“We won’t let jobs disappear!” – Orbán announces industry protection plan

The government will launch two action plans to mitigate the impact of the tariffs agreement between the European Union and the United States on local industry and workplaces, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in a weekly interview with public radio on Friday.

The workplace protection action plan aims to prevent multinationals operating in Hungary that are hit by the tariffs from making layoffs, Orbán said. If people do lose their jobs, the plan would place them in new positions as quickly as possible, he added.

The industry protection plan would keep businesses from shutting down plants in Hungary because of the higher tariffs, he said. Orbán put the impact on Hungary of the 15pc US tariff on EU products at around USD 1.5bn.

He said Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto had been tasked with negotiating with big investors who had signed strategic agreements with the government, while National Economy Minister Marton Nagy would hold talks with the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MKIK).

Orbán: EU-US trade deal ‘economic own goal’

The tariff deal struck by the United States and the European Union “is a terrible economic agreement and an economic own goal” for the bloc, Orbán said. “Anything that could have been botched from a professional standpoint in this agreement has been,” he said.

“It’s not just that we made a bad deal — because all European goods exported to the US will have a 15 percent tariff on them, while there will be no tariffs on US goods coming to Europe — but we’ve also agreed to terms that we obviously can’t fulfil,” he said. “This means that we haven’t settled the tariff disputes. We’ve just lost the first battle and there will be more battles to come.”

Orbán said another factor behind the deal was that the EU would have to pay for the weapons the US provides to Ukraine. “No one has asked me about this. There’s been no European decision declaring that we want this,” the prime minister said. “If we want to make a deal with the Americans on Ukraine, it shouldn’t be done as a secret clause in a tariff deal, but separately. It should put on the table separately and negotiated separately.”