Zsolt Törőcsik: This week the European Commission presented its plan for the seven-year budget for the period starting in 2028, which includes significant structural changes compared to the current budget. Yesterday Viktor Orbán said that the document is in fact a Ukrainian budget and is unacceptable for Hungary. One of the questions I’ll be asking Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is why. Good morning.
Good morning.
Let’s look at some aspects in turn. The draft says that 100 billion euros will be earmarked for Ukraine, which is 5 per cent of the total budget. At the same time, you and several members of the Government have said that the amount allotted to Ukraine will be 20 per cent. What’s the reason for this very significant difference between the two calculations?
You see, budgeting is a great science, in which you have to be able to read not only what’s written in a document, but also what’s hidden behind the lines. And independently of one another, different groups of experts – not only in Hungary but also outside – have identified the hidden items that are assigned to the sphere of the Commission’s individual decisions. They’ve added them up, and according to some groups of experts this could transfer 20 per cent of the total budget to Ukraine, while other experts say it could transfer 25 per cent. I can say with a great deal of confidence – not based on my own knowledge, but on the knowledge of experts, and with a great deal of confidence – that at least 20 per cent of this budget is destined for Ukraine: at least 20 per cent of Europeans’ money, including 20 per cent of Hungarians’ money, would go to Ukraine.
At the same time, the whole “cake” will be bigger, because the total amount of the budget would increase from 1.2 trillion euros to 2 trillion euros. If Ukraine gets more, why wouldn’t it be possible for other goals to also receive more, or can we assume they’d receive more?
If we look only at the financial aspects, we need to understand that over and above the 20–25 per cent allocated to Ukraine, 10–12 per cent of this budget will go towards repaying the interest on loans that we’ve jointly taken out in the past. We’re opposed to this practice. We don’t believe that it’s good practice for the countries of the Union to take out collective loans, but this is a decision and an issue that can’t be prevented by Hungary alone – and so up to now this practice has continued. Now that there’s a new German government, they’re also starting to raise objections, and they don’t want to take out any more large loans that would lead to similarly high levels of debt. But what’s already happened has happened, so with the interest on previously taken loans, 10–12 percent is still being spent. When I add this up, something like 30, 32 or 35 per cent of this budget is going to items that weren’t in the previous budget. So it’s no use increasing the size of the budget by a few percent if 30 per cent of that budget – 30 per cent compared to the previous budget – is flowing out of this budget as if it didn’t exist. The people of Europe won’t be involved in this – apart from the fact that they’ll have to pay into it, and they won’t get anything back from it. This is why everyone in the European Union – depending on the various temperaments of the European nations – is thundering, complaining, grumbling and shouting.
Well, as you’ve mentioned the people, there are indeed trillions of euros flying around, and we’re talking about huge figures, but what would Hungarians – Hungarian families, Hungarian pensioners, for example – feel if this budget were to come into force, and if Brussels were also to ban imports of Russian energy from 2028?
The biggest problem with the budget – and this is something that usually happens not only with the EU budget but also with national budgets – is that there’s no clear strategic basis. So if we don’t know what the budget is for, then it can’t be a good budget; because the first question we have to answer is what we want to achieve with the budget. This is true for Hungary’s budget, but it’s also true for the Union’s common budget. This question hasn’t been clarified – or even if it has been clarified, it hasn’t been stated. So this budget has one obvious purpose: to admit Ukraine into the European Union and to allocate the necessary financial resources for this purpose – making this money available to Ukraine cunningly, covertly, and sometimes openly. But there’s been no decision on Ukraine’s membership of the European Union. And since there’s been no such decision, it’s not right to allocate money for this. Let’s distribute this money among the European countries that are already members of the EU and their citizens; and then, when Ukraine becomes a member of the European Union, we can talk about how to give them money. But that’s not going to happen in my lifetime, so it’s not in the foreseeable future. If, on the other hand, we don’t admit the Ukrainians into the EU, which I think would be right, then we’ll have to develop some other kind of relationship with them – not a membership relationship, but a cooperative relationship. This could also have budgetary implications, and then the financial basis for such cooperation would have to be laid down in this budget. So what I’m trying to say is that we don’t know from this budget how its authors – this Commission – envisage the future of the European economy. And it’s not only Ukraine that’s in a state of uncertainty, but money’s also being taken away from agriculture, for example. The question then arises as to whether money’s being taken away because the previous system is seen as wasteful, whether it’s being taken away because it’s to be used for other purposes, whether it’s being taken away because the European food and agricultural industry is no longer seen as a key sector – or for some other reason. And if it’s being taken away because their thinking about the future of European agriculture is different from what we’ve collectively thought so far, what is it that they think? If up to now millions of farmers in Europe have been living from agriculture and we’ve been supporting their work, then if we’re not going to support them in the future, what will happen to them? How will they make a living, how will they earn their livelihoods, where will they work? So you can’t just take a sharp knife, cut into the budget’s living flesh, and think “What will be will be” – because the patient will bleed to death. So this budget would ruin the European Union, and I don’t think that it will even make it past next year. Either the Commission will have to dramatically withdraw it, or it will have to retreat step by step and rewrite it. I can see from the reactions that the European countries simply won’t accept this budget from the Brussels bureaucracy.
