Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó placed the blame for U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to impose new high tariffs on EU countries on the leadership of the European Union.
On Thursday, he expressed his position in a Facebook post, stating that European citizens are once again forced to pay the price for the incompetence of Brussels politicians, who failed to reach an agreement with Washington.
Everything became crystal clear after Trump’s tariff announcement yesterday: the European Commission should have negotiated! They had two and a half months for this, Szijjártó declared, criticizing the inaction of EU officials.
In his view, Brussels bears direct responsibility for the failure to secure a customs agreement with the U.S.
They did not negotiate, but instead turned an economic issue into an ideological one. And all this while earning their thousands of euros in salaries, the Hungarian minister said indignantly.
Earlier, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the new U.S. tariffs “a serious blow to the global economy” and stressed that the EU is ready to respond.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas also noted that trade wars have no winners and that, in the end, it is ordinary consumers who bear the cost.
The U.S. decision to introduce large-scale tariffs affected nearly all countries, except for a few, including Russia. The White House explained that no new tariffs were imposed on Russia because existing sanctions already make any significant trade between the two countries nearly impossible.
