Category Archives: Hungary from abroad – how others evaluate us

Christian Democrats are currently not properly represented in European politics “so we are making efforts to have their voices heard”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said after talks with Matteo Salvini, the head of Italy’s right-wing ruling party Lega, and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Budapest on Thursday.

Orbán, who is also the head of ruling Fidesz, said that they had discussed the most important issues for their respective countries and concluded that there were no topics where a consensus could not be reached or where the interests of their nations conflicted.

Orbán said they had agreed to get involved in the debates about the future of Europe and prepare a programme to this effect in the next few weeks. “The debate will be a good opportunity to promote and strengthen our values in Europe,” he said.

Orbán said he had met Salvini and Morawiecki now because Fidesz decided to quit the European People’s Party (EPP) and they were planning a common future together, discussing the future of Europe.

Orbán cited Salvini as saying that they wanted a European renaissance and were working together for it to start.

He said there were many million European citizens left without proper and effective representation because the EPP had dedicated itself to cooperation with the European left in the long term.

Orbán said it was symbolic that their cooperation would be launched on Holy Thursday, with a meeting that represents the first stop of a long journey.

Much has been discussed about common values, such as the values of freedom, dignity, Christianity, family and national sovereignty, in addition to Euro-Atlantic commitment, Orbán said. He added that they all say no to a European empire run by Brussels, communism, illegal migration and anti-Semitism.

Orbán said they would next meet probably in Warsaw in May, depending on the pandemic situation.

He also said that they would not be taken in by provocation of any kind, having clear values and positions.

Orbán said they wanted to put an end to the “ridiculous political approach” which qualifies the right wing always as extremist and the left wing always as centrist.

He said they supported freedom, traditional European values, human dignity and more successful European policies.

Orbán described Morawiecki as Hungary’s most faithful friend and Salvini as a hero, for proving as a member of the Italian government that illegal migration could be stopped on sea.

He also said that the pandemic was currently the number one topic in all international meetings and he had also shared his experiences with his negotiating partners, all of them urging the European Commission to speed up vaccine procurements, which is a precondition for stopping the pandemic. Orbán said they wanted a more transparent and faster vaccination drive in Europe.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Matteo Salvini, the head of Italy’s right-wing ruling party Lega, argued in favour of Europe’s renewal and a renaissance of traditional European values after talks with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In a press statement, Morawiecki said they have trust in the future of Europe and the European Union and hold the firm conviction that they together would be able to build a road for Europe.

European integration can further develop but “for it to bear healthy fruits, its roots should not be neglected either,” the Polish premier said, stressing the need to return to Europe’s Christian roots.

Morawiecki said common targets included Euro-Atlantic cooperation and deepening European integration while respecting national sovereignty, individual freedoms and protecting traditional European values and Christianity.

He added that they believed Europe was “completely disintegrated” and damaged by various forces.

The Brussels elite views Europe as a project for elite groups, he said, adding that “we would like to represent a wide range of people”.

Salvini said they were working to help European nations get out of their darkest post-WWII period into a new era in which freedom, rights and family would once again get into the focus.

Salvini said that the EU had made a grave mistake when it rejected its Judeo-Christian roots in the basic treaty.

He added that they did not want European nations to stand against each other but to establish a common European force which can protect the continent’s borders.

Salvini said he believed European politics would not be the same after the coronavirus pandemic.

Salvini said “left-wing cultural groups” should not be allowed to single-handedly determine the future because culture, the family and health are nobody’s monopoly.

(2. 4. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)

Budapest, 2021. április 1.
Orbán Viktor miniszterelnök, a Fidesz elnöke (k), Matteo Salvini, az olasz jobboldali kormánypárt, a Liga vezetõje (j) és Mateusz Morawiecki lengyel miniszterelnök (b) a találkozójukat követõen tartott sajtótájékoztatón a Karmelita kolostorban 2021. április 1-jén. A találkozó napirendjén a Liga, a Mateusz Morawiecki vezette Jog és Igazságosság (PiS) és a Fidesz közötti európai szintû politikai szövetség szerepelt.
MTI/Koszticsák Szilárd

Fidesz “no longer wishes to maintain its membership in the European People’s Party,” according to a letter posted on Twitter on Thursday by the Hungarian ruling party’s deputy head, Katalin Novák.

The letter was signed by Fidesz’s international secretariat and addressed to the Secretary-General of the EPP, Antonio Lopez-Isturiz White.