The biggest outcry, at least so far, has been over the restructuring of agricultural subsidies: above a certain level, area-based support would virtually disappear. What effect do you think this would have on Hungarian farmers? Because the Commission argues that it would support young farmers, sustainability and competition.
The European Commission shouldn’t be arguing in any way, but should be saying: “We’re allocating this amount of money to agriculture and we’re going to get it to the farmers in the simplest possible way. This isn’t the case, it’s a terribly bureaucratic system, and we’re going to get it to the farmers in the simplest possible way.” This is what should be done. Now, by comparison, there’s all this hocus-pocus and Brussels jargon: pushing it here, pushing it there, merging it. I’ve drawn up a few budgets, and in opposition I’ve also seen budgets in Hungary in which there’s been something like this. When budgets contain such complicated, back-and-forth, over-and-under, left-and-right manoeuvres, you can tell that there’s some mischief in the background. And here again, the Commission has no vision for the future of European agriculture – and apparently, in order to give money to Ukraine, it’s cutting, trimming and diverting every possible previous item in order to reallocate it to Ukraine. Moreover, Ukraine’s membership is unacceptable in this budget because it’s like migration: once you let it in, you can’t put it out again. So this is why Hungary is proposing an incremental approach: of course we have to cooperate, because we’re talking about a neighbouring country of great importance and size. Therefore we have to cooperate with Ukraine – but not to let them in and give them the same rights that we have inside. For example, a country can’t be expelled from the EU. Few people know this, but it’s a treaty construction, so that once a country’s been admitted, you can pressure it, you can push it around, as they do to us sometimes, you can snap at its ankles and pull on its coattails, but you can’t kick it out. Now, if we take in a huge country – a country of huge size, within which we don’t know how many people live, but we’re talking about a country of tens of millions – we can’t eject it. And from then on its economic problems will become our economic problems. Then it won’t be about a beleaguered country outside the EU that we should help, but it will justifiably say, “My problem is also your problem, because we’re in the same economic area, so give us money.” And then there will be no getting around it, you’ll have to give it. The money will be going there for decades, and I think it will be going there with no hope of success; because the Ukrainian economy today isn’t in a state that can be modernised through membership and through the money that goes with it. It’s a long way from that: it’s not ready for membership.
How difficult will it be to change this current proposal, and what political forces are behind it in Brussels and here at home?
