State Secretary Zoltán Kovács said the process of resolving the matter of Hungary’s Erasmus education funding shows the European Commission’s disregard for the formal rules of discourse.
Speaking on the podcast Mandiner Reakció, Kovács said issues concerning the Erasmus funding had been cleared up “in under an hour” at recent talks between Tibor Navracsics, the minister in charge of European Union resources, and EU commissioners. “Our biggest problems with the behavior of the two EU institutions, the EC and the European Parliament, is that despite the existence of a dividing line in the Treaties between the competencies of member states and the competencies of institutions, attempts are made again and again to use elusive rule of law criteria to enter areas where they have no business at all,” he said. “Such areas include media and culture, and now higher education, while earlier it was healthcare and migration,” he added. Kovács said that legal steps must be taken if the situation is not resolved quickly. Those steps will be revealed “in the coming days or weeks”, he added.