Boka: ‘EU governed in bad structure by unfit leaders’

Addressing the event focusing on the past 20 years of Hungary’s EU membership, Boka said the root cause of “the EU’s failures of the past five years” was that the bloc was being governed by institutions in Brussels which the minister said “consider themselves political institutions without exception”.

“The European Parliament and the European Commission both operate as a political body to achieve their political goals which are independent from the political will of the individual member states,” he told the conference organised by the Oeconomus Economic Research Foundation to mark the accession anniversary.

Those two institutions “use all of their resources to achieve their political goals”. And, as a result, political conflicts develop between the institutions and the member states, which Boka said “has been coded in the system’s operation”.

The measure of success for member states is that they are more successful together, in a union, than separately, on their own, the minister said, adding that by contrast, in the approach of EU institutions, the measure of success was “federalisation becoming stronger”. “This is why if there is no change taking place [after the EP election], the member states will lose more of their powers over the next five years”.

Speaking about Hungary’s upcoming EU presidency in the second half of the year, Boka said he expected “a strong communications battle and a war of statistics”, adding however that success would be reflected in “how smooth the institutional transition will be and whether aspects could be introduced that cannot be later ignored”.