Chapter I: Országgyűlés (Parliament)

Overview

Chapter I funds the National Assembly and a cluster of bodies grouped administratively under it. The 2026 envelope is 348,192.3 millió Ft of expenditure against 27,060.3 millió Ft of own revenue, leaving a net call on general taxation of 321,132.0 millió Ft.

The chapter is not a single institution. It contains four genuinely distinct things: (1) the legislature itself and its direct service organs — the Országgyűlés Hivatala (Office of the National Assembly), the Országgyűlési Őrség (Parliamentary Guard), and the Steindl Imre programme renovating the Parliament building; (2) the machinery of representative democracy — the Nemzeti Választási Iroda (National Election Office) and the statutory financing of political parties and their foundations; (3) a set of regulators and oversight bodies that the budget classifies here for reasons of formal independence — the Közbeszerzési Hatóság (Public Procurement Authority), the Magyar Energetikai és Közmű-szabályozási Hivatal (Hungarian Energy and Public Utility Regulatory Authority), the Szabályozott Tevékenységek Felügyeleti Hatósága (Supervisory Authority for Regulated Activities), the Nemzeti Adatvédelmi és Információszabadság Hatóság (National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information), and the Országos Atomenergia Hivatal (Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority); and (4) two memory-political bodies — the Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára (Historical Archives of the State Security Services) and the Nemzeti Emlékezet Bizottságának Hivatala (Committee of National Remembrance).

The classification work here is unusually clean at the two extremes and unusually instructive in the middle. The legislature, the election office, and the nuclear-safety authority are constitutional preconditions or protective responses to irreversible harm — Keep. The discretionary public-donation budgets, the campaign-cost line, and the public-media subsidy are subjective allocations by political officeholders or transfers whose recipients could be financed otherwise — Immediate Cut or Phase-Out. The middle — three economic regulators — is where the framework’s instruction to examine whether a regulator is evidence of an underlying problem rather than a solution to it does the most analytical work.

Expenditure Analysis

Országgyűlés Hivatala (Office of the National Assembly)

• Current allocation: 85,544.2 millió Ft (operating 81,449.8 + investment 2,338.7 + renovation 1,755.7; operating breaks down as personnel 61,256.9, employer contributions 7,081.1, materials and services 12,678.6, benefits in cash to those provided for 373.2, other operating 60.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The legislature is a constitutional precondition, not a discretionary programme. A representative assembly through which collective decisions are made, its committee system, its legislative drafting and research support, and its physical administration are the institutional machinery the classical-liberal tradition treats as core state function — the body that makes, amends, and repeals the law is the body within which any reform programme itself must pass. Keep does not mean exempt from operating-efficiency review: a personnel envelope of 61,256.9 millió Ft is large, and whether the Hivatal’s headcount is proportionate to the legislative workload is a fair question for the Állami Számvevőszék. But the function is not a candidate for phase-out.
• Transition mechanism: None. Subject the operating budget to the same external audit discipline applied to any state body.
• Affected groups: None adverse. Members of the National Assembly, parliamentary staff, the public who rely on a functioning legislature.

Az Országgyűlés elnökének közcélú felajánlásai, adományai (Public-Purpose Offerings and Donations of the Speaker of the National Assembly)

• Current allocation: 100.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: This is a statutory budget that places public money at the personal charitable discretion of the holder of a political office. The Speaker chooses recipients; taxpayers fund the choice; the recipients are whichever causes the officeholder favours. The size of the line — 100.0 millió Ft — is not the point. A budget that exists so that a political officeholder can make donations in the state’s name, to recipients of the officeholder’s selection, is a subjective allocation of resources by a political officeholder. There is no calculation by which the state can determine the “correct” set of charitable recipients, because charitable giving is precisely the expression of a donor’s own subjective ranking of causes; the only honest version of this activity is the officeholder giving from their own income, or private donors giving from theirs. Citizens who wish to support a cause can and do — directly, with their own money, at the scale their own preferences dictate. A state-funded version simply substitutes one person’s preference ranking, exercised with other people’s money, for the dispersed preference rankings of the people whose money it is.
• Transition mechanism: Delete the line in the 2026 cycle. No reliance interest is defeated: there is no contract counterparty, no employee, no accrued entitlement. Any commitments already announced can be honoured by the Speaker personally or by private donors.
• Affected groups: Whichever organisations would have received discretionary donations. They retain every avenue of voluntary fundraising open to any other organisation.

