Parliament

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),[^3] whose budget has risen roughly fivefold in nominal terms over the past sixteen years, well ahead of cumulative inflation over the same period.[^3] 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 households[^5] (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.

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.

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.

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.[^1] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.[^2] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 wage[^4] 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.

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.

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.