Hungarian Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Levente Magyar said on Thursday that President Donald Trump should not pressure Hungary to “decouple” from China because China is too important as an investor and trading partner.
“Definitely not. That’s a red line for us, we’re having excellent trade relations with China, and China has become one of the biggest investors in Hungary,” Magyar said when reporters asked if Hungary would be willing to cut ties with China at Trump’s request.
“Hungary is benefiting from these very intensive Chinese economic and trade relations. We’re not willing to give those up,” he said.
Magyar was in Brussels for a meeting of the European Union’s (EU) Foreign Affairs Council. Aside from refusing to bail on China, his remarks were generally supportive of President Trump’s trade agenda.
Magyar slammed the EU for its “belated response” to the Trump tariffs and said the European Commission “should have done a better job” of bargaining with the American president.
“We would like to again encourage and call upon the Commission to do everything in its power to come to some sort of arrangement with the States,” he said.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban also defended his country’s reliance on Chinese trade and investment at a press conference on Thursday, when he announced Chinese electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD has decided to locate its European business headquarters and R&D center in Budapest.
“We are living in a time of transformation. New technologies, new consumer demands, and new manufacturers have emerged. And we Hungarians do not want to be left out of this new era. That’s why we made a strategic decision: the Hungarian industry must join the age of electromobility,” Orban said.
“We need partners. And we can only enter this new era if there is Chinese-Hungarian strategic cooperation, because China leads in this industry’s technology,” he said.
Orban noted that China is one of Hungary’s top foreign investors and plays a “crucial role in financing Hungary’s modernization.”
“In some years, China has even been the number one investor in Hungary. This means Chinese investments have become an important, even indispensable engine of Hungarian economic growth,” he said.
Orban said he wanted Hungary to become a “meeting point for Eastern and Western capital, trade, and innovation.”
Hungarian officials have hinted they might become a little more flexible about decoupling if the U.S. puts a sufficiently generous offer on the table.
“We don’t see an investment potential from the US that would be on par with China. We have a very pragmatic position,” Economy Minister Marton Nagy said in late April.
The Trump administration has yet to make a firm public demand for Hungary to turn its back on China, but the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., has urged Hungary to choose the United States as its main trading partner instead of China.
At a business forum in Budapest in April, Trump, Jr., warned Hungary, and the rest of Europe, that China poses a greater threat to democracy than Russia, and China’s investment practices tend to be harmful to the recipients.
