Good afternoon and welcome to our press point. We have the great pleasure of having with us President von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, and with us the Prime Minister of Hungary, Péter Magyar. Welcome, President.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon. A very warm welcome, Prime Minister Péter, to Brussels, the Barmore here. The 12th of April will stay in our memory for a very long time. On that day, the Hungarian people took their future in their hands. They made a clear choice. They chose Europe and they chose democracy. They chose to return to the heart of our union where they belong. And it has only been a few weeks, but we can already feel a strong wind of change across Hungary. And you, dear Péter, are sending to the world powerful messages with your swearing-in on Europe Day and the sound of the European anthem and with the European colors once again flying proudly over the Hungarian Parliament. These are symbols that a new era is beginning for Hungary. Now, while messages and symbols are important, hard work makes the difference. And in record time, you have formed a government with ministers drawn from the top ranks of their professions who have stepped up for the public interest. Your government is moving with speed and determination to deliver on the promises you have made to the Hungarian people to kickstart the economic recovery, to fight corruption, and to restore the rule of law. And in very short time, we already have concrete progress to share. We will take no shortcuts. We will address all issues and we will work hand in hand for the good of Hungary and the European Union. So let me outline the areas that we are concentrated on. My first point is on structural reforms for Hungary. They are much needed to fight corruption and state capture in Hungary. They also unlock billions of euros in funding frozen over the last years. Now, your government and the European Commission, we together, we immediately went to work. We agreed on a robust architecture to ensure that Hungary addresses corruption and rule of law concerns. And indeed, Hungary has decided to join the European Public Prosecutor's Office to safeguard European funds in the future. You have agreed to strengthen the integrity authority to make sure it has real teeth to detect and fight corruption as well as conflicts of interest. You are also revising your public procurement law to curb fraud and protect taxpayers' money. And you have addressed structures that presented high risks of state capture. The public interest trusts, the PITS, that covered increasingly large parts of the Hungarian economy will be phased out. These are strong signals that Hungary is turning the page. In only a few weeks, you have driven forward long overdue reforms. Reforms for the benefit of Hungary and reforms for the benefit of the European Union. My second point is on investments. Our teams have worked hard day and night together to find common ground and agree on a list of investments for the revised Next Generation EU plan. I think the hard work has really paid off now. We agreed on very concrete projects that will support key sectors such as, for example, energy, housing, but also transport and small and medium enterprises, just to name a few. We have agreed now on a safe and solid lending zone and therefore subject to the reforms that are being adopted and investments implemented. I'm very happy to announce today that we can unlock 10 billion euros for Hungary. My third point is that there is also significant progress on the topic of cohesion funds. With the progress on the super milestones, we have also been able to unlock the conditionality-related cohesion funds worth 4.2 billion euros. And my fourth point is on fundamental rights. We have also made great progress on the protection of fundamental rights in Hungary, notably on academic freedom. Hungary will gradually phase out the public interest trusts, the PITS, and pass legislation to address concerns about conflict of interest and integrity rules. This is a big step forward, long awaited, on academic freedom, and therefore this will unlock another 2.2 billion euros of cohesion funds for Hungary. On the child protection law, more steps will have to be taken, but we are on a good direction of travel. And finally, a special word on Erasmus. This iconic program is one of the great trademarks of the European Union. Entire generations have been shaped by Erasmus. Friendships, families, freedom. With Erasmus, young Europeans fall in love with another language or culture or country and with its citizens. And in doing so, they understand that our diversity is our strength. And it is so important that young Hungarians can benefit from this wonderful experience too. So as early as the next academic year, good news: Hungarian students can again be part of the Erasmus community. With that, dear Péter, let me conclude. A great deal of work has already been achieved in very short time and markets are already taking notice. Investors' confidence is returning. Trust is being rebuilt. This gives confidence for the next steps to come and we will continue to work together at this pace each step of our way. Thank you very much and the floor is yours.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everybody. Let me start on a personal note. I'm really grateful to you personally and all of your colleagues who made a tremendous work and job. You know, we just started the negotiations five weeks ago and now we are here just after three weeks. The new Hungarian government was formed and we have achieved already a historic breakthrough and agreement, really, really important for the Hungarian people, for my beloved country, Hungary. Many thanks. We are very grateful and we are ready to continue cooperating together in the interest of the Hungarian people and all the European citizens. And I would also like to thank my colleagues, all of the Hungarian ministers and colleagues in the government, working very, very hard all the days, all the nights. There were some points when I thought it was hopeless and it was not feasible so quickly and everything, but we are here and we are very happy and I'm sure that all the Hungarians will be very happy. So, thanks again. And if you don't mind, I now will switch to Hungarian because these messages are very, very important for my compatriots.