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GULYÁS: EU FUNDS TO SUPPORT MIGRANTS SHOULD BE SPENT ON BORDER CONTROL

 

Funds earmarked by the European Union for the support of migrants should instead be spent on protecting the bloc’s external borders, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office said.
At his regular press briefing, Gergely Gulyás said it was “unacceptable” that while the EU was supporting “countless forms of migration” and providing migrants with financial aid with a view to helping with their integration, it had not supported Hungary’s border protection efforts. The 300 billion forints (EUR 938.5m) Hungary has spent on border protection was financed entirely from the state budget, Gulyás said. The EU has not reimbursed any of those costs, he added. He welcomed that a provision opposed by the Hungarian government, under which the EU’s border agency Frontex could intervene in a member state’s border protection efforts without the country’s consent, had been left out of an agreement recently approved by the European Parliament on bolstering the agency’s staff. Gulyás said that next month, Europeans should elect a European Parliament that fights migration instead of supporting it.
Gulyás also said the government had discussed a strategy proposed by innovation minister László Palkovics on “switching over” public transport to electric vehicles and supplying as many buses from domestic production as possible. The government supports and finances the acquisition of 3,000 electric buses in the current term, he added. The target is that within three years, new buses introduced in public transport should be all electric, he said.