The Brussels authority advises stopping a third of all EU funds for Hungary – but makes it clear that they will not consider this necessary.
As expected, the European Commission decided at its meeting on Sunday that the only way to ensure the correct use of EU payments to Hungary at present is to suspend around 7.5 billion euros from them. This decision was spontaneously commented on as a great success of the Union in the fight against systemic corruption in Hungary and the nepotistic conditions in the award of public, EU-funded contracts under the national authoritarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The 65 percent of three EU cohesion policy programs that the Commission is proposing to national governments to freeze are worth around €7.5 billion, which is about a fifth of Hungary’s total budget allocation for the 2021-2027 financial period.
Reforms “suitable in principle”
But the relief of rule of law defenders in Europe is premature. With its 53-page decision, the Commission is opening the door to an amicable settlement of the dispute with Orbán that has been raging for years about the political synchronization of Hungary’s state institutions and the abuse of European subsidies to underpin Orbánism. Because she notes that the reform proposals proposed by the Hungarian government after a long back and forth in letters between Brussels and Budapest over the summer “are in principle suitable for eliminating the problems relating to systemic irregularities, inadequacies and weaknesses in public procurement.” Incidentally, which according to the Commission have existed since 2007 (!), i.e. before Orbán’s return to power in 2010.