Hungary is on track to permanently lose access to €1 billion worth of EU funds unless it manages to “correctly” implement over a dozen anti-corruption and conflict-of-interest reforms and also receives EU Commission approval by the end of the year—a task practically impossible within the current bureaucratic framework—Politico reported on Thursday, December 5th, citing unnamed EU officials with knowledge of the proceedings.
The money is part of Hungary’s €16 billion cohesion and pandemic-recovery funds which are still frozen by the Commission due to the country’s alleged rule-of-law shortcomings, a measure that conservative lawmakers in Brussels often regard as “a tool of ideological blackmail” against governments that refuse to subscribe to the EU mainstream’s liberal “values.”
The €1 billion tranche of the frozen cohesion funds in question is tied to 17 specific measures within a wide anti-corruption and conflict-of-interest reform legislation. As it was withheld from the 2022 budget, the two-year deadline for completing the reforms and unblocking the funds is set to expire on December 31st.
Hungary’s EU affairs minister János Bóka presented the country’s adopted amendments to the Act on Public Interest Funds to EU Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin in a meeting on Tuesday. These amendments aim to ensure academic freedom, a key requirement for restoring the country’s access to the Erasmus student exchange funds and research grants.
While Politico’s sources indicated that the Commission is likely to approve Budapest’s access to these funds soon, the new Polish budget chief said the parallel anti-corruption reforms linked to cohesion funds did not meet the expectations.
“It’s not quite what we were hoping for,” Serafin wrote on X.
It’s no coincidence that the budget portfolio was given to Poland in the new von der Leyen Commission. Brussels accused the previous conservative Polish government of very similar rule-of-law violations, freezing around €110 billion worth of EU funds which PM Donald Tusk’s liberal government magically unlocked after entering into office without a single reform implemented.
Now Tusk’s man in Brussels is in charge of overseeing the continued “blackmail” against Hungary, and it’s no surprise that he takes a tough stance on Budapest’s progress. “Unlike his Austrian predecessor Johannes Hahn, Serafin will hardly hesitate to block the Hungarian government’s subsidies from Brussels,” Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote about the incoming budget chief back in September.
The other key figure that Hungary needs to convince is the commissioner for justice and rule of law, Michael McGrath, who took over the job from Belgium’s Didier Reynders on Sunday. Yes, that Reynders, the one who’s now being investigated for conducting a major money laundering operation that took place over a decade while he was serving as a minister.
The last time Hungary’s anti-corruption reforms were on the table a few weeks ago, Reynders’s verdict was that “important concerns still persist.” Little did he know that his own corruption was way more ‘concerning’ and the Belgian police were only waiting for his diplomatic immunity to expire.
