German Green Party MEP Daniel Freund launched another rant this week directed at Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, this time calling for his arrest after Orbán’s debate appearance in the European Parliament.
“It’s time to issue a European arrest warrant,” said Freund while speaking about Orbán. Freund claimed Orbán is corrupt.
“Who has ever stolen so much from European sources?” asked Freund.
The German MEP was outraged after Orbán was allowed to speak at all and expressed that he did not like the fact that Orbán embarked on his “peace mission,” which included the Hungarian leader’s efforts to visit Moscow, Kyiv, Beijing, and Washington D.C. in order to strike a peace deal and end the war in Ukraine.
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One of the most oft-cited examples of “corruption” in Hungary is a “bridge to nowhere”, which was built with EU funds. Orbán himself had nothing to do with the project and instances of pointless or misused instances of EU taxpayer money are widespread throughout Europe. In fact, projects “to nowhere” are commonplace in Germany. In 2020, the country’s own state-funded media, Deutsche Welle, ran an entire article on projects that were extraordinary wastes of taxpayer money and highly questionable in terms of corruption
“In the eastern state of Saxony, locals have petitioned for decades for a bike path to be built along the road between the towns of Pulsnitz and Kamenz. When the train tracks were renovated, a crossing for pedestrians and cyclists was installed — but the path itself has yet to be built. The railroad crossing to nowhere cost an estimated €30,000 to build, as well as hundreds of euros a year in operating and maintenance costs,” wrote DW.
The report is issued every year and among the numerous examples of public waste is “€1.2 million to build a bridge that is not yet connected to a street. According to the German Taxpayers Federation, the initial reason to build the bridge was for it to cross over a private industrial train track. However, the company announced earlier this year that it wanted to dismantle the tracks — thereby removing the main reason for building the bridge.”
Brussels Signal also reports that the German Taxpayers Association has just published a report this year showing similar taxpayer-funded examples: including a €300,000 bridge that leads nowhere and a €4 million tunnel for bats that is not even being used by the animals.
On top of that, within the EU parliament, a number of MEPs have been implicated in a broad and wide-ranging corruption investigation that has seen several arrests. Freund was remarkably silent about these arrests, considering so many of those arrested were left-wing MEPs. For more information about the case, Remix News created a video explainer last year.
Freund himself received an icy response from Hungarian lawmakers such as Ernő Schaller-Baross, who immediately reacted to Daniel Freund’s statements. He said the German MEP should deal with his own country.
“Why don’t you talk about what uncontrolled migration means in Germany?” he asked. He then emphasized that Daniel Freund is not concerned with the fact that the German Green government threatens the German car industry, which is costing the industry billions of euros and threatening the entire European economy.
“You don’t deal with Europe, you only deal with my country. We have had enough of this,” he said.
“Your support in Germany is in the single digits. Go home,” Schaller-Baross said, referencing crashing support for the Greens in national polls, which have hit a record low since the party came to power and amid accusations of racism within the party.
