EU affairs minister János Bóka told a conference on Monday that “the European Union is governed today under a bad structure by people unfit to do their jobs”.
Addressing an event focusing on the past 20 years of Hungary’s EU membership, Bóka said the root cause of “the EU’s failures of the past five years” was that the bloc was being governed by institutions in Brussels which the minister said, “consider themselves political institutions without exception”. “The European Parliament and the European Commission both operate as a political body to achieve their political goals which are independent of the political will of the individual member states,” he told the conference organized by the Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation to mark the accession anniversary. Those two institutions “use all of their resources to achieve their political goals”. And, as a result, political conflicts develop between the institutions and the member states, which Bóka said “has been coded in the system’s operation”. The measure of success for member states is that they are more successful together, in a union, than separately on their own, the minister said, adding that by contrast, in the approach of EU institutions, the measure of success was “increasingly strong federalisation “. “This is why if there is no change taking place [after the EP election], the member states will lose more of their powers over the next five years”.