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Hungarian compatriots. One of our most important commitments during the campaign was that we're going to bring back, we're going to unlock all those thousands of billions of Hungarian forints that the Hungarian people deserve. Hungarian companies deserve it, the health system, the education system, transport, the social sphere deserves it. We've listened to the previous government a number of times, hearing their objections why things cannot be done. They have been lying to the Hungarian people. They have been lying about the European Union. Orbán Viktor and his friends lied about the European Union institutions and they lied about the real reasons behind the blocking of European funds. They lied that the union is not going to give these thousands of billions of forints to the Hungarian people because the Hungarian government thinks differently about illegal migrants, about the war in Ukraine or about certain human rights. Us and me personally, we clearly stated during the campaign that the real reason why the European institutions and the European Union was not in a position to pass all these thousands of billions of forints — the reason for that was corruption. Corruption was at an incredible level, at an incredible rate in Hungary. It was impossible that a prime minister and their family were directly related to hundreds or thousands of billions of forints in corruption. From the very beginning, I've been saying this: if Hungary accepts anti-corruption measures, if we establish the office for asset recovery, if we increase the powers of the integrity authority, or if we accept rules against cronyism, then I think these monies will come to Hungary and this is all we had to do. We accepted with the Commission the measures against corruption and the measures that the President referred to. These steps, in just a few weeks, were enough to conclude a political agreement about these incredibly important funds. Three or four weeks were enough for us to complete that which the previous government of Viktor Orbán could not accomplish, or maybe they did not want to accomplish it. Well, that will be history. There are nicer and not so nice pages in history. Well, soon we'll find out. Anyway, the point is that we've come to an agreement with the President and with the European Commission about every question that has been mentioned that will make Hungarian people access those funds that they deserve. April 12th, as the President mentioned, the Hungarian people gave an overwhelming mandate to the Tisza government. One of the things that the Hungarian people want from us is these funds. They want to kickstart the economy. For years, Hungary's economy could not achieve much. We've had the highest inflation rate in Europe. Day to day now we're trying to make sure that public services can actually continue. Again, we'll bring these funds home to help Hungarians, to help kickstart the economy, to restore public services, to help Hungarian companies, to make sure that SMEs can be competitive. Our objective has been very clear during the informal talks and during the official talks equally. We were very tough negotiating partners and I'm pretty sure that the President fought for us. We said we want the whole thing. We want the whole package. Thank you for your confirmation. Even tonight we were at the negotiating table and we restarted it very early this morning and I think that this is a huge success and I think this is the joint success between the European Union and the Hungarian authorities, as the President said. Based on today's meeting, 2 billion euros have been unlocked. And this is, and I'm saying this to the Hungarian people, even with the better exchange rates that we're having in Hungary right now, it's about 6,000 billion forints, which is 13% of the country's budget. Just so you get a feel for what sort of monies we're talking about. Obviously, not everything is very happy because what's sad is that what Europe and what the President has been asking us to do — those are things that they could have done before if the previous Orbán government had been representing the interests of the people, if they wanted to help the economy, if they wanted to help our health system, if they really had wanted to buy new trains instead of those that catch on fire. They could have done it. The previous government could have done it. Today we've proven that there was no ideology behind these questions. The only thing that we have to do is to fight corruption. Actually, in certain aspects we may be overachieving the Commission's requests. In certain areas we're going to be tougher on corruption than would be absolutely necessary. And I was happy I could officially hand over to the President Hungary's accession to the EPO and we are very hopeful that this can be completed very quickly. We'll do all we can to make it a quick process. Now, what have we changed? These have been referred to by the President. So, I really don't want to rehash all these things. What's very important, for instance, is that we have changed the current property declaration system. The one we had before was completely useless. For instance, one of the ministers of Mr. Orbán said he was an inventor. He worked as an inventor and through this invention activity he lent huge sums of money and it turned out that he was not that bright after all. So probably there was nothing about this invention business anyway. So we want to make sure that the system of property declaration should be absolutely clear and anyone who is lying on their property declaration should be accountable to the law regardless of who they are, regardless of what high office they might hold. We have lots of changes that we need to implement. For instance, if somebody now, from now on, if somebody lies in their property declaration, they're looking at a two-year prison term. We're going to do everything possible against corruption. We want to make sure that no oligarchy can continue to exist in Hungary and people in high positions can channel public money off to their families. Now the 14.6 billion euros that we've unlocked fall into different categories. 