The chairman of the EU committee in the Bundestag, Anton Hofreiter, demands that the European Union stop all payments to Hungary, reports the “Spiegel”. The Green politician refers to a legal opinion according to which the government of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is guilty of “fundamental, frequent and widespread” violations of democracy and the rule of law. “The study reveals that all EU funding sources in Hungary are affected by corruption,” says Hofreiter.
The EU money is not there for Orbán to finance his minions. “The EU Commission does not lack instruments, but quite simply the political will to implement our common rules and values. The Commission must now freeze 100 percent of the funds to Hungary.” The report was drawn up by three well-known lawyers from the USA and the Netherlands.
Late last week, Orbán acknowledged that his country is isolated in Western alliances with its stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine. “We don’t need sanctions (against Russia), but an immediate ceasefire and immediate peace negotiations,” said the right-wing politician on state radio. However, apart from Hungary, no one else in NATO and the EU takes this position, he added. “For now, no one but us will strike that note.”
“Everyone is on the side of the Ukrainians, because people tend to side with the attacked and keep their fingers crossed for the attacked,” Orban said. But at the same time one had to face the “military realities”. Russia’s supremacy means that “the war zone will move closer to Hungary much faster than most Hungarians think”. Hungary, which has been part of NATO since 1999 and the EU since 2004, borders Ukraine in the northeast.
The current theaters of war are more than 1,000 kilometers from the Hungarian-Ukrainian border. Orban, who maintains a good relationship with Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, initially only half-heartedly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When the EU’s most recent package of sanctions was imposed, he threatened to veto Russian oil supplies to Hungary from being exempted from the EU’s oil supply boycott.