Hungary's New FM to Meet EU Commission on Frozen Funds

Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar will travel to Brussels next week to discuss unlocking billions in frozen EU funds with the European Commission, the country’s foreign minister said Saturday.

“One of our most important tasks in the first couple of months is that we will get access to the recovery and resilience funds, which is a €10.4 billion envelope for Hungary,” Anita Orbán, who was sworn in as Hungary’s foreign minister earlier this month, told POLITICO in an interview at the GLOBSEC conference in Prague. “And yes, I can confirm, there is a plan of a meeting next week in Brussels,” she added.

The politician, who is not related to Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, also said that several days of negotiations with Brussels over the frozen funds had already taken place at expert level in recent days.

The money had been withheld over Budapest’s breaches of EU law under Viktor Orbán, who had governed the country for 16 consecutive years until losing last month’s general election. The €10.4 billion is part of a post-pandemic recovery fund and only a fraction of the money Hungary is seeking to unfreeze. But with a looming deadline, securing full access to that tranche has become the new government’s top priority.

Magyar’s incoming administration has until Aug. 31 to formally request the money, while the Commission in Brussels has a deadline of Dec. 31 to make the payments.

The country’s foreign minister stressed that Hungary was already working on a set of so-called “super milestones” and reforms that were needed to get access to the money.

“Those are reinstating rule of law criteria. And that’s ensuring that the money is spent transparently, absolutely free of corruption,” she said. “And it’s important to emphasize here that that was our electoral mandate. We were running on a platform. … So these super milestones are 100 percent coinciding with what this government will do, would do anyway, as well as what the electorate was asking us to do.”

The foreign minister also said her government would push for the release of access to €16 billion in European defense loans under the so-called SAFE program, albeit with less time pressure. To secure the money, Budapest would table a new proposal, she said.

“Our SAFE proposal wasn’t accepted by the European Commission. So we inevitably have to table it again,” she said. “So we will see what we can do, again within the framework of what are the real needs of the country, what are the NATO requirements, how fast and how we want to meet those and how we want to get there, as well as what is the Hungarian defense industrial needs.”

The politician, who is set to meet most of her European counterparts for the first time in Cyprus next week, also said she expects prosecution against those suspected of corruption to kick of as early as a couple of days from now. “We will go after all the public money stolen because that was stolen from the Hungarian people,” she said.

On her country’s positioning toward Ukraine and Russia, Orbán remained rather vague.

She stressed that the Hungarian minority issue with Kyiv had to be resolved before any other matters could be discussed, including Ukraine’s accession to the EU.

With regards to Budapest’s dependence on Russian energy, her country would do what’s best for the Hungarian people, Orbán said.

“We want a country where we have choices, where we have decisions, [where] we can make decisions freely,” she said. “In terms of energy diversification, we need to put together an energy mix, which is the best possible for the Hungarians in terms of prices, in terms of availability and in terms of sustainability.”