Volt köztársasági elnökök közcélú felajánlásai, adományai (Public-Purpose Offerings and Donations of Former Presidents of the Republic — Schmitt Pál, Áder János, Novák Katalin)

• Current allocation: 219.0 millió Ft (73.0 each for three former presidents)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: Strip the euphemism and the line reads: a statutory entitlement to discretionary public-donation budgets for living former heads of state. Each former president receives 73.0 millió Ft of public money annually to direct to charitable recipients of their own selection. The mechanism is identical to the Speaker’s donation line and the objection is identical: it is a subjective allocation by a political officeholder — here, three of them, after they have left office. The seen is a set of grateful recipient organisations and three former presidents able to perform philanthropy at no personal cost. The unseen is every taxpayer funding it: a worker on the roughly 561,000 Ft median monthly gross wage¹ contributes to a pool that exists so that three named individuals can make donations the worker has no say over, to causes the worker may or may not share, while the worker’s own capacity to give to causes they do care about is correspondingly reduced by the tax that funds the pool. A former head of state who wishes to support charitable causes enjoys every means of doing so available to any other citizen of means, including a presidential pension already provided separately. There is no rights-protection function here, no constitutional precondition, no irreversible harm being guarded against.
• Transition mechanism: Delete all three sub-lines in the 2026 cycle. The presidential pension and statutory post-office provision are separate matters and are not addressed by this cut.
• Affected groups: Three former presidents lose a discretionary donation budget. Recipient organisations lose a funding stream they can replace through ordinary voluntary fundraising.

Magyar Nemzeti Közösségek Európai Érdekképviseletéért Alapítvány támogatása (Support for the Foundation for the European Representation of Hungarian National Communities)

• Current allocation: 80.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: This is a transfer to a private foundation whose advocacy activity its members and supporters could fund voluntarily. Advocacy and representation of a cause — here, the interests of Hungarian national communities at European level — is exactly the kind of activity that voluntary association exists to carry. The state cannot determine the optimal level or direction of advocacy effort: how much representation, on which questions, with what emphasis, is a matter of the dispersed judgement of the people whose cause it is, and there is no price signal or calculation by which a budget line can substitute for that judgement. Where a foundation pursues an objective its supporters genuinely value, voluntary contributions reveal that valuation; a tax-funded line substitutes a political appropriation for that revealed support and converts the foundation’s incentive from serving its supporters to retaining its line.
• Transition mechanism: Delete the line in the 2026 cycle. The foundation continues on member contributions, private donations, and any project grants it can win competitively.
• Affected groups: The foundation and its staff. The cause of Hungarian minority representation is not affected by the funding source; it is advanced by whatever voluntary support it commands.

Képviselő-testület váltásával kapcsolatos kiadások (Expenditures Related to the Change of the Representative Body)

• Current allocation: 6,019.2 millió Ft (operating 4,443.1 + investment 1,576.1)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: These are the costs of transition between parliamentary terms following the 2026 general election — severance and statutory entitlements for departing members, setup costs for incoming members, and the associated administrative and capital expenditure. This is an intrinsic operating cost of a functioning representative legislature: an elected body that changes membership necessarily incurs the cost of that change. The line is bounded, cyclical, and tied directly to the constitutional function of the National Assembly.
• Transition mechanism: None. The line should fall back to a low base in non-transition years; verify the cyclical profile.
• Affected groups: Departing and incoming members of the National Assembly. No adverse effect on third parties.

Steindl Imre program támogatása (Support for the Steindl Imre Programme)

• Current allocation: 21,369.5 millió Ft (operating 4,780.2 + investment 16,589.3)
• Classification: Nominal Freeze
• Rationale: The Steindl Imre programme renovates the Parliament building (Országház) and a cluster of government heritage buildings around Kossuth Square; the Parliament’s own internal renovation is a multi-year programme still in its pre-design phase, with the detailed budget not yet fixed pending the historical documentation and design tender.² The preservation and structural maintenance of the building that houses the legislature is a legitimate state expenditure — the asset is the physical precondition of the constitutional function. But a renovation programme is a finite, bounded mandate, not a permanent line, and a capital programme of this scale carries the standard public-choice exposure: the longer it runs and the larger its envelope, the more it acquires a professional constituency — programme staff, contractors, consultants — whose interest is in the programme’s continuation independent of the renovation work remaining. The framework’s honest classification holds the line at its current nominal level rather than letting it expand: hold the allocation, require the programme to publish a fixed-scope, fixed-horizon completion plan against which each year’s spend is measured, and let real-terms erosion at typical inflation discipline the envelope while the finite mandate is delivered.
• Transition mechanism: Hold the nominal allocation. Require a published completion plan with a defined end date; treat the programme as closing on that date, not as an open-ended line.
• Affected groups: Programme staff and contractors, who face a defined rather than open-ended horizon. The renovation of the Parliament building proceeds.

Országgyűlési Őrség (Parliamentary Guard)

• Current allocation: 6,246.3 millió Ft (personnel 5,525.0 + employer contributions 721.3)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The protection of the legislature and its members is a rights-protection and physical-security function attached directly to a constitutional institution. The Guard secures the building, the chamber, and the members against physical threat. This is core state function in the classical-liberal frame — the same category as courts and police. Keep, subject to ordinary operating-efficiency review.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None adverse.

Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára (Historical Archives of the State Security Services)

• Current allocation: 2,147.8 millió Ft (operating 1,932.6 — personnel 1,156.4, employer contributions 170.0, materials and services 606.2 — plus investment 198.0 and renovation 17.2)
• Classification: Nominal Freeze
• Rationale: The archive preserves and makes accessible the records of the communist-era state security services. The custody of these records has a genuine rights dimension: individuals have an enforceable interest in accessing files held on them, and the records are evidence in restitution, rehabilitation, and historical- accountability proceedings. That said, the archival mandate is bounded and self-limiting — the record set is closed and finite, it does not grow, and the core task is preservation and controlled access rather than open-ended programme activity. This is the textbook profile for a Nominal Freeze: a bounded mandate where outright cut is not warranted because the custody function is real, but expansion is equally unwarranted because the underlying material is fixed. Hold the nominal allocation; let real-terms erosion gradually compress the envelope as digitisation reduces the marginal cost of access.
• Transition mechanism: Hold the nominal allocation. Review whether digitisation can reduce the long-run operating cost of controlled access.
• Affected groups: Archive staff; researchers and individuals exercising file-access rights, who are not adversely affected by a nominal freeze.

Közbeszerzési Hatóság (Public Procurement Authority)

• Current allocation: 3,567.8 millió Ft (operating 3,387.6 — personnel 2,183.6, employer contributions 283.9, materials and services 920.1 — plus investment 180.2)
• Classification: Phase-Out (8 years)
• Rationale: A public-procurement supervisory authority is, on the framework’s own instruction, to be examined as evidence of an underlying problem rather than as a solution to it. The authority exists because the Hungarian state buys on a very large scale, and large-scale discretionary state purchasing generates contestable rents — the supplier who wins a state contract earns a return that depends on the award decision rather than purely on competitive performance. The procurement authority is the state’s attempt to police the rent allocation its own purchasing volume creates. It is, in the framework’s terms, part of the construction, not the cure: no procurement supervisor can substitute for the discipline that a smaller state purchasing footprint would supply automatically, because the supervisor is reviewing the formal regularity of awards, not the prior question of whether the state should have been buying at that scale at all. The honest classification ties the authority’s phase-out to the reduction of the underlying activity: as the reform programme set out across the other chapters reduces the volume of discretionary state purchasing — fewer state-funded programmes, fewer transfers routed through procurement, a smaller state commercial footprint — the supervisory load falls correspondingly, and the authority can be wound down to a small residual function or folded into a general administrative-law oversight body. This is not a claim that procurement irregularity does not matter; it is the claim that the irregularity is a symptom, and that treating the symptom permanently while the cause grows is the more expensive path. The 8-year horizon is set to track the pace at which the underlying state-purchasing volume can realistically be reduced across the budget as a whole; it is not a discretionary delay.
• Transition mechanism: Linear phase-out over 8 years, tracking the reduction in state-purchasing volume delivered by the wider reform programme. The protected party is the authority’s permanent staff — on the order of 200-250 employees on standard public-sector contracts with general administrative and legal skills. A residual procurement-oversight function (for the genuinely irreducible rights-protection core of public purchasing — defence, security, the courts) is retained, either as a small unit or within a general administrative-law authority.
• Affected groups: Authority staff, who face an 8-year transition with re-employment prospects in the wider public administration and the private legal and compliance sector. Suppliers and contracting authorities, for whom the formal compliance burden falls as the underlying purchasing volume falls.

Pártok támogatása (Support for Political Parties)

• Current allocation: 2,548.8 millió Ft (parties with national- list mandates: FIDESZ-Magyar Polgári Szövetség 1,014.0; Demokratikus Koalíció 268.6; Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom 236.4; Momentum Mozgalom 185.1; Magyar Szocialista Párt 183.3; Mi Hazánk Mozgalom 183.1; Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt 160.5; Párbeszéd 135.9; LMP 105.6 — plus parties without national-list mandates: Magyar Kétfarkú Kutya Párt 54.7; Megoldás Mozgalom 21.6)
• Classification: Phase-Out (4 years)
• Rationale: Statutory state financing of political parties distributes the largest amounts to the parties with the most parliamentary seats: the allocation formula is seat-share-weighted, so the largest single recipient on the 2026 list — 1,014.0 millió Ft, roughly 40% of the national-list-party envelope — is FIDESZ-Magyar Polgári Szövetség, reflecting its seat share under the current formula.³ The arrangement raises a genuine public-choice problem: the parties that sit in the legislature vote on the statute that funds the parties that sit in the legislature, and the formula they set rewards incumbency — the parties already holding seats receive the largest transfers, which is a structural advantage in contesting the next election against entrants who do not yet hold seats. A party is a voluntary political association; the activity it carries out — organising, campaigning, advocating a programme — is precisely the activity that the members and supporters of a voluntary association fund through their own contributions, because their willingness to contribute is the most direct available signal of the support the party actually commands. State financing substitutes a seat-weighted appropriation for that signal and insulates a party’s finances from the revealed enthusiasm of its own supporters. The case for a transition rather than an immediate cut rests on a legitimate reliance interest: parties have organised their staffing and operations around the statutory income, and an abrupt removal in an election year would fall unequally — hardest on the smaller parties least able to substitute private fundraising at short notice. A 4-year phase-out, spanning a full electoral cycle, gives every party time to rebuild a membership-and-donation funding base.
• Transition mechanism: Linear phase-out over 4 years, beginning after the 2026 election so that no party’s mid-campaign finances are disrupted. Pair with a transparent private-financing framework — disclosure of donations, contribution limits — so that the shift to voluntary funding is matched by the transparency that makes private political finance accountable.
• Affected groups: All parliamentary and minor parties currently receiving the transfer, and their employed staff. The transition protects against abrupt disruption; the destination is parties financed by their own supporters.

