The proposal which the departing European Commission prepared with respect to the European Union’s next budget is unfair, and “we want justice”.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is attending the Friends of Cohesion summit, at the beginning of which the prime ministers of the Visegrád countries (V4 – Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia) had talks.
After the V4 meeting, Mr Orbán highlighted that the draft which is being debated throughout Europe is the now-departing Commission’s proposal, and bears the hallmarks of all its mistakes.
According to the Prime Minister, in order to make the budget just and fair, four things must change: the system of rebates must be eliminated because if we recalculate the amounts that each Member State pays into the budget in relation to its own gross domestic product by also taking into consideration the rebates they receive, we will see that the situation that so evolves is completely unfair.
It is necessary to also take account of the fact that a large percentage of the funds received by Central European countries as grants goes back to Western Member States, and this must be reflected in the proposal, he said.
Mr Orbán said it is also unfair that they intend to reduce cohesion funds in such a way that “the poorer a country is, the more money would be taken away from them, while the richer a country is, the less”.
He took the view that it is likewise necessary to increase flexibility as the Commission’s proposal “points in the other direction” and this makes the budget increasingly inflexible.
He stressed that “despite this we are optimistic” because, luckily for the V4, there are two former finance ministers among the Visegrád prime ministers.
In answer to a question, he said the Horizon programme which is about funding research and development is one of the most unfair ones because 95 per cent of the total funding is allocated to old Member States, and only 5 per cent to new ones. “In this regard, we should introduce some national element,” he said.
The situation is similar in the case of climate neutrality as well: They have made calculations which conclude that in order for the Hungarian economy to become carbon-neutral by 2050, each year it should spend 2.5 per cent of its GDP on the transformation of the economy, while the Netherlands should only spend 0.5 per cent of its GDP in order to achieve the same target, he explained.
He said it is evident that the level of general economic advancement is a determining factor regarding the burden the attainment of a carbon-neutral economy imposes. Hungary is ready to have a carbon-neutral economy by 2050, but “we would like to see the fair funding of the attainment of this goal in the budget,” he added.
Mr Orbán highlighted that whichever way they look at the budget, “the trouble with it is that it is not fair”. “We would like a fair and just budget,” he said.
Regarding the EU’s enlargement, the Prime Minister said “we are all disappointed” that the EU will not start negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania. Therefore, we must accelerate talks with countries – Serbia and Montenegro – with which talks have already begun in order to somewhat alleviate this bad decision, and “not to lose the ideal of enlargement altogether”.
The Group of Friends of Cohesion came into being 2005 at a Polish initiative in order to represent the interests of beneficiary countries over those of net contributor countries, to draw attention to the topical issues of cohesion policy, and to coordinate positions and to settle disputes.
Members of the Group first met in 2012 in Bucharest.
According to the organisers’ information, they are expecting the leaders of Bulgaria, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia, representatives of Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Italy, Spain and Greece, and EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger to attend the meeting in Prague.
(MTI)
