Gergely Karácsony, the mayor of Budapest, and Istvan Ujhelyi, an opposition Socialist MEP have turned to Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, over 5,472 billion euros of European Union recovery funds that Hungary is slated to receive. Ujhelyi told an online briefing that the EP had made funding conditional on the government submitting a recovery programme in the next few weeks with the involvement of municipalities, trade unions and NGOs. He said the government had failed to present such a plan to lawmakers and a parliamentary debate had therefore not taken place, adding that details of the proposals and a spending plan had not been forthcoming. At the same time, the government has insisted to the EC that broad social dialogue in Hungary was under way, he said.
Ujhelyi said the reason why they wrote their letter to Von der Leyen was to point out the discrepancy between the government’s claims and the reality, and to request an investigation of whether the government had engaged in social dialogue and whether funding would actually be spent on priority areas.