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Facebook statement by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ahead of a meeting of EU heads of state and government

29 June 2023, Brussels

This is Brussels. Here in Brussels the prime ministers’ summit is about to begin. One question is on everyone’s minds: Where has the money gone? The Commission has tabled a proposal for a budget amendment, asking Member States to pay in another massive amount of hundreds of billions [in forints]. The following question arises: How did this situation come about? How could they have brought the European Union to the brink of bankruptcy? Here are the larger items. They want to ask for 50 billion euros from the Member States to give to Ukraine, when they can’t even account for the money that we’ve given them so far. They want a lot of money from the Member States to pay the interest on the European Union loans that they’ve taken out so far. To date Poland and Hungary haven’t seen a penny from these loans. This is frivolous behaviour, to put it mildly. They want us to give them more money for migration – not for border protection, but to bring in migrants. And of course they’ve not forgotten about themselves: they’re asking for billions of euros to increase the salaries of bureaucrats in Brussels. The Hungarian position is clear. First, we want to know how the money we’ve given them so far has been spent, and then we want an answer to the question of who’s responsible for bringing the European Union to the brink of bankruptcy.