Menu
I am delighted that you have accepted our invitation. First of all, on behalf of Hungary I want to condemn the anti-Semitic rioting in Amsterdam. We Hungarians also find this unacceptable. You are now in a city – and I say this to foreigners – where perhaps the largest synagogue in Europe and the city’s largest Catholic cathedral are practically a stone’s throw apart. And this proximity is also symbolic of our city. It is a meeting place, a meeting place of different cultures: East, West, North and South. And this is what makes it so uniquely tolerant. This is why here in Budapest we live together in peace and security – and I wish the same for the people of Amsterdam.
As you know, the European Council has held an informal meeting in Budapest. Hungary has already held the Presidency, the rotating Presidency of the European Union. That was eleven years ago, but on that occasion there was no informal summit in Budapest, so this was the first time. We have been honoured to host the leaders of the Union. Just so that you do not ask unnecessary questions, I would like to make it clear in advance that it is common knowledge that there are serious political conflicts between Hungary and the Commission of the European Union. I, too, have disputes with the President, but on this occasion Mrs. von der Leyen is our guest, we invited her, she accepted our invitation, she has come to our home, and a guest deserves a polite welcome and respect. So at the Council meeting there was no intense dispute – and indeed no dispute at all – between us. We will fight our battles in Brussels. Moreover, on the main issue here – competitiveness – we were in complete agreement.
The Hungarian Presidency set itself the goal of focusing all our efforts on competitiveness, and the plan was to create a competitiveness pact, an agreement: the Budapest Declaration. And after many months of work we have achieved this. I would like to thank my staff, the President of the Commission and her staff, my friend Charles Michel and his staff, and also President Mario Draghi, who prepared his report. It has taken a lot of work by a lot of people to be able to adopt a joint document that puts competitiveness at the heart of our work for the next five years.
The facts are known. Over the past two decades, growth in the European Union has been consistently slower than that of China or the United States. Here in Europe productivity is growing slower than that of our competitors, the European Union’s share of world trade is falling, and compared to their competitors in the United States, European Union companies are paying three times more for electricity and four times more for natural gas . Therefore the Budapest Declaration’s assertion that immediate action is needed is no exaggeration. I will now present some of the Declaration’s key points to you.
First, we decided to launch a rationalisation revolution, reducing administrative burdens. As a first step, by the end of the first half of 2025 we will drastically reduce the number of reporting obligations that are greatly burdening European companies. We have resolved to adopt urgent measures to reduce high energy prices. We have also resolved to formulate a genuine industrial policy in the coming period. We have all agreed – and we have pledged, we have confirmed – that by 2030 we will devote 3 per cent of Europe’s GDP to research and development. We are determined to make the Capital Markets Union a reality in its entirety. Madam President, you have also spoken about the fact that the level of the European people’s savings, the amount of their savings, is higher than the American people’s savings; but Europeans keep their money in banks, and banks are not genetically suited to financing various high-tech, risky investments. Therefore we need to move bank deposits into financial funds, and we need to persuade our citizens to do so in order to make those funds more easily available for innovative economic solutions. We will take steps in order to do this. We have decided to create a European defence industrial base. We have agreed that over the next five years competitiveness will be at the heart of our efforts. We have also agreed that every new legislative proposal should be accompanied by an assessment, what we call a “competitiveness test”, to see what impact it will have on competitiveness. The President of the Commission has agreed with the members of the Council that at European Council meetings we will regularly return to the issue of competitiveness.
At the end of today’s deliberations I am optimistic. I got the feeling that no one wants to manage decline, but we all want to make Europe great again. If the Americans have decided that they are going to make America great, there is only one possible European answer: we shall make Europe great.
Thank you very much for your attention.