Novák, who is also Hungary’s minister in charge of family affairs, commented on Twitter saying: “It’s time to say goodbye”.

Fidesz’s MEPs quit the EPP group in the European Parliament on March 3 after the group approved its new procedural rules.

Explaining the decision, Novák wrote that in 2015, in the midst of “the migration crisis”, the EPP pegged its future to supporting migration.

“Hungarians rejected this,” she said, and insisted they did not want to “become like countries in which the effects of mass immigration had become irreversible”.

Novák said that the EPP, instead of seeking solutions to EU vaccine procurement, had quietly changed its procedural rules in order to deprive democratically elected Fidesz members of their parliamentary rights.

It had become clear, she added, that on most issues the EPP represented “left-wing values that Fidesz cannot identify with”.

“Fidesz belongs to the democratic right in Europe,” she said, adding that it was necessary now to reform it.

(19. 3. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)

Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, expressed hope that the issue of dual citizenship would sometime in future be resolved in Slovakia, after talks in Révkomárom (Komarno) on Wednesday.

Szijjártó held talks with Béla Keszegh, the local mayor and board member of the Party of the Hungarian Community in Slovakia, and György Gyimesi, member of the Slovak National Council.

“The option of dual citizenship, it seems at the moment, is not ensured in Slovakia,” Szijjártó said after the meeting which also addressed the citizenship issue.

“Dual citizenship is a legal instrument that exists across Europe, an institution which should not be feared,” he said.

“We would like to discuss this issue with Slovakia, a strategic partner for Hungary, rationally and on the ground of mutual respect,” Szijjártó said, calling the neighbouring country’s Hungarian community an important link in bilateral ties. He called on Slovakia’s Hungarians to participate at the ongoing national census and declare their ethnicity.

Concerning the coronavirus epidemic, Szijjártó said that the Slovak government had asked for his help in putting their officials in contact with Russian and Chinese partners during talks on purchasing Covid-19 vaccines from those two countries.

He said the Hungarian government was also sending 27 ventillators to 13 hospitals in southern Slovakia where a large Hungarian community lives.

(4. 3. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a “samizdat” letter published on his website on Thursday, slammed the European People’s Party for “indulging itself in power games” while the rest of Europe fights “a life-and-death battle” against the coronavirus pandemic.

“While we here in Hungary — and other leaders in their own countries — are literally fighting a life-and-death battle against the coronavirus, the EPP is indulging itself in power games within the bubble of bureaucrats in Brussels,” the prime minister wrote. “This is unacceptable.”

Orbán noted that Fidesz’s MEPs have left the EPP’s European Parliamentary group, refusing to accept “that the rights of Members of the European Parliament — and thus the rights of Hungarian voters — be restricted by an amendment of the Group’s statutes”.

The prime minister said the departure of Fidesz’s MEPs from the EPP group also opened up a “new perspective” in European politics.

Orbán said Hungarians had “wanted to return the EPP — which is in continuous retreat, jettisoning its political values, as if from a sinking airship — to its former position as Europe’s leading intellectual and political force”. The aim, he said, had been to once again make the conservative grouping “a large, strong, democratic formation of the right, which could bring together centrist, conservative and traditional Christian democratic parties and their voters into a great shared political home”.

But Orbán said this opportunity “was lost” on Wednesday and the EPP had become “an annexe of the European left”, meaning that there was “no longer any difference” on key issues like migration, family values and national sovereignty between itself and the left wing.

“There is good reason for parties on the European left and their leaders to light bonfires in celebration: they have expanded their numbers with the addition of another party,” he added.

Now, he said, Fidesz’s task was to help build a new European democratic right wing “that offers a home to European citizens who do not want migrants, who do not want multiculturalism, who have not descended into LGBTQ lunacy, who defend Europe’s Christian traditions, who respect the sovereignty of nations, and who see their nations not as part of their past, but as part of their future”.

(4. 3. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)

Hungarian PM’s move ends one chapter, but saga is far from over.

Viktor Orbán’s relationship with his European Parliament family finally reached breaking point.

After years of tension and procrastination over their enfant terrible, many members of the European People’s Party (EPP) breathed a sigh of relief when the Hungarian prime minister on Wednesday jumped before he was pushed out of the EPP group in the Parliament.

Orbán announced that MEPs from his Fidesz party were quitting the center-right group — the largest bloc in the Parliament — soon after it approved a rule change that paved the way for them to be suspended from its ranks.

