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DOBREV ADVOCATES ' DREAM' OF BEING PART OF EUROPE

 

“Belonging to Europe has been a thousand-year dream of ours and we must not give it up,” Klára Dobrev, MEP and shadow prime minister of the opposition Democratic Coalition, told a rally of her party in Miskolc, in northern Hungary. When Hungarians supported the 1989-1990 change of political system they wanted to ensure that “prosperity is not conditional on snuggling up to the party state but on talent and hard work.” Hungarians, their local governments, chambers and unions want to be consulted when making decisions about their future rather than accept “decisions made over our head”, she said. “We are at home in Europe. By joining the EU and NATO Hungarians wanted to achieve a decent, predictable, European life,” she said. Dobrev insisted that since 2010 the country had “received as much European funding as would have made two countries rich”. “We could have adopted the euro, tidied up health care, and education,” she said. “There is no ‘sanctions-related’ inflation; what people pay in shops and at filling stations is the price for the Orbán regime … the consequences of bad governance,” she said. “Hungary has a future in Europe … even if the prime minister thinks that he has no more air in the EU and outside could be better; he can go but we will stay in Europe,” Dobrev said.