Polish government is moving in a zigzag, Hungary holds its position firmly
HUNGARY
- In Brief
05 Dec 2020
by Istvan Racz
Just one day after Polish deputy PM Gowin told the press his government could back away from its fiscal veto if the EU issued some legal assurances on the rule-of-law mechanism, the same government's speaker said that his words were mistranslated or misinterpreted but anyway misunderstood, as he actually did not say what he had been reported to have said.But it is more likely than not that Mr. Gowin actually spoke as he was reported to have spoken, or at least in a way which was very easy to misunderstand in the way it was misunderstood. The background is that in the Polish government, there seems to be a conflict over the veto subject. The author of this note is by no means an expert on Poland, but it seems that one of the two junior partners of the governing coalition energetically demands a veto on the EU budget, whereas the other one, the party founded and led by Mr. Gowin, opposes it. Anyway, the current government view appears to be that Poland keeps itself to its recent agreement with Hungary that it rejects the EU's fiscal package unless the EU agrees to water down the conditionality mechanism embedded in it to a level which is currently unlikely to be acceptable for the donor countries.Meanwhile, Hungary's government holds itself to its veto decision firmly. Most lately, PM Orbán wrote an open letter to Manfred Weber, the parliamentary faction head of the European People's Party and one of his leading opponents in these days. In this letter, Mr. Orbán wrote in a somewhat offended style that the EU and within that specifically Germany should not regard the Hungarian government as stupid as to believe that the conditionality mechanism would not be used directly ...
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