The European Union has denied Hungary its entitlement to around one billion euros for supporting structurally weak points, citing corruption.
The European Commission says that Hungary failed to implement reform requirements by the end of 2024, which would have allowed it to access them the money.
The funds have been frozen since 2022, and have remained in this state because Hungary didn’t follow instructions to change laws to prevent conflicts of interest and combat corruption, and didn’t make efforts towards transparency regarding public procurement, as well as media independence.
Instead, Hungary took out a loan of one billion euros from China in April (this only became public in July) for three years — but only after borrowing 900 million euros for the construction of the new railroad line from Budapest to Belgrade, which China itself is actually building.
China has been active in Hungary in recent years and months, with e-car manufacturer BYD building a large plant in Szeged and battery cell producer Catl building a mega-factory in Debrecen.
That doesn’t mean that Orbán’s government isn’t still trying to access the Eu funds. Orbán threatened to veto the EU’s next seven-year budget.
We should expect to see how that plays out around the middle of 2025.
In mid-December, Orbán also opposed the extension of sanctions against Russia, after he announced that he would block the start of EU accession negotiations with Ukraine and an EU aid package worth billions for Ukraine.
A year before, in 2023, the EC released around ten billion euros for Hungary despite criticism. Even this, conditionality measures were put into place. But this is the first time such a first move has been against a member of the European bloc.
Commentators suggest this might hail the end of Orbán’s era.
“They constantly try to take the money of Hungarians by a variety of means and a variety of methods,” Orbán said flippantly.
But EU rules are the same for everyone: any country is given two years to claim back funding that was withheld by the Commission.
