Suchergebnisse

Hungary is an extremely poor state in terms of energy resources; the energy policy of the country and the structure of energy resources used have been and are determined by the energy import dependence. After WWII, it could obtain its increased demand necessary to its extensive energyintensive industry established based on the Soviet model almost entirely from the Soviet Union. Hungary, just like other Central-European countries, tried to decrease its unilateral dependence on energy import linked to Russia through several measures in the past 25 years but these efforts achieved partial success only; the Russian energy import dependence of Hungary and of a large part of Central-Europe remained till the present days. The 'National Energy Strategy 2030' developed on the basis of the guideline, adopted in 2011, specified insurance of long-term sustainability, security and economic competitiveness as primary objective of the Hungarian energy policy. The Government intends to guarantee security of supply, to enforce environmental considerations and depending on the options of the country, to stand up for solving global problems through implementation of the strategy. The strategy intends to achieve the termination of the electricity import balance of the country until 2030 by this 'Nuclear-Coal-Green' scenario based on these three pillars.

In the recent decades, the Member States of the European Union have paid more and more attention to the environment and to a more efficient use of renewable energy sources to gain decent energy security. To tackle these problems, the European Union adopted the Europe 2020 strategy in March 2010, which wants to create more a resource-efficient, more competitive and greener Europe until 2020 on the basis of knowledge and innovation. In the strategy the EU undertake the obligation to fulfill the 20/20/20 goals in the field of energy policy. However, to do this multi-trillion forints and profitable investments are needed over several years, which neither the civil society nor the state cannot accomplish from their own resources, thus grants are necessary to fulfill the objectives. In the present article we intend to show that in the 2014-2020 period of EU development from which operative programs for which goals and what intensity of support will help to fulfill the main objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy. In this study we investigate whether EU funds and supplemental national co-financing are expected or not, and what kind of projects can be supported.

Energy is one of the key tools of Russian geopolitical advocacy that Russia can still use efficiently through the energy supply systems built up after WWII and that is still unavoidable. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the advocacy role of the Russian state has decreased however it has never completely lost its influence on the energy sector and thereby on the countries depending on it. We can speak about the active use of energy relations as a tool of political advocacy again since 2006, nonetheless we cannot observe a complete lack of use of these tools between 1990 and 2006 either. The former Soviet republics and the former satellite countries were the targets of these actions, which illustrates the long-term effects of energy dependency systems developed between 1945 and 1990. The 2006 Russian-Ukrainian conflict was the first, when Russia did not only threaten with but actually reduced the amount of natural gas transported. During the 2006 and the 2009 Russian-Ukrainian conflicts, it became clear that Russia actually uses limitation of supply and price policy pressure and not only as a means of threat in order to enforce its political interests, even accepting its negative consequences.

This study is a natural continuation of the author's earlier book on privatization in Hungary, covering the developments between 1989 and 2009 on 1700 pages. As it is well-known, the right wing FIDESZ government, which came to power with a 2/3 supermajority in Parliament, has embarked upon a totally new economic policy as from mid-2010. Within this setting, illiberal constitutional changes and unortodox economic policies were implemented. Renationalization was a significant (but not the most important) building block of this. As we analysed the individual transactions, it turned out that actually many of them were initiated by the previous, Socialist led government. In other words, there are interesting elements of continuity here, especially in the energy sector. Another interesting finding is, that almost without exceptions, the renationalization deals were not implemented by force, the Hungarian state paid quite generously to the sellers. In the case of the largest deals, there is even reason to speak of sweetheart deals through which the Hungarian government tried to make favour to German and US businesses. So far, the renationalization affected more than 200 firms (including banks) for which some HUF 1600 bn (≈ 5bn €) state money was used. This figure, just as the sums involved in the individual transactions are somewhat misleading, if compared to the privatization revenues generated by previous governments prior to 2010. However, if all transactions – i.e. asset sales and asset purchases – are expressed as a percentage of Hungary's annual GDP, it becomes clear that the post 2010 nationalization deals were much smaller than the 1990-2000 privatization deals.