Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Brussels has said it will deduct €200mn from EU budget payments to Hungary, increasing tensions with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government over its approach to immigration.
The move by the EU’s top court comes a day after Budapest missed a deadline to pay a fine of the same value for breaking EU asylum laws.
“The commission is, in accordance with the applicable rules, moving to the offsetting procedure,” a European Commission spokesperson said on Wednesday.
The commission will deduct the sum from forthcoming payments to Budapest from the EU budget. “In theory, any payments can be looked at, nothing is excluded,” the spokesperson added.
“There is a hunt under way against politicians and governments who oppose migration,” said Hungary’s foreign minister Péter Szijjártó in response to the European Court of Justice’s move.
“The only way to protect Schengen is by defending the external borders.”
The EU has repeatedly frozen Hungary’s EU funds due to concerns over rule of law in the eastern European member-state.
The ECJ in December 2020 upheld the commission’s complaints that the country’s asylum process breached EU law, allowing for unlawful detention of applicants in “transit zones” and blocking applicants’ right to appeal.
The court imposed its fine in June this year, and accused Hungary of “an unprecedented and extremely serious infringement of EU law” for failing to implement the judgment. It accused Budapest of “disregarding” and “deliberately evading” the application of EU common policy.
The ECJ simultaneously imposed a daily fine of €1mn until Budapest amends its legislation, which has so far built up to almost €100mn. The commission on Monday sent out its first request for payment of the fines over a period spanning 93 days. Hungary has refused to pay the fine and has so far not indicated that it will make the necessary legal changes.
Hungary’s “conduct constitutes a serious threat to the unity of EU law”, the court said, and “seriously undermines the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility between the member states”.
In a post on X in June, Orbán called the fine “outrageous and unacceptable. It seems that illegal migrants are more important to the Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens.”
Orbán’s government boosted its domestic approval ratings in 2015 when it closed a transit route used by hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers fleeing war, and has maintained a hardline stance on migration since.
The dispute is the latest between Brussels’ institutions and the Eurosceptic government of Orbán, who has on numerous occasions sought to block the EU’s military aid to Ukraine and this year met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In July it took over the bloc’s rotating presidency of the EU Council and will hold the role until the end of the year.
Hungary’s spokesperson in the EU did not immediately respond to a request for comment.