Due to its economic achievements over the past ten years, Hungary has sufficient resources for supporting families, religious life and economic development, Finance Minister Mihály Varga said at the consecration of a new Reformed church in Panet (Mezőpanit), in central Romania, this weekend.
The Hungarian government has contributed over 350 million forints (EUR 1m) to the costs of construction, the Finance Ministry said in a statement on Sunday. The minister confirmed
the government’s commitment to national cohesion,
the prosperity of Hungary’s residents and their ethnic kin abroad, and preserving the Christian roots, culture and values of Europe.
For this reason, the government has promoted the economic prosperity of ethnic Hungarians abroad for several years, the minister said, citing Hungarian support for the
Transylvanian economic development programme launched in 2017.
Varga noted that the government had part-financed the renovation of 3,000 churches and the construction of nearly 150 churches in Hungary and the neighbouring countries since 2010.
In the forthcoming year, the actions of the Hungarian presidency of the Visegrád Group will be governed by the conviction that the member states – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – have
a vested interest in each other’s success, stability and prosperity,
Zsolt Németh, head of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told MTI on Saturday.
Earlier in the day, Németh, along with Martin Klus, state secretary at the Slovak Foreign Ministry, and József Berényi, Slovakia’s former state secretary of foreign affairs, held a forum on relations between the V4 presidency, central Europe and the European Union at a student camp of Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarian community in Gombasek (Gombaszög).
The contributors agreed on the need to strengthen central Europe, especially through infrastructure development projects, economic cooperation and trade, Németh said. They termed the voluntary nature of Visegrád cooperation as an asset, enabling the member countries to cooperate just in the fields of shared interests, he said. It is another common feature that the Visegrád countries highly value freedom and reject external pressure, Németh said, referring to recent “moves by the European Union which can be seen as a kind of external pressure”.
The single issue of disagreement was dual citizenship as the Hungarian government insists on granting Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, he said.
The incumbent Slovak state secretary, Németh said, was open to further consultations, stressed the need to amend the relevant law, and expressed hope that “the issue would be settled in a reassuring way” once
the Hungarian community would once again be represented in the Slovak parliament.
Source: MTI
