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China-EU relations
ChinaDiplomacy

‘Suicide’ for economy: Hungarian foreign minister takes aim at EU’s China ‘de-risking’ strategy

  • Budapest’s top diplomat, Peter Szijjarto, calls on Brussels to ‘come back to rationality’ and fix ties with Beijing
  • Hungary is widely seen as the most ‘China-friendly’ member of the European Union

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Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto says the EU should expand economic cooperation with Beijing, especially in electric vehicles. Photo: Xinhua
Wendy Wuin TianjinandOrange Wang
The Hungarian foreign minister lashed out against Brussels’ “de-risking” approach to China, warning on Tuesday that cutting off the world’s second-largest economy would be “a brutal suicide” for Europe.
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Warning against the risks of “bloc confrontation” and the possible consequences for the European economy, Peter Szijjarto called on the European Union to fix ties with Beijing and expand bilateral economic cooperation, especially in electric vehicles.
“Political leaders in Europe are not too much interested in the interconnectivity between Europe and China. To the contrary, they are interested in so-called decoupling or de-risking, which, to be honest, according to our understanding, would be a suicide, a brutal suicide committed by the European economy,” he said in a panel discussion during a World Economic Forum meeting in the port city of Tianjin.

“Our interest is to cooperate with China, unlike others. Hungary looks at China as a country with which cooperation brings a lot of potential benefit.”

Hungary is widely seen as the most “China-friendly” member of the EU.
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