4.4 billion euros will come from cohesion. Now we're going to turn this to finance transport, health sector, 2.2 for education, mainly for higher education research. Apart from that, we've got billions that we will be able to use for projects that will be implemented. I'm looking at my finance minister who is immediately smiling when he means the room for maneuver of the budget will be increased by these. Obviously that will make other ministers very happy because this means that we will be able to implement other investments and the Hungarian people and companies will be able to benefit from. Again, that's about 4 billion. 1.5 billion will turn towards the grid development, the electric grid development, which is very important because with this we're going to be able to continue with planting new solar panels and creating new wind farms. And this will mean that at the end of the day, Hungarian companies, be them large companies or SMEs, will be able to buy cheaper electricity. This is very important because as of today, Hungarians pay the highest prices in Europe for electricity. So this will again help companies. Now, if I'm looking at my Minister of Transport, Dávid Vitézy, he is going to be one of the happiest people in the government because we'll be able to use 2 billion euros to buy new trains, new interurban trains. This is going to be a huge step ahead, especially if we compare this against the previous government's activities and János Lázár, the previous responsible person, who instead of buying new trains, they started to lease very old, 20-year-old coaches and carriages that are catching fire without any — they just keep getting fired. So on the intercity lines routes we'll be seeing new trains and new coaches. Now we also on new digital technology developments SMEs will be benefiting from new resources including grants and loans. Again, the total is 16.4 billion euros, which is more than 10% of the Hungarian budget. Roughly it's 13% of the Hungarian budget. So I think this is an historic day. Well, definitely for Hungary. If every time I come here I go back with this amount of money, I'll be coming here more often.
Actually, I do like this city. That might be a surprise. I've spent nine years here with my family, with my three sons. Yesterday I talked to the Secretary General of NATO and the Prime Minister of Belgium and we agreed with the President that my first official meeting will be on the 18th here again. Competitiveness, new investments, new jobs, helping people with new building, new homes, which is not going to be helped by the six to eight billion euros that will come from these unlocked funds, but through the multiplier effect this will be up to five times more that we will be able to use to finance new housing. And maybe the most important is the fight against corruption. So all the negotiations with the Commission, with the Commission members and with our President have been about how to unlock these funds. We've not talked about anything else between us. We are absolutely clear that this is a political agreement. This is a very strong political signal. We also know that we have loads of work ahead of us. We've got to approve lots of legislation. But the good news here is that today in Europe, Hungary has the most robust government majority. So even if there's a flu, even if the flu hits the Hungarian government, we'll be able to pass any new legislation. Now, if the polls actually say that if we had a rerun of the elections, our government would even have more seats than it actually has. Thank you very much for allowing us to be here and to go through with these negotiations and we're very happy to be able to continue working with you to ensure Hungary's future in the European Union and to ensure Hungary's competitiveness.
Thank you. Now before taking a couple of questions, let me remind you that immediately after this press point, you'll be able to ask all your technical questions to our colleagues who will be here just after this press point. Let us start with H.
Good afternoon. I have two questions. One is, can you clarify regarding RRF? So the Hungarian envelope is 10.4 billion. How much is worth the projects you are talking about? Can you make it up to 10.4 billion or what exactly is in this Hungarian envelope? And the second one is migration. You haven't touched upon that, but there is a 1 million daily fine on this topic because the previous government did laws which are against the EU legislation. So I was wondering when and how are you intending to change this Hungarian legislation regarding the refugee status? Thank you.
So I can confirm that it is 10 billion euros that have been unfrozen or will be unfrozen from Next Generation EU. Then the 4.2 billion from the cohesion conditionality and 2.2 billion for the academic freedom, which makes in sum 16.4 billion euros. That is quite a sum, but as Péter said, the Hungarian people deserve it. So again, many, many thanks for the outstanding work that has been done because it was a race against time and we won it and that's important for the Hungarian people. On the migration pact, we will work very closely with the Hungarian authorities on migration and implementing the pact. You know the pact and the structure behind it. It will create the same conditions all over the European Union so that we have very clear objectives here for the implementation and we will work towards this goal together with the Hungarian government.
