8 billion Ft a year — but this is a debt, not a programme.

Indoklás

This is the chapter's largest expenditure line and its analytically clearest. Under the land-for-annuity programme, the state acquired farmland — in practice up to 20 hectares per participant, capped at a modest valuation — from owners who were typically of, or near, retirement age, and pays them a monthly annuity for the remainder of their lives. The programme ran in discrete tendered phases; the fifth phase was tendered by Magyar Nemzeti Vagyonkezelő Zrt. in April 2010 under the terms of Government Decree 259/2009, and the contract stock that resulted from the first several phases reached roughly 19,000 contracts covering on the order of 55,000 hectares. No further tendered phase has been documented in the budget record in over a decade. The 8,161.2 millió Ft line is therefore not a programme that *spends* in 2026 in the discretionary sense — it is a schedule of payments to a defined, closed group of people who signed contracts years ago and surrendered an asset in exchange for a promise. Each of those contracts is a property transaction the state freely entered: the annuitant gave up land and accepted, in return, a stream of income for life. To stop paying would not be a budget cut. It would be expropriation of consideration already received — the state keeping the land and repudiating the price. The rule-of-law principle the classical-liberal framework rests on protects exactly this kind of good-faith contractual reliance; the annuitants are not recipients of a discretionary transfer but counterparties to a completed sale whose deferred-payment leg is still running. The honest classification is therefore not Keep and not Immediate Cut. It is Phase-Out by cohort mortality: the line requires no policy decision to wind down, because it winds itself down. Every annuitant is, by the design of the scheme, elderly; no new entrants have been admitted for many years; the line falls year by year as the cohort ages. Within roughly two decades the stock of live contracts approaches zero through actuarial attrition alone. The fiscal "saving" is real but it is not available *now* and cannot be accelerated without breaking contracts — it is the natural runoff of a finite obligation, and the budget should simply recognise it as such rather than book it as a reform. One forward-looking point belongs in the analysis. The scheme should not be reopened. Viewed as a *new* programme, land-for-annuity is a state purchase of a private asset financed by an open-ended income promise — the calculation difficulty is acute, because the state has no market-disciplined way of pricing a 20-year-plus annuity against a parcel of land whose future rental yield it cannot forecast. The closed legacy book is a reliance obligation to honour; the policy itself is not one to revive.