To the EPP’s critics, the separation was long overdue. They have accused the EPP of turning a blind eye for years while the Hungarian government rolled back democracy, human rights and the rule of law, Orbán regularly assailed EU institutions and Fidesz embraced far-right populism.

Fidesz angrily rejected those charges while EPP leaders argued for years that theirs was a broad alliance, and that it was better to try to keep Orbán’s troops inside the camp than have them move further to the right and attack from outside.

The question for both Orbán and the EPP now is whether the rupture benefits or damages them in the long term.

In the short term, both lose something. The EPP group is deprived of 12 MEPs (although one Fidesz member was already suspended). It remains comfortably the largest in the Parliament but the Fidesz departure comes on top of losses at the last European elections.

Fidesz, for its part, loses its place inside a large, influential and wealthy political force that has given it a platform to advance its interests on the European stage.

Publicly, EPP group leaders played down talk of victory and defeat. But they noted the rule change was overwhelmingly backed by the group’s MEPs — a statement that suggested Fidesz had become isolated.

“I am very happy that the EPP group is so united,” group leader Manfred Weber told reporters. “I don’t see winners and losers, and I even would say that I regret that we are losing colleagues in the EPP family.”

A total of 148 MEPs voted in favor of the new rules, while just 28 voted against. Orbán responded quickly with a letter, saying that his group would leave the EPP because the vote was “clearly a hostile move against Fidesz and our voters.”

Tensions between Fidesz and other, more centrist, members of the EPP have been simmering for years. Fidesz has been suspended from membership of the EPP party alliance since March 2019. But its MEPs remained part of the EPP group in the European Parliament, despite moves by some to kick them out.

However, many EPP lawmakers, even some previously in favor of keeping Fidesz MEPs in their ranks, eventually grew tired of what they saw as repeated attacks on both the EPP’s values and its leaders.

The pivotal players in Wednesday’s drama were Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU) — the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — and their Bavarian CSU allies, who had long been reluctant to act against Fidesz but backed the rule change.

Weber said on Wednesday it was “clear” that Fidesz had moved away from the values of the EPP’s founding fathers, including former German Christian Democratic Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl.

“They moved away from the EPP, we did not,” Weber declared.

Fidesz faces choice
It remains to be seen whether others are tempted to move away from the EPP too. Several Parliament officials suggested that MEPs who voted against the new rules on Wednesday could follow in Orbán’s footsteps.

Among the dissenters were members of the Slovenian Democratic Party of Prime Minister Janez Janša and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party. They and other malconents would, however, have to weigh up the loss of clout that would come from leaving the EPP group, even if they feel an affinity with Fidesz.

The next chapter in this political family drama will likely come if Fidesz is expelled from the EPP party umbrella. Or if, once again, Fidesz decides to walk out before the EPP can make such a move.

Fidesz MEP Tamás Deutsch said that while there is a possibility that the party will remain inside the EPP, the course of events points “in the opposition direction.”

Nevertheless, he also noted that new CDU leader Armin Laschet’s comments on Fidesz are “very different in tone” from those of the EPP’s leadership. Laschet has so far avoided saying whether he favors excluding Fidesz from the EPP.

The European Parliament has been rife with talk that Fidesz has been discussing alliances with groups that are critical of the EU, including the European Conservatives and Reformists and the far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group.

Jörg Meuthen, a leader of the Alternative for Germany party and leading member of the ID group, said it was clear Orbán and his party belonged in their ranks.

“That is apparent in questions such as migration, identity and national sovereignty,” Meuthen said in a statement. “Fidesz was always the conservative fig leaf of a fake-conservative EPP.”

But Balázs Hidvégi, a Fidesz MEP who acts as the party’s spokesperson in the Parliament, said it was too early to talk about what would happen in the future.

“Fidesz is and has been a dedicated pro-European party,” he said. “We are not Euroskeptic, we are not critical of Europe, but of the Brussels bureaucracy.”

EPP ‘moderation’
For the EPP, Wednesday’s move offered leaders the chance to claim that they had brought ideological clarity to the group, after years of trying to bridge the gap between Europhile centrists and others who felt closer to the nationalist, anti-migration line of Orbán.

During an EPP debate prior to the vote on Wednesday, Esteban González Pons, an EPP vice president who oversaw his group’s work on the new membership rules, warned MEPs that the adoption of the rules “preserved the unity” of the group. He said if MEPs did not adopt them “it would have been the end of the EPP,” according to one participant to the meeting.

