Hungarian PM Orbán says euro may dip below 400 forints
According to Orbán, last week ended with a discussion of economic issues and this week has begun in the same way.
He recalled that preparations had begun for peace talks between the Russian and US presidents. The two leaders spoke by telephone.
Gas prices have fallen by 10% and the forint has also strengthened.
If this continues, it is only a matter of time before the euro falls below 400 forints,
the PM said.
Orbán said peace [in Ukraine] would bring economic benefits to Hungary. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, i.e. almost exactly three years ago, and Russia now controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, taken in 2014.
Trump on Sunday raised the prospect of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin “very soon.” “We’re moving along. We’re trying to get a peace with Russia, Ukraine, and we’re working very hard on it," he told reporters in Florida.
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would “never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine,” Trump gave a vague assurance that he would be “involved.”
Putin had described Kyiv’s bid to join NATO as a “red line” for Moscow, casting the alliance’s eastward expansion as a major threat to Russia and seeking NATO’s guarantees that it would never offer membership to Ukraine. Trump said Ukraine’s NATO membership is “impractical” and the return of Russian-occupied territories to Kyiv is “illusionary".
Orbán's comments on the forint exchange rate are interesting for several reasons. First, the government is not used to commenting so specifically on the level of the exchange rate. In particular, it rarely talks about a stronger forint exchange rate in a favourable way, and such a comment almost acts as a verbal intervention. The talk of a stronger forint is certainly not unrelated to the very unpleasant January inflation data, which almost certainly means that this year's inflation will be higher than last year's (3.7%) and could even exceed 5%.
Cover image (for illustration purposes only): Getty Images