Pártalapítványok támogatása (Support for Party Foundations)

• Current allocation: 3,230.4 millió Ft (Szövetség a Polgári Magyarországért Alapítvány 1,593.9; Új Köztársaságért Alapítvány 334.3; Jobbik Magyarországért Alapítvány 279.8; Indítsuk Be Magyarországot Alapítvány 193.1; Táncsics Mihály Alapítvány 190.1; Mi Hazánk Alapítvány 189.7; Barankovics István Alapítvány 151.6; Megújuló Magyarországért Alapítvány 110.1; Ökopolisz Alapítvány 58.7; Savköpő Menyét Alapítvány 92.5; MEMO Alapítvány 36.6)
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: The party-foundation transfers are state financing of the research, civic-education, and policy-advocacy bodies attached to political parties. The funding formula concentrates the subsidy in the foundations affiliated with the largest parties: the single largest recipient, at 1,593.9 millió Ft — roughly half the entire party-foundation envelope — is the Szövetség a Polgári Magyarországért Alapítvány, the foundation in the orbit of the governing majority. The activity these foundations carry out — political research, the publication of policy ideas, civic education in a particular ideological tradition — is the defining activity of a voluntarily-funded think tank or political foundation. Whether a tradition’s ideas deserve to be developed and propagated is a question answered by the willingness of that tradition’s adherents to fund the work; a state transfer substitutes a seat-weighted political appropriation for that test and converts the foundation’s incentive from persuading supporters to retaining its line. This is a sharper case than the party transfers themselves: a parliamentary party has at least a defined constitutional role in the legislature, whereas a party foundation is a pure advocacy-and- research body, exactly the kind of organisation the classical- liberal frame expects to be voluntarily financed. The reliance interest is correspondingly weaker — these are not bodies contesting an imminent election — so an immediate cut is the honest classification rather than a phased transition. The institute making this argument operates on precisely the model it recommends: a policy-research body financed by those who value its work, not by a statutory line.
• Transition mechanism: Delete the lines in the 2026 cycle. Foundations that command genuine support among their tradition’s adherents continue on voluntary contributions; those that do not contract to the scale their voluntary support sustains.
• Affected groups: The eleven party foundations and their staff. The development and propagation of political ideas is not impaired by the change of funding source; it is carried by whatever voluntary support each tradition commands.

Kampányköltségek (Campaign Costs)

• Current allocation: 4,000.0 millió Ft
• Classification: Immediate Cut
• Rationale: This line funds the campaign costs of the 2026 general election. It is distinct from the National Election Office’s operational budget — the machinery of running the vote — and from the per-candidate and per-list statutory campaign support that flows through the State Treasury. Funding the campaigning activity of political competitors from the general budget is, like the party transfers, a substitution of a tax-financed appropriation for the voluntary support a campaign commands. Campaigning — persuading voters of a programme — is the core activity of a political competitor, and the willingness of supporters to fund it is the signal that the framework treats as the appropriate test. The reliance argument that justifies a transition for the standing party transfers does not apply: this is a single-cycle election- specific appropriation, not a recurring income around which an organisation has built permanent staffing. It can be ended cleanly.
• Transition mechanism: Delete the line in the 2026 cycle. Campaigns are financed by their supporters within a transparent contribution-disclosure framework.
• Affected groups: Political competitors contesting the election, who fund campaigning from voluntary contributions.

Közszolgálati médiaszolgáltatás támogatása — Közszolgálati hozzájárulás (Public Service Media Subsidy — Public Service Contribution)

• Current allocation: 141,268.4 millió Ft

• Classification: Phase-Out (3 years)

• Rationale: The közszolgálati hozzájárulás is the central-budget transfer that finances Hungary’s public-service media — the largest single line in this chapter, larger than the legislature’s own operating budget. The transfer reaches the public-media operator (the Médiaszolgáltatás-támogató és Vagyonkezelő Alap, MTVA),⁴ whose budget has risen roughly fivefold in nominal terms over the past sixteen years, well ahead of cumulative inflation over the same period.⁴ Two distinct objections converge on this line. The first is the calculation problem: there is no market price signal by which the state can determine the correct quantity, mix, or quality of broadcast and online content, because content preferences are subjective and revealed only through what audiences voluntarily choose to watch, read, subscribe to, and pay for. A budget line sized by appropriation produces an output sized by appropriation, not by audience demand — and the absence of the demand signal is precisely why a transfer can rise fivefold without any market test of whether the additional spending corresponds to additional value to viewers. The second is the public-choice exposure that is structural to any state-financed media: when the operating revenue of a broadcaster is set by the budget that a parliamentary majority votes, the broadcaster’s institutional incentives are exposed to whichever bloc holds that majority, and that exposure does not depend on which bloc it is — it is a property of the funding structure, and a cleaner future appropriation would simply route the same dependency to a differently-credentialed recipient.