González Pons told reporters later in the day that with the new rules, the group had chosen “moderation instead of radicalism,” and “compromise instead of intolerance.”

But the EPP’s opponents did not give the party much credit. They accused the EPP of having been much too lenient for too long in the face of increasingly autocratic tendencies from Orbán.

“It is regrettable the EPP have harboured the slide to authoritarianism in Hungary for so long,” Dacian Cioloş, leader of the centrist Renew Europe group in the Parliament said in a statement. “Under Orbán, Fidesz has eroded democracy in Hungary and vandalised European values …There is no space for the toxic populism of Fidesz in mainstream European politics.”

Iratxe Garcia, the leader of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group, said Fidesz “should have been kicked out years ago.”

“Instead, the EPP Group sat by and watched while Orbán’s anti-democratic government attacked European citizens’ freedoms again and again,” Garcia added.

(3. 3. 2021 via politico.eu)

The EPP is about to change its rules of procedure allowing the party family to penalize an entire member party, rather than just a single MEP. The new rules would enable the party family to exclude the whole Fidesz faction by a simple majority. In reaction, Fidesz MEP László Trócsányi has already threatened to turn to EU’s Court of Justice. Also, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán issued an ultimatum to pull his party from the EPP should the new rules be put to vote.

Last Friday, EPP group leaders agreed to new suspension rules allowing the group to exclude or suspend an entire member party rather than just a single MEP, leftist daily Népszava reported.

Although the final draft is still a work in progress, the rules are expected to be approved by the required two-thirds majority at a group meeting on Wednesday.

If approved, the exclusion will no longer require a simple but a two-thirds majority instead, except if it is about a member of a party that has already been expelled or suspended.

This also means a simple majority in the EPP would be enough to expel Fidesz MEPs.

Several officials and MEPs already said they are confident that the group will vote to suspend the 11-strong Fidesz faction, Politico reports.

The move to change the suspension rules comes after the EPP sanctioned then Fidesz EP group leader Tamás Deutsch for his harsh critical statement in which he compared comments made on the rule of law criteria by Parliament group leader Manfred Weber to the slogans of the Gestapo and Hungary’s communist-era political police.

As a quick response, Fidesz MEP László Trócsányi threatened to take the EPP group to the Court of Justice of the EU should the planned changes to the rules of procedures be accepted.

Trócsányi said the group would be disrespecting the rule of law if it introduced what he called mechanisms to “punish Fidesz” for its past actions.

PM Orbán threatening to leave the European People’s Party

On Sunday, in reaction to the suspension rule changes, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sent a letter to Manfred Weber, the head of the EPP, slamming the European People’s Party for “seeing the review of internal regulations as their most pressing task during a pandemic.”

Fidesz will leave the EPP if the party group votes in favor of the changes accepted by the leadership on Friday, Orbán wrote in the letter.

According to Orbán, the accepted proposal would “facilitate excluding our MEPs from the party family.”

In the letter, Orbán said the EPP had been suffering from a “leadership and political crisis for a long time.” Fidesz proposed “a return to the heritage of [EPP founder and former head] Wilfried Martens,” who Orbán said, successfully united right and center-right parties of various ideological and geographical backgrounds, and brought Christian right-wing parties of post-communist states into the party family.

Since 2019, the party kept promising “deep internal discussions” about the party’s future, Orbán said.

He noted his December 6th letter to Weber where he proposed a new, looser type of cooperation, but “The promises have not been kept, and my letter has not been answered.”

Instead, the EPP tabled a motion to rewrite internal regulations “with record speed and a view of easing the exclusion of our MEPs, or if this proposal didn’t get the necessary majority, they would cobble together a legally questionable way to exclude our elected representatives from the party family,” Orbán said.

“The message is clear and easy to comprehend. If Fidesz is not welcome, we do not insist on remaining members of the party group.”

Orbán noted that the coronavirus pandemic has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Europeans and the third wave was hitting the bloc, “taking a terrible toll in human lives and causing unprecedented economic damage.” Such times call for cooperation, joint action, tolerance, and patience, he said, adding that “It is hard to understand and accept” that Weber and the EPP group find the review of long-standing regulations their most pressing task.

