“The number of completed National Consultation questionnaires is growing day-by-day, and over 140 thousand have been submitted including internet replies”, Minister of State for Government Communication Bence Tuzson said on M1 Hungarian television’s Wednesday morning current affairs program.

Among the questions being put forward during the course of the National Consultation, Mr. Tuzson highlighted protecting the reduction of public utility charges as being particularly important, stressing that the achievements of the utility charge reduction, including that Hungary now has the some of the lowest energy prices in Europe, must be preserved. “We will not allow the realisation of extra profits”, the Minister of State said, adding that the Government would like to keep energy prices within a national sphere of competence to ensure that the Hungarian people only pay as much as the energy actually costs. It “must be regulated in the interests of the Hungarian people”, he declared.

To this end, a so-called yellow card procedure will be initiated in Parliament on Wednesday, aimed at preventing the EU from liberalising energy prices and keeping them within a national sphere of competence.

The Minister of State said he was expecting heated debates over the upcoming weeks and months with regard to the reduction in public utility charges, adding that we will have to “fight until the very end” to ensure that the related EU regulations do not come into force.

Mr. Tuzson also mentioned that another subject of the National Consultation was illegal immigration. “Hungary’s borders must be protected, and this is dictated by the need to maintain security and in the long term also by the need to protect Hungarian culture”, he highlighted.

Speaking later on Kossuth Radio’s “180 Minutes” program, the Minister of State said we must prepare for the fact that there are organisations, “behind which we can generally find George Soros”, who are working to bring the migrants into the European Union. Mr, Tuzson noted that these organisations are not even attempting to hide their intentions, and the opposition’s seven-point proposal also states: migration must be supported even if it requires new borrowing.

The Minister of State highlighted the fact that these organisations often do not make public where they get their financing and in whose interests they are performing their activities, and accordingly the Government would like the operations of organisations that are activist organisations, agent organisations and which concentrate on influencing a country’s politics, to be transparent. “Everyone should know who they are financed by and who is behind them”, the Minister of State stressed.

(Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister/MTI)