Viktor Orban suffers blow as Hungary to miss out on €200m in EU funds after missing major deadline
Hungary will soon be deprived of a share of its EU funds for refusing to pay a fine imposed in a blow to Viktor Orban’s regime.
The European Commission has triggered a special procedure to deduct the €200million fine that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has imposed on Hungary over the country’s long-standing restrictions on the right to asylum.
Budapest had missed the first deadline in late August, prompting the executive to send a second payment request with a deadline of September 17.
After this second request was ignored, the Commission confirmed it would activate the “offsetting procedure” to subtract the €200m fine from Hungary’s allocated share of the EU budget.
It comes after Hungary closed down a major transit route through Hungary for hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing war and poverty in 2015, bolstering his domestic support but earned him widespread criticism from EU allies.
In June, the EU’s top court ruled that Hungary must pay a €200m fine for not implementing changes to its policy of handling migrants and asylum seekers at its border.
In the weeks that followed, Orban ratcheted up his anti-EU rhetoric, calling the fine “outrageous and acceptable” and arguing that his country should be paid €2billion for defending its borders since 2015.
He said in a recent radio interview: “We should not be punished but our achievements should be recognised and money should not be taken away from us but given to us so that we can continue this work…It is a matter of time.”
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Recently, Budapest has threatened to bus migrants to Belgium “voluntarily” and “free of charge,” a move that would constitute an unprecedented case of instrumentalised migration by one member state against another.
No transfers of migrants have yet taken place but the scheme has already been met with fierce criticism from Belgian and EU authorities.
It is the latest in a series of clashes between Brussels and Budapest with growing concerns over Hungary’s decision to extend its National Card scheme to Russian and Belarusian citizens.
The Commission has warned this could enable sanctions circumvention and pose a threat to the “entire” Schengen Area.
Budapest has strongly denied any risks to internal security, claiming the extension to Russian and Belarusian citizens was needed to palliate labour shortages.