EU summit – Official: Hungary rejects the migration pact, budget proposal ‘shocking’

Also, the Commission’s proposal for a medium-term review of the seven-year budget envisaging member states paying an additional 100 million euros “is shocking and unfit for discussion”, the political director told Hungarian journalists during the EU summit.

After only two years since the start of the current seven-year EU budget, the EC seems to have run out of the money paid in by member states and wants to collect new resources from them, he said.

“How could this happen? Where have the EU monies gone? Where did the resourced end up?”

He added that the EC proposal was unfit for discussion because no document was available showing how much the EU had spent and on what, and how the monies linked to supporting Ukraine had been spent.

Hungary objects to the EC trying to get member states to make additional payments in lieu of higher interest spending on the recovery fund, he said, adding that Hungary’s position concerning these issues was clear: as long as Hungary does not receive the resources, it cannot be expected to be make any additional payment.

The EC proposal also includes a potential increase in EU bureaucrats’ salaries and payments, which could be justifiably questioned by European citizens, he said. While prices are sky-high throughout Europe as a result of the war and the ill-fated sanctions policies of the EU, “they should not be thinking of ways to fatten the EU system of bureaucracy”, he said.

Orbán said the EU proposal on migration would draw in 15 billion euros of extra resources from member states, and the fact that the majority of this money would be spent on managing migration instead of stopping it “completely goes against the Hungarian position which has not changed since 2015”, he added.

Hungary resolutely rejects the new migration pact proposal because it does not solve anything and it could further encourage illegal migration, he said.

In addition to the amendment package, the EU is also debating a proposal that would force member states to distribute several thousand or even tens of thousands of migrants among themselves, he said. “This is unacceptable,” Orban said. The proposal includes setting up migrant camps in Hungary, which would pose a security risk, and Hungarians clearly said no to this at a referendum in 2016, he added.

He said the proposal would not solve anything and it could be considered the declaration of a pro-migration position, he said. Hungary and Poland are cooperating closely to prevent the proposal from entering force, he added.