Hungarian government slams EU budget: “This proposal will die quickly”

The European Commission’s proposal for the European Union’s multiannual financial framework (MFF) budget is “unacceptable” not just to Hungary, but several other member states as well, in its current form, János Bóka, the EU affairs minister, said in Brussels on Friday.

Arriving at a meeting of the General Affairs Council, Bóka told reporters that he believed the proposal in its current form “will die within a short amount of time”, and EU institutions and member states will have to restart negotiations.

Bóka said though some figures from the draft budget were known, the details were still being analysed “because the devil is in the details.”

He said the draft’s “two clear winners” were Ukraine and the EC itself, arguing that preliminary calculations showed that some 20 percent of the budget would flow into Ukraine. “That means every fifth euro in the budget, directly or indirectly, will end up in Ukraine,” he said. Bóka said the EC was another winner, with a plan for more than 2,000 new hires for the purpose of speeding up Ukraine’s EU accession.

But the draft budget also proposes significant cuts to farm subsidies, “while the market would have to make way for the Ukrainian agriculture sector”, the minister said. Also, he noted, the EC planned to strengthen the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism, enabling the swift suspension of member states’ EU funds.