We’re at the beginning of a very high-stakes period – one that I don’t think the listeners can even imagine. So there are thousands of people looking through the pages of the draft, dividing, multiplying, underlining, underlining, overwriting, making notes in the margin and so on. And then these 27 countries will start talking to each other and to the Commission, and an extremely complex negotiating process will begin. This is all in the hope that we’ll be able to make changes to the budget that’s been put forward as a starting point that will be acceptable to all 27 Member States – because at the end of the day we have to reach a unanimous decision on this budget. I’ve seen many of these, this isn’t the first EU budget in my life, but the third; so I know the process, I know the maze, the jungle that we have to navigate through. We already know who we’ll be negotiating with, and I know roughly which countries our interests coincide with, which countries our interests conflict with, who we must reach an agreement with – and roughly how – in order to arrive at a budget that’s acceptable to Hungary. But there’s a bigger problem here: when I read this budget, I see it’s a budget of despair. So if you at least struggle through the executive summary, or wade all through it, you won’t see an optimistic, triumphant Union with clear plans and a promising future. Instead, you’ll see a Union in trouble, taking from here and there, trying to finance ill-conceived goals: a struggling, scrambling Union without a clear vision for its own development, more focused on stagnation and avoiding disintegration. This document’s ambition level is extremely low. We didn’t join the Union to have the kind of budgets that outline how to survive the next seven years, but to have ones setting clear objectives with the other EU countries that are ambitious, encouraging and promising for the Member States, and then to achieve those objectives together. There’s nothing like that in this budget.
We’ll see what happens with the budget. But what Hungary’s certainly asking Brussels for is that the EU adds to its human rights sanctions list three Ukrainian leaders responsible for forced conscription. The Hungarian government has requested this in connection with the case of József Sebestyén. What chance do you see of this Hungarian request being granted?
We’ve caused a surprise in Brussels. Our Foreign Minister was there the other day. They – I mean the Brusseleers – had heard the reverberations of this bilateral conflict, after a Hungarian citizen – and also a European citizen – had been killed by the Ukrainians during a brutal roundup, in other words during forced conscription. And obviously they thought that Hungary wouldn’t let this pass without a response. We didn’t take that route, however, but instead took the opportunity to present the report of the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights. It’s a serious international document, recently published, in which a specific chapter is devoted to brutal human rights violations committed during forced conscription in Ukraine. So in Brussels we’re not saying that this is a Hungarian issue, but that it’s a European issue, which is perceived not only by Hungary because one of its citizens was beaten to death by the Ukrainians who were subjecting him to forced conscription, but that it’s also a European problem perceived by others, too. And those who are aware of it – this is a Strasbourg organisation, by the way – have collected the relevant information, collated it, organised it and published a comprehensive assessment. This says, as does the Hungarian government, that this isn’t an individual case, but general practice. In fact, people are being hunted down. It’s called conscription, forced conscription, but it’s people being hunted down by recruiters who think they can be immediately dragged into the Ukrainian army. And if nice words don’t work, violence is used. And in the process they’re committing brutal atrocities, as this document makes clear. And only at the very end did we say, “And you know, Dear Friends from Brussels, by the way, the latest victim was a Hungarian citizen who was also your citizen, because he was an EU citizen.” So this is where we come in – not with reference to Ukrainian–Hungarian bilateral relations, but with a view to the European Union imposing punitive measures and penalties: to not go along with this, but to impose some kind of sanctions – for example, to put the Ukrainian leaders responsible for these brutal abductions on a sanctions list. And, for example, yesterday Hungary banned them from our country. But this isn’t something that should be done only for Hungarians, because in our neighbouring country there’s a general practice that’s unacceptable. This is our line of attack, and we will pursue it. What can be introduced by Hungary as sanctions on a bilateral basis has already been introduced against the three responsible persons that we know of and have identified.
But Brussels has not only failed to respond to this, to this Hungarian request, but has also failed to respond to the matter in general. What could be the reason for this silence?