Thank you. Just very quickly, the numbers have been cited by the President, so I'm not going to repeat that. There is obviously more detail, but I think we'll have more time for that later. Now, the failed previous government keeps talking about the immigration pact. The President will be able to confirm that Mr. Orbán was here for 16 years. He attended all the meetings that Vanessa said. Well, sometimes he was elegantly asked to leave and have a coffee outside, and sometimes he asked somebody to take his place and to vote for him. Mr. Orbán had all the time and possibility to stop the approval of the migration pact. He never managed to do that. Well, he hasn't managed to do anything over the past few years. He's been using his veto power just for the sake of using it. And obviously, as a result, he was left with no more friends. And any time that a decision had to be made that was not a unanimous decision, he couldn't find any allies. He couldn't influence the procedure even if he was right in certain situations. Let's not forget something: the migration pact that was mentioned by the President. This is something that was approved while Mr. Orbán was frequenting this city and all the meetings. It was approved and this is something that has to be directly implemented in the member states. And this is something that Mr. Orbán keeps forgetting to tell Hungarians. And although obviously their means of communications have been weakened significantly recently, but anyway, the point is that there are many tougher measures in this migration pact. Back in the day, he actually was right about the weaknesses and shortcomings of this pact about illegal migration. And in many areas, the migration pact had to be changed so that the external borders can be better protected. Now, what Mr. Viktor likes to say, and let's be honest, the choice of name is not very good here because the name can be actually frightening. It might frighten people. If we're talking about mass migration, something that we had in 2015, what would member states do in that situation? Now, that is the question. There's more than one option. There could be member states who would like to accept migrants. There are others who can pay if they don't want to take in any. And there could be other ways. If somebody, for instance, doesn't want either of the first two, but they want to help to protect external borders, that could be also an option. So this is what it's all about. And this pact is what Mr. Orbán and his government approved and now they're trying to use that as they're trying to frighten people with it. We're going to have the exact same rules to protect our external borders as before. Obviously, it's not only our borders because it's also the borders of the European Union. We're not going to have migrant camps within Hungary. Actually, that was one of the secret plans of Mr. Orbán. Well, actually, I'm not quite sure how well it is known in Brussels. During his reign, Mr. Orbán set free 2,200 people smugglers from Hungarian prisons, namely people whose business it was to bring in people and to trade with them, to help people get into Europe. He said that prisons are overpopulated. That's the problem. That's why he needs to free these people. Now, my message to him is that there's no need to worry about these people because we're not going to have this as a problem anymore. If we need more spaces, if we need more vacancies in prisons, then we're going to break some more. But we're not going to let convicted criminals loose.
Thank you, Vitali. Please.
Thank you, Freedom TV channel. For the President: how are negotiations with Ukraine on opening the first cluster for EU accession progressing? And during the negotiation, did you link the release of EU funds for Hungary to the opening of clusters in negotiation with Ukraine? And for the Prime Minister: are you satisfied with the Ukrainians' proposal regarding guarantees for Ukrainian Hungarians? And when do you expect to have a meeting with the Ukrainian President? And will we see a new chapter in Ukraine-Hungary relationship without previous veto policy on a lot of decisions in support of Ukraine? Thank you.
Why don't you start? Yeah.
Thank you. I'll start off this time and I hope that the President is going to confirm this when I say that there was absolutely no link between the unfreezing of the funds and the opening of the first chapter of the Ukraine talks. I told the President of the European Union that, well, actually the Hungarian press knows this already, so that we are already talking to our Ukrainian partners. What's most important for us is that we need guarantees regarding the 100,000 Hungarians who live in Ukraine, that they will be able to use their mother tongue at school, in cultural activities, in public administration. We have an 11-point proposal which is not new to the Ukrainian partners, again regarding language and cultural questions. We'd like the Ukrainian partners to agree to them. This is nothing special in Europe as well as across the world. It's a human right regardless of where you live, that if you live in a settlement or in a town where your language is predominant, you should be able to use that language. Should it be a student in an elementary school or the mayor? I think that we've been through a few rounds of discussions. We have active links with our Ukrainian partners in these technical matters and I'm hoping that we'll be able to tackle these 11 points and they can introduce the necessary changes in their legislation. And we're going to have the foreign ministers of our countries sit down. And again, I'd like to confirm that I'd be very happy after these technical meetings to sit down with the Ukrainian President, to sit down somewhere well in the Hungarian-speaking areas of Ukraine and to open a genuinely new chapter in the relationship between Hungary and Ukraine. Obviously, there are all sorts of disputes between countries. We have some disputes with other neighboring countries as well, but that's normal. I've already been to Poland, to Austria to talk with those countries. And when I talked to Mr. Tusk, we agreed that we'd like to reinforce the operation of the Visegrád Four countries, perhaps have new members. And I will be meeting the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland and hopefully we will have the chance to have the first new V4 meeting.