  Hungary already runs the alternative. A large and growing commercial media sector — broadcast, print, and online — operates without central-budget subsidy, financed by advertising, subscription, and voluntary reader and viewer payment, and the existence of that sector demonstrates within Hungary that news, current affairs, entertainment, and cultural programming can be produced and distributed on a voluntary-financing basis. The seen here is the public-media institution and its output; the unseen is the scale of the transfer measured against the people who fund it. At 141,268.4 millió Ft spread across roughly 4.0 million Hungarian households⁵ (KSH STADAT 2024: 4,044,811 households), the line costs on the order of 35,000 Ft per household per year — a figure that, were it collected as an explicit subscription rather than buried in general taxation, very few of those households would voluntarily renew at that price, which is itself the revealed- preference test the budget line is structured to avoid.

• Transition mechanism: Phase-out over 3 years using severance-with-overlap, because the protected party is the operator’s permanent workforce — roughly 2,070 employees as of 2024, with reported wage costs of approximately 13.1 milliárd Ft.⁴ Adding employer social contributions and the broader personnel-type payments, the payroll component is on the order of 18,000 millió Ft, roughly 13% of the 141,268.4 millió Ft envelope; this share is derived from public reporting on the operator’s accounts and should be confirmed against the operator’s audited zárszámadás before implementation. Under severance-with-overlap, payroll-component employees keep their full salary for 24 months and may take private- sector employment during that period; the non-payroll components of the envelope — content acquisition, transmission, materials, property — fall to zero in the first budget cycle, because contract counterparties’ rights are honoured through contract run-off rather than through employee transition. The non-payroll envelope of approximately 123,000 millió Ft is therefore saved from year 1; the payroll bridge of approximately 18,000 millió Ft is paid in years 1 and 2 and ends in year 3, at which point the full envelope is saved. Any genuinely irreducible public-interest broadcasting function — for instance, emergency public-information capacity — can be retained at a small fraction of the current envelope and is not what the phase-out removes.

• Affected groups: The operator’s roughly 2,070 permanent staff, protected by 24 months of severance-with-overlap with private-sector re-employment as the household path; content suppliers and freelancers under contract, honoured through contract run-off; audiences, who retain the commercial and voluntarily-funded media sector that already operates at scale.

Nemzeti Adatvédelmi és Információszabadság Hatóság (National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information — NAIH)

• Current allocation: 2,414.5 millió Ft (personnel 1,792.2 + employer contributions 237.9 + materials and services 384.4)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The NAIH enforces individuals’ data-protection rights and adjudicates freedom-of-information claims against the state. Both functions are rights-protection in the strict classical-liberal sense: data protection enforces an individual’s enforceable interest in control over information about themselves, and freedom-of- information enforcement is the mechanism by which a citizen compels disclosure from the state — it is, in effect, a check on the state itself. An authority whose function is to enforce the individual’s rights against both private parties and the government is not a candidate for phase-out; it is closer to the courts than to the economic regulators in this chapter. Keep, subject to ordinary operating-efficiency review.
• Transition mechanism: None.
• Affected groups: None adverse.

Magyar Energetikai és Közmű-szabályozási Hivatal (Hungarian Energy and Public Utility Regulatory Authority — MEKH)

• Current allocation: 12,917.0 millió Ft (operating 12,783.6 — personnel 8,273.2, employer contributions 1,131.5, materials and services 858.3, other operating 2,520.6 — plus investment 133.4; the title is fully covered by 12,917.0 millió Ft of own fee revenue)
• Classification: Phase-Out (8 years)
• Rationale: The MEKH regulates electricity, natural gas, district heating, water, and waste — a remit that exists because these markets in Hungary are heavily state-shaped: state-owned incumbents, concession regimes, regulated tariffs, and administratively-set prices. The framework’s instruction is to distinguish the genuinely network-economic element from the contestable element. Some part of what the MEKH oversees is a genuine network — the high-voltage transmission grid, the gas transmission system, the last-mile distribution networks — where the physical infrastructure is not efficiently duplicated and some standing oversight of third-party access and network tariffs has an enduring rationale. But a large share of what the authority does is the administration of arrangements that are themselves state constructions: setting retail energy tariffs, administering price caps, supervising concession allocations. Where the regulator is administering the consequences of administered prices, it is part of the construction and not the cure — the price cap destroys the information the price would otherwise carry, the producer cannot signal scarcity and the consumer cannot signal preference, capital misallocates toward serving the cap rather than the underlying demand, and the regulator is then required to manage the resulting distortions. The honest classification phases the authority’s remit down in parallel with the deregulation of the contestable activities it currently supervises: as retail energy and related markets are opened to competitive pricing, the corresponding supervisory load falls, and the MEKH contracts to the genuine network-regulation residual — a materially smaller body overseeing third-party access to the transmission and distribution grids. Note also that the title runs entirely on its own fee revenue of 12,917.0 millió Ft, levied on the regulated firms; that revenue disappears as the regulated activity is deregulated, so the phase-out is broadly fiscally neutral on the net position but removes a real cost embedded in regulated energy prices and ultimately borne by households and firms as energy consumers.
• Transition mechanism: Linear phase-out of the contestable- market supervisory functions over 8 years, tracking the pace of energy-market deregulation; retain a network-regulation residual. The protected party is the authority’s permanent staff — on the order of 350-400 employees with technical, economic, and legal skills that transfer readily to the energy sector and the wider regulatory and consulting market. The fee revenue declines in step with the deregulated activity.
• Affected groups: Authority staff, facing an 8-year transition with strong re-employment prospects; regulated energy firms, whose fee burden falls; energy consumers, who over the horizon face prices that carry information rather than administered caps.

