13 billion, of the withheld EU funds will be received by Hungary by 2027. The London-based Financial Times, in a piece covering the contentious negotiations, seems to agree with his assertion.
The European Peace Facility was posed to transfer €500 million to Ukraine for artillery round purchases, but the aid was blocked by the Hungarian government. The official explanation for the move is that Budapest would like to see the off-budget EU fund focus on more than just Ukraine, but some believe the blacklisting of OTP Bank may be behind it.
How could Hungarians celebrate the EU, when it is seen as a threat to their ideals, God, nation, and family?
The fate of a sum of 13.2 billion EUR is at stake in the political and legal debate between the European Commission and the government of Hungary. Parts of the regular EU cohesion and post-COVID recovery funds are being withheld, as the Commission has issues with the state of the rule of law in Hungary. The new law, to enter into force on 1 July, aims to resolve the deadlock.
Four Central European countries, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, have announced bans on foodstuff imports coming from Ukraine. Meanwhile, Romania has joined them in demanding action from the EU to address these concerns. The five countries are estimated to have lost 417 million EUR combined due to cheap Ukrainian food imports.
‘But anyways, a changing of the guard is coming. And that means that Ursula von der Leyen—by the way, nominated, if not created, by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel—, just like Jens Stoltenberg, has to look for a new job. Pony riding is obviously no option for her any more. She is a political animal, a political wolf maybe. Too bad that there are technical and political obstacles.’
‘We cannot look at the European Union as those who must be listened to and must always have the best solutions in a suitcase to Bucharest or Warsaw,’ Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki stressed in Bucharest.
From the perspective of Europe, the Hungarians’ conversion to Christianity was by no means an unbroken continuation of their raids—the Hungarian people was still considered suspicious, barbaric, and prone to paganism for a long time.
‘Normally, a member state’s disputes with Brussels about compliance with the EU regulations should not affect its NATO membership at all. What’s more, the European Union is not a ‘top-down organisation’, where one must comply with orders coming from the Brussels headquarters. Sanctions are decided by the European Council, consisting of the leaders of EU member states…There is no such thing as a single EU interest.’
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.
