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State Secretary: Hungary not the cause of EU budget veto

The veto of the European Union budget and recovery fund was not caused by Hungary but by those who created the conditions leading to it.

 

Zoltán Kovács, State Secretary for International Communications, said the veto of the European Union budget and recovery fund was not caused by Hungary but by those who created the conditions leading to it.

The state secretary said Budapest and Warsaw used their veto, saying new rules making the receipt of EU funding contingent on upholding the rule of law breached the EU’s founding treaty as well as a deal in July not to tie funding to “political conditions”.

Kovács said Prime Minister Viktor Orbán approved the July agreement with “a mandate” from the Hungarian parliament. “The European Parliament and current EU president Germany have overturned that July agreement,” he said, adding that introducing any sort of new mechanism would require an amendment to the EU’s founding treaty.

Kovács said the EU’s current institutional framework guaranteed the proper use of funding by member states, and linking payment to “ideological conditions” was unnecessary. “So what we’re seeing is none other than a political whip being used to punish those who refuse to fall in line,” he said.

PM Orbán has said that tying the EU’s budget and the recovery package to conditions where “the nature of the alleged law violation is not precisely defined” put trust between member states at risk.