Vucic speaks from Budapest: I believe we'll be under even greater economic pressure, very difficult situation

The president of Serbia was in Budapest on Monday, for a one-day trilateral summit between the leaders of Serbia, Hungary and Austria

A one-day trilateral Serbia-Hungary-Austria summit was held in Budapest, the main topic of which was common migration policy, but also joint action against organized crime and smuggling, as well as the energy situation.

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President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic said while Budapest that he was satisfied with the talks and that they agreed on how to combat illegal migration in Presevo, Bujanovac and Vranje, but also in Kanjiza, Mali Idjos...

"At the same time, many technical details need to be worked out, and our teams will work on that for the next three weeks. We also talked about other important issues, anticipating an increasing volume of fighting in Ukraine. I believe that we will be under even greater economic and energy pressure. But we have to work, whining won't save us," said Vucic.

"We agreed with Hungary, but also with Austria to help each other in every way," he added.

Key is to preserve low electricity price

"We must try even harder to preserve our financial stability. The key fight this time will be to see what we can do to keep the price of electricity low. The key struggle will be to preserve the low price of electricity and gas not only for households, but also for companies so that they do not lose their place in the production chain. We are trying to find solutions, and there are many problems. We have an important meeting ahead of us on October 6 in Prague, a meeting with (Ursula) von der Leyen," Vucic told journalists at Serbia's embassy in Budapest.

"Our warehouse in Hungary has 380 million cubic meters of gas, I asked them not to fill up to 500, that is expensive gas. Our warehouse in Banatski Dvor (in Serbia) is full to the brim. We managed that in two months. Let's see when we will turn on heating. Luckily we did the pipeline, imagine if we didn't. Now we can survive.

Rarely have we had a full storage, now we have Banatski Dvor, then another Banatski Dvor, and another hundred million.

The bottom line is whether companies will be able to withstand all this. That the input elements are low for them, that they survive on the market. The dollar is rising, demand is lower, there is a crisis, and with such a strong dollar, they can buy everything cheaper, and what should we do? Now, even when we take anything that is needed to cover the deficit, we have to take it in dollars, and it's very fortunate what we have done with the Emirates. So, we are managing.

We found more options, but our public debt is not growing at all related to GDP, which is very important. 2,480 billion is the public debt of Germany. We are in good shape, Hungary today has over 80 percent. Italy three times higher. We're still in good shape, we'll just have to see how these six months minus three days go."

Macron invited to visit Serbia

"Last night I also exchanged messages with the French president about the meeting of the European political community, we will see each other in Prague, I believe that I will have the opportunity to meet with him soon, I once again invited him to visit Serbia, I believe that in 2023 he will come to Belgrade," Vucic said.

"Today we discussed important investments. We get oil via Croatia, there have been no problems regardless of our very strained relations, we pay them, they deliver it to us. The import of Russian oil is banned to us, so we need more refineries and new oil pipelines."

(Telegraf Biznis)