Hungarian FM regrets ‘nadir’ of EU’s competitiveness before meeting EU counterparts

“Ill-advised decisions in Brussels in recent years have led to a nadir in Europe’s competitiveness,” Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said on Monday, ahead of a meeting of the EU’s foreign affairs council.

Europe has been relegated to third place in terms of its contribution to the global economy, “and with the worst figures of recent decades,” he said on Facebook. Meanwhile, he added, “natural gas in Europe costs four times as much as in North America, and electricity three times as in China”.

“The ties of East-West cooperation, which have served a solid basis for European growth for a long time, are now being severed one by one,” he said. “We are debating the 12th package of sanctions, while no honest assessment of the impacts of the previous eleven have never been compiled,” he added.

The Hungarian government “seeks an improvement in Europe’s competitiveness and greatly contributes, having won a number of investment projects this year, which otherwise would have gone to third countries,” he said, adding that East-West cooperation should be considered “a great opportunity rather than a peril”.

As we wrote last week, the European Commission has approved the government’s amendment to the Recovery and Resilience Instrument, submitted in August, giving Hungary access to around EUR 1 billion in EU funding for the development of the RePowerEU chapter, details HERE.

• Read also: Hungary’s jobless rate stood at 4.1 percent in October, up from 3.9 percent in September and 3.7 percent twelve months earlier, details HERE