Regular government press briefing about illegal migrant flow, Budapest’s agglomeration transport and state land auctions

Budapest, January 14 (MTI) – Hungary can keep the flow of illegal migrants into its territory to a minimum as long as its border fence remains in place, government office chief Janos Lazar told a regular government press briefing on Thursday.

If there were no fence installed on the southern border, attacks similar to the mass assault on women in Cologne could have happened in Hungary as well, Lazar said.

Answering a question, Lazar said that the European Union seeks to return 45,000 illegal migrants to Hungary, but the country will refuse to receive them. He added that Hungary is sending back hundreds of migrants to Serbia on a continuous basis.

Concerning EU funding, Lazar said that Hungary targets paying out 2.048 trillion forints (EUR 6.5bn) this year. Under a government decree all EU tenders for the 2014-2020 financial period must be announced by June 30, 2017 and all outstanding amounts must be paid out by early 2019 at the latest, Lazar said.

Lazar said he had met Elzbieta Bienkowska, the commissioner in charge of internal markets, in Brussels on Tuesday and they held an “intense discussion”. The commissioner was “explicitly hostile” concerning Hungary’s plan to upgrade its Paks nuclear plant and the Budapest-Belgrade railway project, and she objected to the idea that Hungary would be signing investment contracts with either Russia or China, he said.

On the subject of Hungarian doctors seeking jobs in other countries, Lazar said Hungarian health care “cannot pay them more than they can earn in western Europe”. By comparison, he said that doctors who have recently quit their jobs at a Budapest hospital were earning around a monthly 1 million forints (EUR 3,200). He said there was huge demand abroad for well-educated Hungarian doctors. The government should consider training more physicians, said, adding, however, that salaries in health care should be increased commensurate with what the central budget can afford.

Answering a question about Hungary’s administrative reform, Lazar said that several government agencies would be gradually eliminated and suggested that the size of the tax authority would also be “adjusted”.

At his press briefing, Lazar said that the government is set to relaunch state land auctions in mid-February. He said the next round of auctions is set to last until the end of March with prices and legal conditions unchanged.