Hungarian forint of the European Union, the long-term aim of the Hungarian government may be to replace the forint with the euro, but that does not appear to be likely until some time during the 2020s. The forint's name comes from the city of Florence, where gold coins called "fiorino d'oro" were minted from 1252. In Hungary, "florentinus" (later "forint"), also a gold-based currency, was used from 1325 under Charles Robert and several other countries followed its example. Between 1868 and 1892 the forint was the name used in Hungarian for the currency of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, known in German as the
Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union policy. The three stages for the implementation of the EMU were the following: There have been debates as to whether the Eurozone countries constitute an optimum currency area. There has also been a lot of doubt if all eurozone states really fulfilled a "high degree of sustainable convergence" as demanded by the Maastricht treaty as condition to join the Euro without getting into financial trouble later on. Since membership of the eurozone establishes a single monetary policy for the respective states, they can no longer use an isolated monetary policy, e.g. to increase their competitiveness at the cost of other