Magyar: ‘No real utility price caps in place’ in Hungary

The leader of the Tisza party said on Tuesday that Hungary’s government “has revealed itself” in the European Parliament and made it clear that utility prices in Hungary were on a par with European ones, “and there are no real utility price caps in place”.

Péter Magyar said on Facebook that, when asked about a “European record inflation of food prices” in Hungary, Agriculture Minister István Nagy had pointed to “the government raising energy prices to European levels” as the reason for “brutal price hikes”.

“Hungarian households on average pay more for gas and electricity than the European average, and Hungarian companies pay even more,” Magyar said.

Magyar said the government had doubled the price of electricity and raised that of gas seven-fold “after the 2022 elections” and had steeply raised the system usage fees. Meanwhile, he said energy prices at the market have fallen to a fraction of those in 2022. “The extra profit is going to Lőrinc Mészáros’s companies and state-owned [electricity company] MVM,” he said.

He slammed the government for hitting farmers and companies with high energy prices and consumers with a 62 percent food price inflation “while enriching oligarchs”.

In response to Magyar’s speech at the EP plenary in Strasbourg on Monday, Nagy rejected what he called “untruths” in the speech and said Hungarian food prices had been kept low by the utility price caps but had to be raised “when energy prices rose to European levels due to sanction policies”.

As we wrote a few days earlier, Magyar, the leader of Hungary’s opposition Tisza Party called for “a boycott of the propaganda media’s products” at a demonstration held at the headquarters of MTVA, the Media Service Support and Asset Management Fund (MTVA), on Saturday afternoon, details and photos here.

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