In return, Budapest is not deprived of 70 % of the aids to which he can claim within the framework of the European recovery plan.
by Virginie Malingre (Brussels, European office )
Finally, Hungary will have access to the 5.8 billion euros to which it can claim within the framework of the European recovery plan of 750 billion euros. The ambassadors to the European Union (EU) of the twenty-seven have reached an agreement on Monday, December 12 in the evening, which will allow Budapest not to lose most of this sum.
In the afternoon preceding this meeting, nothing was yet acquired. Throughout the weekend, the discussions had continued between capitals and with Budapest to try to find a solution to what looked like a Mikado: that a stick falls, and it was all the patiently edified compromise that is shouted. In total, four legislative proposals were on the table, the spells of which were intimately linked.
The Government of Viktor Orban is not close to touching the first euro of the European recovery plan: it will first be necessary to carry out important reforms to ensure greater independence of justice, today ‘Hui in the pay of power, or to better fight against corruption which many relatives of the Hungarian Prime Minister benefit. But if the Europeans had failed to agree before December 31, he would have lost 70 % of the funds reserved for him.
For Hungary, which undergoes the economic crisis with full force, the prospect of being able to touch this money was crucial. For the EU, depriving it would have caused an unprecedented slump while all the other member states have obtained the green light to have access to the aid of the European recovery plan and that the latter is funded by a common debt in the twenty Seven. “It would have been a huge crisis for the European institutions that would have found themselves threatened with blocking,” said a diplomat. In these times of war in Ukraine, where they must first and above all remain united against Moscow, Europeans could not afford it.
reduced sanction
Monday, the member states also decided to lighten the sanction that the Commission recommended that they take against Hungary, whose too great tolerance in corruption penalizes the community budget. While the European executive advocated, in the name of the conditionality mechanism of the payment of European funds to compliance with the rule of law, to deprive Budapest of 7.5 billion cohesion funds, they brought this sum to 6.3 billions of euros.
The Commission had activated this unprecedented mechanism in April, just after the triumphant re -election of Viktor Orban. During the summer, Hungary had presented a series of proposals for reforms in seventeen points, including the establishment of an “independent authority” to combat corruption and an anti-corruption working group where NGOs would sit . Faced with these “advances”, the community executive seemed ready, at the end of November, to withdraw his proposal to suspend 7.5 billion euros in payments in Budapest.
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