Additionally, retroactively changing regulations or imposing sanctions is, “in our interpretation,” contrary to the rule of law, Orbán said. He said the recent amendments were “tailor-made to punish Fidesz.” “Since you could not collect enough votes to punish us, now you are trying to change the rules and expand them to an ongoing procedure,” he said.

As Fidesz’s leader, Orbán said he had the duty to ensure full representation of their voters. Therefore, he said he could not accept the curbing of MEP’s rights necessary to fulfill their duties, as such a step would be “profoundly anti-democratic.”

Fidesz MEPs have been elected by over 1.8 million Hungarians or 52 percent of the votes, Orbán reminded Weber. They are the strongest delegation in the EPP in that regard. “Sidelining our MEPs would be equivalent to ignoring nearly two million Hungarian voters and would further weaken our political family,” the president of Fidesz said.

Should the EPP vote in favor of the regulations accepted by the leadership and the heads of national delegations on Friday, Fidesz will leave the EPP, Orbán said.

Fidesz’s membership has been suspended in the EPP since 2019 following a joint proposal from the European People’s Party Presidency and Fidesz. Since then there have been ongoing debates about the situation of Fidesz in the party family.

(1. 3. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)

Ruling Fidesz MEPs have turned to Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, concerning Ukraine’s enactment of measures that they say hurt the country’s ethnic Hungarian community and other “offences” committed against them.

The Fidesz-Christian Democrat MEP group said in a statement on Thursday that, alongside ethnic Hungarian MEPs, they have sent a written query to Borrell calling attention to the “systemic infringement of the rights of Transcarpathian Hungarians”.

In the query, the MEPs noted instances of hate speech in Ukrainian media against the Hungarian community, their intimidation by paramilitary groups, the arson attack on the headquarters of the Hungarian Cultural Federation in Transcarpathia (KMKSZ) in 2018, and a series of raids by the Ukrainian authorities of the premises of ethnic Hungarian institutions last year.

The MEPs said Borrel expressed concern over the treatment of ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine in a letter of response.

The European Union continues to defend the rights of national minorities, Fidesz cited Borrell as saying, adding that he called on Ukraine to respect minority rights.

The EU calls on Ukraine to work closely with Hungary on finding a joint solution to the situation that is based on European values and principles and in line with its international obligations and commitments, they cited Borrell as saying.

Fidesz welcomed Borrell’s response, saying it was “encouraging” that the EU’s top diplomat was committed to the principle of protecting minority rights. Fidesz however expects the offences committed against Transcarpathian Hungarians to be addressed through specific steps and for Ukraine to be held accountable for the commitments it made in its association agreement with the EU, they added.

(12. 2. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán emphasized the importance of procuring Covid-19 vaccines as quickly as possible after talks with his Czech counterpart Andrej Babis in Budapest on Friday.

“Those who act quickly will save lives while those who are slow will lose lives,” Orbán told a joint press conference. The prime minister said it was therefore a mistake to wait for Brussels and its “slow” procurement of vaccines.

“We want to learn from each other about how we can speed up vaccine procurement,” the prime minister said after discussing with Babis Hungary’s experiences in purchasing the Russian and Chinese vaccines.

Orbán noted that the Russian and Chinese vaccines were in wide use in Serbia, adding that he and Babis had also shared with one another their information from that country’s experiences with those jabs.

In response to a question, the prime minister said the important thing now was to procure the vaccines against Covid-19, adding that now was not the time to discuss whether things could have been handled better, quicker or differently in the European Union. “It’s not worth politicising either the issue of the vaccine or the response measures,” Orbán said.

Asked about the Russian vaccine, the prime minister said “time will take care of” the lack of public trust in the jab.

He added that as of right now the number of people registered for vaccination in Hungary as well as the country’s vaccination capacities exceeded the available contingent of vaccines.

“We’re working every day to obtain more and more vaccine doses that meet the Hungarian safety requirements, regardless of where they come from,” the prime minister said.

He said Hungarians were remarkably disciplined in terms of adhering to coronavirus-related restrictions in a European comparison, which he said could be related to the government’s decision to conduct a public survey asking the public’s opinion about the lockdown measures.

“This is how it’s going to be in connection with the reopening of the country, too,” he said. Hungarians will again be asked to take part in a nationwide survey running from mid-February until early March. They will be asked, among other questions, whether they believe the country should be reopened gradually or in one go and whether it should cover everyone or just a certain segment of society, Orbán said.

The prime minister added that unlike his Czech colleague, he had the advantage of not having to lead a coalition government, which he said made decision-making smoother.