Yes, I'm very happy to hear about the ongoing process that the Prime Minister has just described. To confirm, there's absolutely no link between the negotiations that we had and Ukraine because Next Generation EU and cohesion funds are not linked to accession. But of course, we have been discussing many topics, among them also of course accession of candidate countries. And I want to re-emphasize here, and we've discussed that, this is a merits-based process and our line is very clear that Ukraine and Moldova have met all the conditions necessary to open the fundamentals cluster, the first cluster. So they have been working hard. They have been working intensely on the necessary reforms and they have delivered on these reforms. So there is no reason to delay the process. We will certainly have a discussion about that at the European Council. But again, I want to confirm there's no link between our negotiations that we have right now and the question of Ukraine.
And we take the final question, Sándor.
Thank you. I will switch to Hungarian if you don't mind. Euronews. My question to both of you now: the recovery fund, during the next three months, how will Hungary be able to meet all the requirements? And I'm talking about the hundreds of milestones. And this question goes specifically to the Prime Minister. There were certain reforms that the previous government submitted to the Commission. Obviously, certain measures of those cannot be completed because of lack of time. Have you offered any replacement measures?
Yeah. So I can again confirm, I mean, we've been working extremely hard over the last four weeks and again many, many thanks to the negotiating teams for the excellent work that has been done. We have now a very solid architecture and landing zone for rule of law topics where reforms have to be taken, for non-rule of law topics where also reforms have to be taken, and for the investments we've described that at length. And the point is of course the rule of law reforms or all the reforms that are in this package have to be done and have to be concluded and of course investments have to be implemented. The moment the reform law, for example, passes the parliament, the moment we can disburse the respective money that is tied to this specific milestone or super milestone. It has been very intensive work but it has been very successful and I'm very glad that we found in such short time such a good solution.
Let me respond to these questions. As the President said, there are certain milestones and super milestones that cannot be completed, that cannot be implemented because of lack of time or because they become moot. But obviously the European Union is fair enough to treat some of these milestones flexibly, as flexibly as possible, so that we can do our best until August 31st. Again here we're talking about fight against corruption and public interest trusts. Now the agreement is this: there's going to be a transition period regarding the public interest trusts related to universities because there are some universities that have, for instance, hospitals working with them and there's just time needed to restructure the ownership structure. And the deadline there is August 31st, 2027. Until that point, those public interest funds that are not related to universities will be phased out by the end of summer, that is August 31st. MCC in particular is going to be restructured. Obviously, public activities will be taken over by the government or the new owner. The problem itself was not privatization or the trusts themselves. It wasn't a problem for Europe or for the Hungarian people, but the problem was how the previous government implemented this and how public monies were channeled in incredibly strange ways to private individuals and private interests. Now, we didn't have during these past talks, we didn't have to promise anything very special regarding the reforms. Obviously, it's everybody's interest that we have a budget that can be actually used. I'm not quite sure if many of you in this room remember the name Almonia. A few years back, there were certain situations where there was fraud in the Hungarian budget. This year's budget deficit was increased to 5% during the previous part of this year. Now when we entered into power it turns out that it's actually 7%, the budget gap, and that's another reason why it's very important to be able to get the new unfrozen funds so that we can help the budget as well. We are going to implement the necessary changes. We're going to establish the new authorities that are necessary and the budget for 2027 will be built on a good basis, strong basis, let's say a granite basis, as opposed to sand that the previous budget was built on. Now just one more sentence and I'm sorry for taking so long. I understand that the previous President Tamás Sulyok wanted to say something about the issue of European Union funds. Well, interestingly, for the past three or four years, he said nothing. He didn't say anything before, but I think now he is saying something because he's concerned about rule of law in inverted commas concerned in Hungary, which I think proves that he's got a very interesting sense of humor. Now, as you will remember, we have a very strong mandate in the Hungarian parliament and it is more than funny that the President of Hungary now suddenly has an opinion about things despite the fact that during the previous government many children have been exposed to horrible risks and clearly the President of Hungary had absolutely no problem with those problems. Now when he knows that probably his job is not as sure as it was before and now probably he's actually worried about his own income. Now let me remind him that he has until March 31st to resign from his position.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you, Prime Minister, President. And as said, we will resume in a few minutes. Don't go far with our team of experts who will be replying to your technical questions. Thank you and see you in a minute.
