Hungary downplays concerns over potential EU presidency meeting boycotts

4 months ago 20

Budapest on Wednesday (10 July) downplayed mounting concerns that EU countries could boycott future informal meetings hosted by the Hungarian Council presidency.

Hungary’s EU Affairs Minister János Bóka’s said the lack of high-level participation at Tuesday’s informal gathering of EU industry ministers in Budapest, the first meeting of this kind since 1 July, did not prevent a “meaningful” discussion taking place.

Only seven EU member state ministers attended, with many countries declining to send top-level officials in protest against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s decision to meet with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Moscow last week.

EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton also didn’t attend the meeting. His stand-in, Commission Director-General for Internal Market, Kerstin Jorna, was also notably absent from the post-meeting press conference.

“So far, we have received no indication from any member states that political considerations would influence the level of their representation at informal meetings,” Bóka told reporters in Brussels.

The decision on which government officials were sent to informal EU meetings is up to individual member states, said Bóka.

“For us, only one thing is important: that these informal Council meetings are meaningful, and this requires representation, that is, it has the professional capacity and the political authority to engage in a meaningful policy discussion during the Council meetings,” said Bóka.

“I think the one informal Council meeting that has taken place in Hungary on Monday and Tuesday managed to do this,” he added.

His comments came as EU ambassadors on Wednesday (10 July) were seeking clarity about Orbán’s self-declared ‘peace mission’ to Russia and its outcomes.

The trip was sandwiched between a trip to Kyiv, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a visit to Beijing, for talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Some EU diplomats privately say they would be keen to explore options on how to rein in what they see as Hungary’s “destructive behaviour”.

It would “not be unthinkable” that some high-level meetings scheduled to take place in Budapest in the next six months could either have a reduced attendance or be boycotted, several EU diplomats told Euractiv ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.

Bóka stressed “some EU member states will just have to agree to disagree” about the appropriateness of his boss’s trip to Russia, which the Hungarian leader said was done to help accelerate a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine war.

“As I understand [it], what has become politically controversial is the visit to Moscow, and some member states [are] expressing the view that it was inappropriate,” said Bóka.

“I think (…) the end point of discussions could be that with some member states, we will just have to agree to disagree,” he said.

An informal gathering of EU environment ministers is scheduled for this Thursday and Friday (11-12 July). It will be followed by a meeting of energy ministers on Monday and Tuesday next week (15-16 July), both in Hungary.

The first significant test of how far member states are willing to go to sideline Budapest will be an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers at the end of August.

*Sofia Sanchez Manzanaro contributed to this reporting.

[Edited by Alexandra Brzozowski/Rajnish Singh]