It’s embarrassing for them. For those affected, of course, the brutality is more than embarrassing. So there are victims, but for the Brussels bureaucrats it’s embarrassing. All you hear in Brussels – and I hold my head in my hands, as if trying to stop my hair falling out – is that Ukraine has made fantastic progress: progress in the area of human rights, in the area of justice, in the fight against corruption. So the leaders in Brussels are talking about Ukraine as a country that’s done everything it can to make itself suitable, and has even already become suitable: they’re knocking on the door, but some obstinate people – these Hungarians for example – don’t want the door to be opened, even though the Ukrainians are entitled to enter. So they’re saying that Ukraine is not only ripe for EU membership, but almost overripe. Anyone who knows Ukraine – and we Hungarians know it, because it’s our neighbour – is perfectly aware that this has nothing to do with reality. And of course, in general, whether or not a country’s judiciary is up to European standards, whether or not its tax system is up to European standards, whether or not its economic dispute resolution methods are up to European standards, can be debated and interpreted one way or another. But a man has been beaten to death because he refused to enlist or thought that the law on enlistment didn’t apply to him; and he wasn’t arrested and subjected to legal proceedings, but beaten to death. It leaves one speechless. This is clear evidence of the fact that the country is not ready to be accepted as a Member State of the European Union. And therefore if it takes up this case, Brussels will be contradicting itself. They won’t do so of their own accord, and it is we who must put this matter on the table, because the Brusseleers won’t – wrongly, by the way – do so themselves of their own free will. European values, European declarations and principles of human rights would require the Brussels bureaucrats to take up this case and investigate it. But they won’t: they want to sweep this off the table, because we’re talking about a country that they believe is long overdue for EU membership.
The reactions of Ukraine and Hungary are interesting, because Kiev/Kyiv, for example, reacted to yesterday’s ban by rejecting Hungary’s “manipulations” and stating that it “will not tolerate such disrespect”. And we also hear about this in Hungary, where the Government is being called to account in relation to evidence of the beating, with Péter Magyar, President of the Tisza Party, saying that he doesn’t want to “take part in a campaign built on the death” of József Sebestyén. How do you assess these reactions from Ukraine and Hungary?
As we’ve shown in Brussels, the case of József Sebestyén is important to us Hungarians, because he was one of us – in fact we are József Sebestyén. Regardless of where the borders of the state have been drawn, we, the Hungarian national community, are one nation – and therefore this is important to us, a matter of the heart and of honour. But, as I’ve said, we mustn’t argue from this starting point, but from the report of the Commissioner for Human Rights. And we must tell the Tisza Party, we must tell the Ukrainian secret service and Ukrainian diplomacy, that they’re not arguing with Hungary. A European organisation has written in black and white that this is a practice and that it must be stopped – specifically because the latest victim was Hungarian. So to all those who are arguing, the facts speak for themselves: what needs to be brought to the forefront is not the Hungarian case, but the human rights report, the European report, in which this practice is described not by Hungarians, but by non-Hungarian rapporteurs. So the authors cannot be accused of bilateral or Hungarian bias. This is the reality. This is a sad thing, but it’s not unprecedented in Hungarian history for there to be parties that always align with the arguments of foreigners in a Hungarian–Ukrainian or Hungarian–foreign debate. The Tisza Party is part of this tradition, and DK [Democratic Coalition] is part of this tradition. These are parties for which Hungarians can never be right, because they say that foreign countries always represent a higher, nobler point of view than ours, and we mustn’t argue with foreign countries, but must submit to them, follow them, use them as a model to be followed, and accept their instructions. This is a different world: the world of the Hungarian opposition and its relationship with Brussels or any other imperial centre – formerly Moscow or Washington, and now Brussels – is a subordinate relationship, in which a Hungarian can never be right. This is the rotten mess we need to rid ourselves of. It’s been weighing us down for over a hundred years, while we’ve been continuously beaten over the head and told that we Hungarians can never be right. There are parties that believe this, accept it and make a living from carrying out such orders. And then there are national parties, which we are, and which are proud of what we are. We say that we’re Hungarians, that we’re right and we’ll prove it, we’ll fight for it, and we’ll defend our interests. So now we’re seeing the imprint of this debate on a specific case.
Let’s also talk about Hungarian economic issues. You’ve said that the EU budget is a budget for survival, but at the same time in an earlier interview you said that Hungary has economic ambitions. There’s the Home Start Plus programme, which is aimed at young people – many of whose parents, by the way, were burned when taking out foreign currency loans in the early 2000s, so they’ve had fairly bad experiences. How can they be persuaded that it’s nevertheless worth taking out a loan and buying a home now?
