"It is especially important in today's fast-changing international environment that Serbia and Hungary, two neighbouring countries, conduct frequent high-level consultations to ensure the stability of the region," Szalay-Bobrovniczky told a joint press conference with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.

Hungary and Serbia have the strongest bilateral defence and military ties among non-EU or NATO member states, and Hungary is helping to upgrade Serbia's armed forces, he said.

Serbia and Hungary's strategic partnership was expanded to include defence and military cooperation in 2023, and cooperation between the ministries and armed forces is strengthening, he said.

Under the agreement signed on Tuesday, the two countries will organise 79 joint programmes in 2025, including flotilla training, an international exercise for volunteer reservists and marksmanship training, Szalay-Bobrovniczky said.

Hungary is committed "to [maintaining] the stability and peace of the Western Balkans, and Serbia is key to that."

Hungary also sticks to its stance that "the European Union is not whole without the Western Balkans, including Serbia," he said. "A credible and meaningful enlargement policy has been our strategic goal for years, and it was one of the priorities of Hungary's presidency of the Council of the EU in 2024." Budapest also stands by the Dayton Peace Agreement, he added.

Vucic said Serbia's defence ties with Hungary were the strongest among all its neighbours. A comprehensive defence agreement is one of the most important points of the two countries' strategic partnership, he said.

In 1999, during the Balkan wars, "it was thanks to Prime Minister Viktor Orban that NATO could not launch a land attack against what was then Yugoslavia," Vucic said. "A full 26 years later, the two parties now have the opportunity to build extremely close strategic ties, to further deepen cooperation, coming closer to a Hungarian-Serbian military alliance."

"Serbia can learn a lot from Hungary, and there is interest in certain military equipment," he said.

Vucic thanked Hungary for standing by Serbia "in hard times as well as in good ones," and said Budapest could always count on Serbia's support.

Besides military cooperation, Serbia and Hungary are reliable partners in energy matters, and bilateral trade has been growing steadily year after year, he said.

Meanwhile, Cooperation in Carpathian Basin key to strategy of connectivity - PM's political director

Balazs Orban, the prime minister's political director, said that Hungary needed to be a bridge connecting economic areas divided along geopolitical fault lines and pointed to the strategic importance of cooperation among countries in the Carpathian Basin to achieve that endeavour, addressing a conference in Budapest on Tuesday.

Orban told the conference organised by MCC that taking full advantage of that role required developed transportation and energy infrastructure.

He noted that Hungary's government had, for years, adopted a strategy of connectivity that ensured the country would be a bridge between East and West, based on its geographical and economic strengths. He added that the countries in the Carpathian Basin region played a key role in that strategy because of their shared culture, history and values.

Orban said Hungary's active participation in European cooperation remained important, but the country couldn't build its future exclusively on that cooperation.

"We can't be dependent on a single side, but need to establish diverse ties, and the strategy of economic neutrality serves that purpose," he added.

He noted that Hungary had the third-highest motorway density in Central Europe and the second-highest railway density. He added that the M1, M3 and M7 motorways were being expanded, while the M8 was under construction.

He said Hungary had electricity grid interconnectors with all of its neighbours and gas network interconnectors with all but Slovenia. Hungary has access to LNG from Croatia and LNG and has diversified its gas supply with deliveries from Turkiye and Azerbaijan, he added.

He said the construction of the Budapest-Belgrade railway would finish in 2025, turning Hungary into a distribution hub between East and West, while the Hungarian port in Trieste, with annual capacity of 87,000 containers, was underway.

Mate Loga, a state secretary at the National Economy Ministry and the chairman of Liszt Ferenc International operator Budapest Airport, said passenger numbers were expected to reach 18.5 million in 2025, up from 17.6 million in 2024.

The state of Hungary and French co-owner Vinci aim to boost passenger numbers to 20 million by 2030 and 25 million by 2040, he added.

Cargo turnover at Liszt Ferenc climbed 49pc to 300,000 tonnes in 2024, he said.

Loga said a priority goal was to boost the number of Chinese tourists arriving at the airport. Seat numbers on direct flights from China will reach 357,000 in the summer, up around 25pc from a year earlier, he added.

He said the number of seats on flights from Israel could climb to 600,000 in the summer.

Source: 
MTI - The Hungarian News Agency, founded in 1881.

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