According to Hungarian House Speaker Kövér, Europe lags behind global competitors

In the past five years policies “dictated by the European Commission have caused the greatest fiasco in the history of the European Union as Europe seriously lags behind its peers in terms of world economic competitiveness,” László Kövér, Hungarian House Speaker, said in Spain on Tuesday.

Speaking on the closing day of a conference of EU house speakers in Palma, Kövér said “most Europeans are worse off than five years ago.”

The Hungarian House Speaker cited US economist Jeffrey Sachs as saying that “Brussels is controlled by the USA”. “I, however, will say that where human failings provide sufficient explanation we don’t need to look for a more complex one … Brussels’s failures are caused by bureaucrats pushing ideological solutions to economic issues,” he said.

The EU’s elite is “absolutely unsuitable” for their positions because they are “unable to give a response … to the US gaining unilaterally against its European allies through its energy and industrial policies,” Kövér said.

In the past five years “Brussels bureaucrats have seriously abused climate protection policy, often taking it to the extreme in an economic sense,” he said. This has led to a “tangible reduction in society’s support” for climate targets and measures as demonstrated by farmers’ protests across Europe in recent months, he said.

Europe’s agriculture “is not only compromised by the unacceptable dumping of Ukrainian grain and products of dubious quality but by Brussels’s so called green over-regulation,” the Hungarian House Speaker said.

The EU cannot “return from the clouds of ideologies to economic rationality” unless it “takes the different economic levels, national characteristics, economic abilities of people and businesses, competitiveness, as well as the interests of people and businesses in members states,” Kövér said.

Hungary rejects “an emerging practice” of taking out joint loans and “an interpretation of economic governance that is in fact aimed at further centralisation within the EU and increasing the power of EU bureaucrats,” the Hungarian House Speaker said. “All those will not serve to reinforce the EU but result in further divisions and weakening it,” he said.

The Hungarian House Speaker also said the inter-parliamentary conference to be held during the Hungarian presidency in the second half of this year would “reflect on the most burning problems of Europe”. He said the enlargement of the EU, security challenges facing Europe, the continent’s demographic trends, the EU’s economic policies, illegal migration and the future of structural funds would be high on the agenda of those events.

The house speaker said that five of the conferences would be hosted in the Hungarian Parliament, adding that another conference on the control over Europol, co-organised with the European Parliament, would be held in Brussels.

He added that a conference on cultural heritage and national identity would also be held in Budapest in early December.

On the sidelines of the conference in Palma, the Hungarian House Speaker had bilateral talks with his Dutch, Norwegian, Montenegrin, Moldavian, Armenian, and Serbian counterparts.

The next conference of European house speakers will be held in Hungary in May next year.

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