These will be forint-denominated loans. What was wrong with the foreign-currency loans? The problem with the foreign-currency loans was that the banks and the Gyurcsány government jointly lured people into a foreign-currency loan scheme, saying that if they borrowed in forints they’d pay a high interest rate, but if they borrowed in euros they’d pay a low interest rate. Of course, people aren’t stupid, so they thought that a low-interest loan is better than a high-interest loan, and if the banks and the Government supported this, then obviously it was a sensible proposal. No one told them clearly and comprehensibly – even though I tried to do so from the opposition – that they were running an exchange rate risk, that those loans may look cheap, because the forint–euro exchange rate was favourable for us, but the forint–euro exchange rate could deteriorate. And whether it deteriorated didn’t depend only on Hungary, but also on international economic developments that were independent of us. They were exposing themselves to a risk that if the forint exchange rate deteriorated, their debt could suddenly increase several times over. They weren’t told this, or there’s a debate about who told them – which banks providing the credit told them and which didn’t. There are court cases about this. Hundreds of thousands of families were bailed out – thanks to György Matolcsy, who, as the governor of the Central Bank at the time made proposals on how to get people out of foreign currency loans and into forint-based loans. But that’s another story. The current offer is a forint-based loan, with a fixed interest rate of 3 per cent for 25 years, maximum down payment of 10 per cent, for apartments worth up to 100 million forints and houses worth up to 150 million forints. This is a safe loan for the person who takes it out. I’d encourage young people to consider this. Of course they have to decide – we can only open a door. But they should consider that if they want to live somewhere on their own, and they don’t live in a rich family where their parents buy them their home but they have to make their own decisions about their future and their home, then they’re better off taking out a loan, buying a home and paying the repayments. These will be subsidised or reduced by the Hungarian government through an interest rate subsidy, and this is better than paying the same amount for rent, for renting a home. Because there’s a big difference between giving a landlord the rent and getting an apartment on a monthly basis, or paying off part of the debt owed on a home that you’ll later own. The latter means that you’re creating wealth for yourself. This is worth thinking about. I see this as a breakthrough. So we’re seeing figures on how much a young person can save with state-subsidised interest rates, which can mean tens of thousands of forints per month, depending on the size of the loan they take out. The mathematical modelling calculations have been done, and we’ve passed the most important stage of negotiation with the banks. So now I can say with certainty that we’re not just talking about an option, that the Government hasn’t just put forward an idea, but that we have a proposal on the table that’s been worked out in detail, that’s been agreed with the parties concerned – especially with the banks and the construction industry – and that’s been fully worked out in detail. There’s something here for young people to study.
You’ve mentioned the construction industry, but it’s something we don’t talk about as much. How does the Government expect this to affect the construction industry?
There are mathematical models, and I have to be careful here. I’m one of the “cautious daredevils”, but even my most conservative calculations show that if ten thousand homes are built, it could result in a 1 per cent increase in the national GDP, in national economic output. And between thirty and fifty thousand homes could easily be built every year. It should be noted that this scheme, this offer is not only for new properties, but also for existing ones.
We’re out of time, but we have one more topic, because the research astronaut Tibor Kapu has returned home, having splashed down in the Pacific on Wednesday. Can we see the significance – even in the long term – of this successful mission? Because his mission was successful.
I’ve been listening as much as I can to the scientists who have been talking about the experiments that Tibor Kapu – our glorious new hero – carried out in space. These are difficult to describe, or somehow strange, but the scientists say that they represent important and valuable research. But I look at it from a different angle. Somewhere I read that there are twelve nations in the world that can claim to have sent a person into space, and we Hungarians are one of those twelve. And while we’re on the subject, let’s promote justice and fairness; because of course everyone’s talking about Tibor Kapu, just as they were talking about Bertalan Farkas forty or so years ago – but there was a second man in all this too. At times like this we don’t train one astronaut, but we train two. Because, as the old-timers used to say, one child is no child ; and one astronaut is no astronaut, because anything could happen – and then what would we do? His name isn’t mentioned very often, although he’s done everything, he’s prepared in the same way. He’s a great man of great intellect; his name is Gyula Cserényi, but he remains in the shadows because he didn’t go up – but he still deserves credit.
Among these subjects I’ve been asking Prime Minister Viktor Orbán about were the draft for the next EU budget, the protests against forced conscription in Ukraine, and the impact of the Home Start Programme.