Nemzeti Választási Iroda (National Election Office — NVI)

• Current allocation: 33,122.8 millió Ft (operating organs: personnel 1,134.6, employer contributions 151.7, materials and services 435.0, other operating 4.0, investment 50.0; chapter- managed appropriations: by-elections and minority elections 910.9, operation of the electoral systems 7,198.6 + investment 300.0, conduct of the 2026 general election 22,938.0)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: The conduct of free elections and the operation of the electoral system is a constitutional precondition in the strictest sense: it is the institutional machinery through which the governed authorise the government, and through which any reform programme — including the one set out across this budget analysis — would itself have to be authorised. The 2026 general-election conduct line of 22,938.0 millió Ft is a cyclical cost that recurs at each parliamentary election; the electoral-systems operation line and the by-election line are the standing cost of maintaining the register and the voting infrastructure between general elections. None of this is a discretionary programme; all of it is core state function. Keep, subject to ordinary operating-efficiency review of the standing cost.
• Transition mechanism: None. The general-election line should fall back sharply in non-election years; verify the cyclical profile.
• Affected groups: None adverse. Every voter relies on this function.

Nemzeti Emlékezet Bizottságának Hivatala (Office of the Committee of National Remembrance — NEB)

• Current allocation: 1,595.1 millió Ft (operating 1,554.1 — personnel 1,121.1, employer contributions 165.6, materials and services 267.4 — plus investment 41.0)
• Classification: Phase-Out (5 years)
• Rationale: The NEB researches the functioning of the communist dictatorship’s power structures and the role of individuals within them. Unlike the Historical Archives — which preserves a fixed record set with a direct individual-rights dimension, and is held at a Nominal Freeze — the NEB is a research-and-publication body: it produces historical analysis. Historical research is valuable, but it is not a rights-protection function, not a constitutional precondition, and not a protective response to irreversible harm; it is exactly the kind of scholarship that universities, independent historical institutes, and voluntarily-funded research bodies carry. The state cannot determine, by calculation, the correct quantity or direction of historical research into a particular period — research priorities are a matter of dispersed scholarly judgement, and a permanent state research office on a defined historical subject carries the standard public-choice exposure of a body whose staff have a professional interest in the office’s continuation. The case for a phase-out rather than an immediate cut rests on a genuine reliance interest: the NEB has in-flight research programmes, publication commitments, and permanent academic staff, and an abrupt closure would strand half-finished work. A 5-year phase-out allows current projects to complete and the staff to transition to university and independent-institute positions where this kind of research properly sits.
• Transition mechanism: Linear phase-out over 5 years. Current research projects run to completion; the protected party is the office’s permanent academic and support staff — roughly 60-80 employees — who transition to universities and independent research institutes. The archival and documentary materials the NEB has assembled are transferred to a permanent archive or university collection.
• Affected groups: NEB staff, facing a 5-year transition into the academic sector; the field of communist-era historical research, which continues in universities and voluntarily-funded institutes.

Szabályozott Tevékenységek Felügyeleti Hatósága (Supervisory Authority for Regulated Activities — SZTFH)

• Current allocation: 14,327.2 millió Ft (operating 14,299.6 — personnel 7,719.9, employer contributions 830.0, materials and services 5,050.7, other operating 699.0 — plus investment 27.6; the title carries 6,254.0 millió Ft of own fee revenue)
• Classification: Phase-Out (6 years)
• Rationale: The SZTFH supervises a set of activities the state has chosen to license or to operate as monopolies — most prominently gambling, the tobacco-retail concession system, and mining and geological activity. This is the clearest case in the chapter of a regulator whose existence is evidence of the underlying arrangement rather than a solution to an independent problem. The Hungarian tobacco-retail market is a state-constructed concession monopoly: the state restricted who may sell tobacco to a limited set of concession-holders, and the SZTFH then administers and polices that concession regime. The gambling regime is similarly a licensing construction. A concession-licensing authority and a gambling regulator address symptoms of state-monopoly and state-licensing arrangements, not the underlying cause — the state licenses what it need not license or operates monopolies whose rent allocation it then has to police. Where the underlying activity is deregulated — the tobacco-retail concession opened to ordinary licensed retail, the gambling concession regime reformed toward general business licensing — the corresponding supervisory load falls, and the authority contracts to whatever genuinely irreducible residual remains (mining and geological oversight has a stronger standing rationale than the concession-policing functions and would be the natural residual or could be folded into a general resources authority). A 6-year phase-out tracks the pace at which the underlying concession and licensing regimes can be reformed. As with the other fee-funded regulators, the 6,254.0 millió Ft of own revenue is levied on the regulated and licensed activities and declines as those activities are deregulated.
• Transition mechanism: Linear phase-out over 6 years of the concession-policing and gambling-supervision functions, tracking the reform of the underlying licensing regimes; retain a residual for mining and geological oversight or fold it into a general resources authority. The protected party is the authority’s permanent staff — on the order of 350-450 employees with administrative, legal, and technical skills. Fee revenue declines in step with deregulation.
• Affected groups: Authority staff, facing a 6-year transition; tobacco retailers and prospective entrants, for whom a deregulated market replaces the concession lottery; consumers, who face a competitive rather than concession-restricted retail market.