Orbán said he had also briefed Babis on Hungary’s action plan to reopen the economy.

The prime minister also said that the economies of the Visegrad Group countries were poised to emerge significantly stronger from the coronavirus crisis and “make even bigger gains in the deficit handed to us by history”.

Concerning the Czech Republic, Orbán said it was well known that Babis “was Europe’s best finance minister”. He said their two countries’ good relations were also important for the 15,000 Hungarians living in the Czech Republic.

Orbán noted that the Czech Republic had the lowest jobless rate in Europe, followed by Germany and Hungary in third place.

He also praised the country’s demographic situation, noting that unlike the Hungarian, the Czech population had increased by more than 500,000 over the last 20-30 years.

Coronavirus – Babis: Vaccine not political issue
The issue of coronavirus vaccines is not a political one but one of safety, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said after talks with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Budapest, adding that it was therefore wrong to politicise a vaccine’s country of origin.

The best vaccine against Covid-19 is one that is safe and available immediately, Babis told a joint press conference, noting however that the Czech Republic does not have at the moment the required contingent of Covid vaccines either.

He said he had received a detailed briefing on Hungary’s virus response measures, including the country’s authorisation of vaccines that have not yet been approved by the European Union. He added that the Czech Republic would follow the example of Hungary with regard to these jabs.

Babis said that they were also briefed about the Hungarian medical officer authority’s pandemic response measures and the use of various therapies.

He said he should have visited Hungary as early as last November, to learn useful information from Hungarian experts as he had learned today.

The Czech prime minister thanked Hungary for offering to his country 150 ventilators.

Answering a question, he noted that although the EU had collectively ordered 2.3 billion doses of vaccines paying 3 billion dollars in advance, deliveries were still sluggish.

“This is why we must act, we don’t have time to wait,” Babis said.

(5. 2. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)

Hungary and Poland continue to oppose “EU-sponsored migrant settlement quotas” because they believe repeated waves of migration pose a health risk in Europe, Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, said in Warsaw on Thursday.

The European Union faces two challenges, he said, referring to “the extremely slow acquisition of vaccines” and “the health risk implied by imminent waves of migration”, he told MTI after a one-day visit to Poland.

Szijjártó slammed “efforts in the EU to impose mandatory migrant quotas on member states”.

“Allowing hundreds of thousand non-vaccinated people to enter Europe would give a fresh impetus to the pandemic”, he said. Meanwhile, he added, vaccine deliveries to Europe “are much slower than expected”.

Szijjártó noted that the European Commission had recently agreed with 79 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to facilitate the inflow of migrants into Europe from those countries.

Szijjártó said he had agreed with Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski “on thwarting and vetoing to the greatest possible extent” the EU’s related efforts.

The minister and his Polish partners agreed on “preventing their countries and central Europe as a whole from adopting the new type of migrant settlement quota and allowing new waves of migration.”

They also agreed to keep one another updated about delays in vaccine deliveries.

Emphasising the importance of putting and end to the coronavirus epidemic and lifting the restrictions that cause huge losses to both economies, the minister pledged to intensify international talks on accelerating vaccine deliveries to Hungary.

Szijjártó noted that Poland is Hungary’s fourth biggest trading partner and the tenth major destination of Hungarian capital investment, with pharma Richter, oil and gas company MOL and construction firm Cordia playing an increasing role in the Polish economy.

Szijjártó also met counterpart Zbigniew Rau in Warsaw and held talks with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economic Development Jarosław Gowin. At the latter meeting, the sides “welcomed that their respective countries’ persistent position regarding the EU seven-year budget framework and the so-called rule of law mechanism proved to be successful,” Szijjártó said on Facebook. He added that the two countries set up a economic mixed chamber last year.

(29. 1. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)

Hungary expects the Portuguese presidency of the European Union to act as “fair mediators, to execute the financial agreement, and not to give in [to] the trickers of the rule of law mechanism”, Justice Minister Judit Varga said on Facebook on Saturday.

Varga, who also published her interview with pro-government daily Magyar Hírlap, said the economic policy ensuring wage growth should remain within the competence of member states as different “recipes” are needed in the individual economic situations of each member state.

The justice minister, who also published her post in English, asked the Portuguese presidency to be open to the different approaches of nation states to migration. “Instead of more Europe, let’s focus on building a smart Europe,” Varga said.

(23. 1. 2021 via hungarytoday.hu)