The opposition E-PM and the leftist Democratic Coalition (DK) said the figures showed that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and central bank governor György Matolcsy have lost the war against public debt. DK’s László Varjú warned that the tendency could lead to another excessive deficit procedure by the European Union.

According to radical nationalist Jobbik, the government has failed in its attempts “involving a multitude of austerity measures” and concluded that the government should start without delay negotiations about rescheduling the national debt.

The opposition Socialist Party called on the government to abandon the idea of using a 10-billion-euro loan from Russia to upgrade the Paks plant and take steps to strengthen the ailing Hungarian currency. Sándor Burány, the Socialist head of parliament’s budget committee, said it was clear that the government is to blame for the record high debt and insisted that the “deliberately weakened” forint and the government’s “unpredictable” economic policy were weighing heavily on Hungarian families.

The green opposition LMP called on the government to meet its earlier pledge to reduce the national debt. LMP deputy Erzsébet Schmuck, deputy chair of parliament’s budget committee, said that putting the state debt on a downward path would require dropping “luxury development projects”, with special regard to the Paks upgrade or the central bank’s purchases.

Responding to opposition criticism, the ruling Fidesz party said that it was the parties of the left that had doubled Hungary’s national debt. It insisted that under the previous, Socialist governments the country was “up to the eyes” in debt, the national debt rising from 8,300 billion forints to 22,000 billion, or from 53% of GDP to 85%.

The previous governments had “ruined the country and made it vulnerable through their perilous and extreme economic policies,” it said, adding that the country is fiscally stable and the economy has been put back on a long-term growth path, while employment is record high.

Source www.hungarymatters.hu

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