Would the introduction of EURO be “particularly dangerous” in Hungary?

The European Commission cannot afford to involve itself in partisan politics, as this would eventually tear the European Union apart, Gergely Gulyás, the prime minister’s chief of staff, said in a discussion with András Schiffer, the opposition LMP party’s former leader, on Thursday.

In the discussion on the future of the EU at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium festival in Esztergom, in northern Hungary, Gulyás said there was no alternative to institutionalised cooperation among the nations in today’s globalised world. This, he added, required a shared set of rules. Gulyás insisted, at the same time, that the EC had lately been ignoring what it was allowed and not allowed to do according to the law. He said the commission was

“serving political needs”

even if this meant trampling over EU law.

Schiffer said the “real conflict” shaping the future of the bloc was between democratic decision-making and “corporations’ hunger for profit”.

“The question is whether we’ll have a world in which profits come before the interests of the people and nature, or if human communities will be strong enough to keep capital in check,” Schiffer said. This requires strong nation-states and strong cooperation among them, he added.

Schiffer criticised the structure of the EU for “tying together” countries with different levels of development. A different kind of Europe is needed that allows less developed member states to deviate from the rules on certain issues, he said. In these member states, land should not be subject to the principle of the free movement of capital, but the rules on matters like wages, labour protection and environmental protection should stay as they are, he added.

Meanwhile, Schiffer said

it would be “particularly dangerous” to introduce the euro in Hungary,