EU finance ministers on Friday approved Hungary’s revised National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and the payment to the country of a €920 million tranche of the sums owed to Hungary in this revised post-pandemic recovery plan. including the relevant REPowerEU plan Agerpres.

According to the Minister of Finance of Hungary, Mihaly Varga, quoted by the MTI agency, this contribution will be paid in January.

Accusing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of violating the rule of law, the European Commission blocked Hungary’s access to both cohesion funds and European Pandemic Recovery Plan funds, the latter of which was provided on the basis of the PNRR.

The approval of Hungary’s PNRR, announced by the Community’s executive on November 23, together with the allocation of a corresponding tranche of €920 million, decisions that have now been confirmed by member states in the EU Council, where the Netherlands and the three Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) abstained, they come as European leaders try to persuade Orbán not to use a veto at next week’s European summit to block the start of negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to the EU and new European aid worth 50 billion euros to the country.

Hungary’s revised PNRR has a value of EUR 10.4 billion, of which EUR 6.5 billion are grants and EUR 3.9 billion are loans. In addition, Hungary will receive EUR 4.6 billion under the REPowerEU European Plan to accelerate the transition to clean energy. The first payment will be made under the REPowerEU plan. This payment does not require a review of the decision to apply the rule of law conditionality mechanism, which was first used by the European Commission against Hungary to withhold its cohesion funds.

As France Presse reports, in the coming days the European Commission may decide to conditionally unblock cohesion funds for Hungary, amounting to about 10 billion euros in the current EU multi-annual financial program for the period 2021-2027.

But no additional payments will be made to Budapest until the 27 “supersteps” imposed by Brussels on the rule of law are met by the Hungarian government, a European Commission spokesman said on Friday. According to him, it is about measures to fight corruption and conflict of interests, independence of the judicial system, freedom of speech and academic freedom, protection of migrants’ rights.

Prime Minister Orbán, the only European leader who has maintained close ties with Russia since it launched military aggression against Ukraine, accuses Brussels of blocking European funds belonging to Hungary for purely political reasons, namely the conservative orientation of the Hungarian government and the measures adopted by it against illegal migration and the LGBT community.