Országos Atomenergia Hivatal (Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority — OAH)

• Current allocation: 7,474.3 millió Ft (operating 7,352.1 — personnel 4,341.5, employer contributions 564.4, materials and services 1,531.8, other operating 914.4 — plus investment 122.2; the title carries 3,180.3 millió Ft of own fee revenue)
• Classification: Keep
• Rationale: Nuclear safety regulation is the paradigm case the classical-liberal frame recognises as a legitimate protective response to irreversible involuntary harm. The OAH is the independent nuclear-safety authority: it licenses and inspects nuclear installations, oversees radiation safety, and is the competent authority for the Paks nuclear power station and the Paks-2 expansion. A nuclear accident inflicts harm that is catastrophic in magnitude, irreversible, and imposed on identifiable individuals — neighbouring residents, workers, future generations — who never consented to bear it and for whom no voluntary alternative exists. This is exactly the category of harm whose magnitude and irreversibility make its prevention a matter of rights rather than of preference, and an independent safety regulator with genuine technical authority is the appropriate institutional form. Unlike the economic regulators in this chapter, the OAH is not policing the consequences of a state-constructed market distortion; it is guarding against a physical hazard that exists regardless of how the electricity market is organised. Keep, with the standard expectation of operating-efficiency review and rigorous technical independence.
• Transition mechanism: None. Maintain the authority’s technical independence and resourcing.
• Affected groups: None adverse. Residents near nuclear installations, nuclear-facility workers, and the wider public rely on this function.

Revenue Items

This chapter’s own revenue is modest relative to its expenditure — 27,060.3 millió Ft against 348,192.3 millió Ft — and consists almost entirely of regulatory fees levied by the bodies grouped here, plus the operating revenue of the National Assembly’s own organs. There are no general taxes in this chapter; the central tax structure sits in Chapter XLII.

• Name: Országgyűlés hivatali szerveinek működési bevétele (Operating revenue of the National Assembly’s administrative organs)

• Current yield: 2,515.0 millió Ft

• Type: Fee / Charge

• Notes: Operating receipts of the legislature’s own organs (visitor and building-related receipts, service charges). Tied to the operation of the Országgyűlés Hivatala, which is classified Keep; the revenue is unaffected by the chapter’s proposed changes.

• Name: Közbeszerzési Hatóság működési bevétele (Operating revenue of the Public Procurement Authority)

• Current yield: 2,194.0 millió Ft

• Type: Fee

• Notes: Procedural and administrative fees levied on procurement proceedings. This fee revenue declines and ultimately disappears as the authority is phased out over 8 years and the underlying state- purchasing volume falls. It is a cost embedded in state procurement, not a net gain to the budget.

• Name: Magyar Energetikai és Közmű-szabályozási Hivatal működési bevétele (Operating revenue of the Hungarian Energy and Public Utility Regulatory Authority)

• Current yield: 12,917.0 millió Ft

• Type: Fee

• Notes: Supervisory and licensing fees levied on regulated energy, utility, water, and waste firms. Fully covers the MEKH’s 12,917.0 millió Ft cost. The revenue is ultimately borne by energy and utility consumers through regulated prices; it declines as the contestable-market supervisory functions are phased out over 8 years.

• Name: Szabályozott Tevékenységek Felügyeleti Hatósága működési bevétele (Operating revenue of the Supervisory Authority for Regulated Activities)

• Current yield: 6,254.0 millió Ft

• Type: Fee

• Notes: Concession, licensing, and supervisory fees from gambling, the tobacco-retail concession system, and mining and geological activity. Declines as the underlying concession and licensing regimes are reformed over the authority’s 6-year phase-out.

• Name: Országos Atomenergia Hivatal működési bevétele (Operating revenue of the Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority)

• Current yield: 3,180.3 millió Ft

• Type: Fee

• Notes: Nuclear-safety licensing and inspection fees levied on nuclear installations. Tied to the OAH, which is classified Keep; the revenue continues and properly so — it places the cost of safety supervision on the licensed operator.

Chapter Summary

Classification	Count	Total (millió Ft)
Immediate Cut	5	7,629.4
Phase-Out	6	176,224.3
Nominal Freeze	2	23,517.3
Keep	6	140,821.3
Total	19	348,192.3

Revenue	Total (millió Ft)
Total chapter revenue	27,060.3

Note on counts: the eleven separately-named party transfers are aggregated into one Pártok támogatása line item and the eleven party-foundation transfers into one Pártalapítványok támogatása line item, consistent with their single budget titles; the JSON data file carries the same aggregation. The three former-presidents’ donation sub-lines are aggregated into one Volt köztársasági elnökök line.

