PM’s Office: Budapest’s leaders joined talks on recovery plan only at last minute

Budapest’s leadership only attempted to join in social consultations on the government’s recovery plan at last minute, according to an official of the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Recovery and Resilience Plan takes the entire country’s interests as well as EU rules into account, Szabolcs Ágostházy, the state secretary for EU developments, said in an open letter to the city’s mayor, Gergely Karácsony, on Tuesday.

Responding to a critical letter from the mayor, he said Budapest’s leaders had only made an attempt to involve themselves in the social consultation process mere weeks before the plan was submitted, notwithstanding several prior government invitations to do so.

In the summer of 2020, Karácsony was first invited to put forward his proposals, he said. In mid-December the Association of Budapest Municipalities led by Karácsony was similarly invited to participate in consultations, yet it was only at the end of March this year that various interest groups, NGOs and local councils did so, he added.

• Fidesz official: Budapest had not received any compensation because the left-wing council has reserves

Ágostházy said a joint government-municipality working group set up after a meeting of the Metropolitan Public Development Council at the end of March started its work almost immediately.

“State secretariat staff made available all relevant information … to the mayor’s staff so that despite the delay — not through no fault of the government — he could make substantive comments on the Recovery and Resilience Plan.”

The state secretary accused the mayor and his staff of putting forward expensive and uncosted proposals for the capital whose lack of professional substantiation “made it hugely difficult even to consider the merits of the proposals.”

Budapest, Ágostházy said, was the country’s most highly developed city and its level of development was far higher than that of the EU average. Further, Budapest’s local government is the richest in the country, he said, adding the city had demanded that almost one-third of the resources of the Hungarian recovery plan go to Budapest without a care for the needs of other parts of Hungary.