Jobbik advises EC to directly distribute EU Solidarity Fund to Hungarians in open letter

In the following, you can read the open letter that the president and executive president of Jobbik, a Hungarian opposition party wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission about the direct distribution of the European Union’s Solidarity Fund.

Your Excellency, Dear Mme President,

We are writing to you as the president and the executive vice president of Jobbik, one of Hungary’s leading opposition parties. The past year has faced the world, Europe and Hungary with challenges hardly ever experienced before. The public health and economic impacts of the pandemic have made their mark on the lives of nearly all citizens.

Just like the majority of the Hungarian people, we also feel reassured in these hard times seeing that the European Union, despite all the difficulties and initial mistakes, is trying to give assistance to its member states to get through these months as seam-lessly as possible. That’s why we were so glad to hear about the latest proposal to mobilise €530 million of the EU Solidarity Fund in order to support several Member States and accession countries, whereby Hungary would be allocated a sum of €39,723,926 as well. Indeed, we can use all the help we get now.

Regardless of how happy we are, we can’t hide our deep concerns as to what happens to the funding allocated to Hungary because our country is currently ruled by a government that has abandoned one European democratic norm after the other over the past years while raising corruption to such a level that triggered a worried discussion in Europe. The concerns are highly justified by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s practices to stay in power, which, in addition to eliminating the independent media, curbing the freedom of speech, occupying the state institutions, manipulating the elections and intimidating citizens with different political views, primarily rely on hijacking EU funds and handing them out to a narrow circle of oligarchs and political favourites. That’s why the Hungarian government consistently refuses to join the European Public Prosecutors Office (EPPO), since staying out of it has allowed them to avoid being held accountable — considering that Hungary’s prosecution service has been under the government’s direct influence for years.

The above negative processes have further intensified during the year of the pandemic. Fidesz has voted to grant unlimited powers to the government multiple times. This strong mandate was then used for adopting such measures as modifying the electoral law to hinder the opposition or amending the constitution in order to change the definition of public money so that they could whitewash corruption. In the meantime, hardly any assistance was given either to Hungary’s small and medium enterprises on the brink of closing business or their employees, while the healthcare situation and the death rate have turned dramatic in the last few days, forecasting an increasingly impending public health disaster.