Eurasia Press & News
The mayors of the Polish and Hungarian capitals have written to the European Commission urging it to fund municipalities directly if their governments insist on maintaining the veto of the EU recovery fund.
Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony and his Warsaw counterpart, Rafal Trzaskowski, announced at a joint online press conference on Monday that they have appealed to the EU for emergency funding should both their countries, which are currently vetoing the bloc’s budget over a squabble about making funding conditional on upholding the rule of law, end up remaining outside the planned 750-billion-euro recovery fund.
The two liberal politicians, who established the Pact of Free Cities initiative with their Prague and Bratislava colleagues late last year, said they have sent a letter to European institutions signed by 250 regional and municipal leaders in which they made clear that the stance of their respective nationalist-populist governments was not in line with that of ordinary citizens.
“The governments of Hungary and Poland are at war with their allies, they are at war with the EU, and they are also at war with their own municipalities. The Hungarian government’s strategy is clear: if it cannot convert public money to private money and channel it to its oligarchs, it is ready to give up those funds,” Karacsony said.
Karacsony added that Poland and Hungary’s blocking of the EU’s next seven-year budget and associated recovery fund could mean the EU decides to put together a new coronavirus recovery fund without their support, meaning they would lose crucial funds. Therefore, the two politicians are asking the EU to come up with a funding scheme targeting municipalities, meaning citizens would not be unfairly penalized for the anti-European stance of their governments.
Trzaskowski called the Polish government “totally irresponsible” and “wrapped up in an internal struggle”, meaning it lacks any clear negotiating strategy. He emphasised that if Poland and Hungary block the recovery fund, the whole of the EU would suffer the consequences, leaving member states with little choice but to establish a recovery fund as an intergovernmental initiative.
“How can you later compete with those who received the money? Is this really in our national interest?” he asked.
Trzaskowski added that the two cities had started lobbying for direct EU funding last year, aware that roughly 5-7 per cent of EU funds can be paid direct to municipalities. But they are more ambitious regarding funding from the recovery fund, since it’s larger cities that can more effectively tackle climate change and will be the hardest hit by the fall in tourism.
Both politicians said they are optimistic about the EU’s willingness to distribute more funds directly in the future. “We are offering a solution to EU decision-makers who want to introduce sanctions on countries that breach the rule of law, but without penalising the whole of society,” Karacsony said.
