Fidesz MP on Romania’s Three Seas participation
Zsolt Nemeth, who also heads parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told journalists on the sidelines of an exhibition opening in Sfantu Gheorghe (Sepsiszentgyorgy) that the Three Seas initiative, of which “Romania is formally a member”, has many practical advantages.
The Visegrad Group and Serbia have already pledged to link the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Serbia with high-speed railways, Nemeth noted. Talks are under way to add a Budapest-Cluj-Bucharest line to the network, thus linking Romania to the European high-speed railways, he said. Hungary also has a vested interest in speeding up the construction of three motorways linking the two countries, he said.
Nemeth welcomed the Hungarian economic development programme for Romanian regions home to many ethnic Hungarians.
At the same time, “Transylvania Hungarians see it as their right to have a state-financed Hungarian university in the region, a debt which the Romanian government neglected to pay since the fall of communism thirty years ago.” Cluj’s Sapientia University was funded with Hungarian government support, he said.
Commenting on remarks by Romanian House Speaker Ludovic Orban who said that “investments should be used to change ethnic ratios in Szekler Land”, Nemeth said that ethnic homogeneity policies “had ended up opening trenchlines between the two countries in the past centuries”. “It would be time for Orban to reconsider that remark and apologise,” he said.