Mayor Karácsony: Budapest will never look like Belgrade, they will protect it from UAE investor’s plans!
Gergely Karácsony, the opposition mayor of Budapest, shared photos of his February Belgrade visit showing him in front of some astonishingly high apartment buildings. He said nobody needed AI to picture how the Rákosrendező area would look if the Arab developers carried out their plans.
Mayor Karácsony committed to protect Budapest
Karácsony said that a similar project is nearly finished in Belgrade, and the result was terrible: an inhumane concrete horror. He added that the area on which the apartment buildings were built was one of the most valuable lands of the Serbian capital. He said he was committed not to let that for the Arab investor because “this is not Binjistan”.
Karácsony is irresponsible, says the Hungarian government
Gergely Karácsony, the mayor of Budapest, is putting the planned landmark real-estate Rákosrendezői development at risk, Botond Sára, the head of the government office for Budapest, on Saturday.
Sára said the proposed development was massive and complicated, given that an international treaty has been signed and a related law passed, and in light of the “huge commitments” made, Karácsony was acting “irresponsibly” and putting the investment at risk by blocking the project and running the capital “illegally”.
In a video uploaded to Facebook, Sára said the Budapest administration still lacked a deputy mayor and its 2025 budget was “illegal”, so it was no longer running the city on lawful foundations.
He insisted that the decision on the development required “common sense and calm”, adding that Karácsony should not take risks and “reconsider the matter”.
Budapest Fidesz: the project would create jobs, help housing, traffic developments
In a post on Facebook, Alexandra Szentkirályi, the head of the Fidesz group in the city assembly, accused Karácsony of acting in such a way as to deprive Budapesters of “thousands of new jobs and many thousands of new apartments”, as well as railway and metro developments.
Referring to “illegal rubbish dumps, mountains of hazardous waste and ruined and abandoned buildings” as well as “drug dens and homeless shelters”, she said the central government had launched the “biggest development in the history of the capital”, yet Karácsony was doing everything he could to prevent the project from going ahead.
She said the mayor was trying to distract attention away from “the fact that he and his allies have pushed Budapest into total bankruptcy”.
She said in the video posted on Friday that Karácsony’s administration would not purchase the area legally and the capital no longer had “the money to resolve this issue”.
The state should have “cleaned up” the brownfiled site
Meanwhile, Dávid Vitézy, the leader of the Podmaniczky Movement group in the city assembly, said the state should have “cleaned up” the brownfiled site of Rákosrendező but had failed to, while also neglecting to oblige “the [UAE] Arab investors” in the purchase contract to do so.
The opposition politician noted that the construction and transport minister, Janos Lazar, had promised to clean up the site using state money, given state railway MAV and the state had owned the area for many decades. “Nothing happened; they couldn’t even mount a tender to clean up the area,” he added.
He said the government’s main arguments in support of the investment were that the Arab buyer, who has agreed to invest five trillion forints (EUR 12.3bn), would clean it up. “But this isn’t so,” he said insisting that the investor was under no obligation in the purchase contract to do so.
The contract, he added, stated that the seller and the buyer would enter into a separate agreement regarding environmental damage and waste. But this did not oblige the Arab investor to undertake anything, he said, adding that the clean-up remain the burden of the state and taxpayers.
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