Key Observations

• The chapter splits cleanly into three economic categories. The constitutional core — the legislature, its guard, the election office, the change-of-term costs — is roughly 140,000 millió Ft of unambiguous Keep. The discretionary and party-political transfers — donation budgets, party and foundation financing, campaign costs — are roughly 13,000 millió Ft of Immediate Cut or Phase-Out. And the single largest item, the public-media subsidy at 141,268.4 millió Ft, is on its own larger than the entire constitutional core.

• Regulators here are mostly evidence of an underlying problem. Three of the four economic-oversight bodies in this chapter — the procurement authority, the energy regulator, and the regulated- activities authority — exist because the state purchases on a large scale, administers energy prices, or operates licensing and concession monopolies. Each is part of the construction it supervises, not an independent cure, and each is classified for a phase-out tracking the deregulation of the underlying activity. The two oversight bodies that are genuine rights-protection functions — the data-protection authority and the nuclear-safety authority — are Keep. The distinction is not the word “regulator”; it is whether the body guards a right or administers a distortion.

• The fee-funded regulators are close to fiscally neutral on the net position but not costless. The MEKH, the SZTFH, and the OAH together raise 22,351.3 millió Ft of own fee revenue against their combined cost. Phasing out the MEKH and SZTFH functions therefore does little for the headline deficit — the fee revenue falls with the cost. But the fees are real costs embedded in regulated energy prices and concession-restricted retail prices, ultimately borne by households and firms as consumers; removing the regulated activity removes the cost, even where the budget line nets out.

• The public-media subsidy is the chapter’s defining number. A transfer of 141,268.4 millió Ft, costing roughly 35,000 Ft per household per year, financed by appropriation rather than by any audience demand signal, with a budget that has risen roughly fivefold over sixteen years well ahead of inflation. The severance-with-overlap phase-out protects the operator’s roughly 2,070 staff with 24 months of bridged income while saving the approximately 123,000 millió Ft non-payroll envelope from the first budget cycle and the full envelope by year 3.

• Party and foundation financing concentrates by seat share. The statutory formula directs the largest party transfer — about 40% of the national-list-party envelope — and the largest foundation transfer — about half the foundation envelope — to the bodies affiliated with the governing majority. The mechanism is the seat-weighted formula itself; it rewards incumbency structurally and insulates party finances from the revealed support of the parties’ own members. The transition to voluntary financing should be paired with a transparent donation-disclosure framework so that private political finance is accountable.

Sources

2025. https://www.ksh.hu/gyorstajekoztatok/ker/ker2412.html. Bruttó mediánkereset December 2024: 560,900 Ft (13.1% above the same month of the prior year). Used here as the most recent available monthly median gross wage.

Footnotes

1. Keresetek, 2024. december. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal (KSH). ↩

2. Steindl Imre Program — A Steindl Imre Program. Steindl Imre Program Nonprofit Zrt. 2025. https://www.sipzrt.hu/a-steindl-imre-program/. The programme coordinates the renovation of the Parliament building and government heritage buildings around Kossuth tér; the Parliament’s internal renovation is a multi-year programme in its preparatory phase, with the detailed budget not yet finalised pending historical documentation and a design tender. ↩

3. Kiderült, mekkora állami támogatást kapnak a hazai pártok. Mandiner. 2026. https://mandiner.hu/belfold/2026/03/kiderult-mekkora-allami-tamogatast-kapnak-a-hazai-partok. Hungarian state party financing is allocated on a seat-weighted / candidate-nomination basis; the largest transfers go to the parties with the largest parliamentary representation. The chapter’s own table shows FIDESZ-Magyar Polgári Szövetség as the largest single recipient at 1,014.0 millió Ft. ↩

4. Ötszörösére nőtt a NER 16 éve alatt az MTVA költségvetése, miközben ezt az infláció nem indokolta. Media1. 2026. https://media1.hu/2026/04/20/mtva-koltsegvetes-ner-16-eve/. The public-service media operator (MTVA) is financed principally by the central-budget közszolgálati hozzájárulás; its budget rose from roughly 30 milliárd Ft to roughly 155 milliárd Ft over the 16 years to 2026, ahead of cumulative inflation; reported average headcount was on the order of 2,070 employees with reported wage costs of approximately 13.1 milliárd Ft. The payroll-share figure used for the severance computation is derived from this public reporting and should be confirmed against MTVA’s audited zárszámadás before implementation. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Háztartások és személyek száma régió és településtípus szerint (14.1.2.1.). Központi Statisztikai Hivatal (KSH) STADAT. 2024. https://www.ksh.hu/stadat_files/jov/hu/jov0042.html. Total (weighted) number of households in Hungary 2024: 4,044,811. Per-household cost derived as 141,268.4 millió Ft ÷ 4,044,811 ≈ 34,925 Ft ≈ 35,000 Ft per household per year. ↩