Külgazdasági és Külügyminisztérium

Indoklás

A discretionary cash subsidy to a selected firm is a transfer of taxpayer resources whose allocation is decided by political officeholders, item by item, deal by deal. The decision of which firm receives how much rests on the judgement of the awarding authority — and that judgement has no market price to discipline it. There is no signal that tells the ministry whether a 50 milliárd Ft grant to one manufacturer creates more value than the same sum left with the households and firms that were taxed to fund it; the comparison is between a visible plant with a ribbon-cutting and an invisible distribution of foregone investment, wage rises, and consumption across the economy. The seen is the new factory and its announced job count. The unseen is every Hungarian firm that competes for the same workers, the same suppliers, and the same capital, now bidding against a subsidised entrant — and the wage rise the un-subsidised employer could not fund because the tax that paid the grant came partly out of its margin. There is a further mechanism. A standing discretionary subsidy programme is itself the rent. Once the state runs a 107 milliárd Ft annual fund whose disbursement is decided case by case, the return to lobbying the awarding authority rises relative to the return to serving customers better. This holds regardless of which party administers the fund and regardless of how clean each individual award is: a more transparent tender in a future government redirects the same rents to better-credentialed applicants; it does not remove the incentive that the existence of the fund creates. The structural problem is the discretionary fund, not the administrator. The classical-liberal alternative is not "no investment policy" — it is *non-discretionary* investment policy. The mechanism that has demonstrably attracted durable foreign capital is a low, predictable, uniformly-applied tax rule that every firm can rely on without negotiating, rather than a discretionary grant a minister awards. Ireland's sustained low corporate-tax regime, stable across decades and applied to all comers rather than negotiated firm by firm, drew FDI inflows among the highest in the world and built genuine capital deepening — the predictability is doing the work, because long-horizon investment is priced against political risk, and a rule removes the political risk that a discretionary programme reintroduces with every award.[^1] Hungary already has the headline instrument: a 9% corporate-tax rate, the lowest in the EU.[^5] A reform that financed a uniform rule out of the savings from the discretionary fund would attract investment through the rule, not through the minister's signature. The four-year phase-out horizon protects firms that have signed grant agreements in reliance on disbursement schedules. Multi-year investment-incentive contracts have payment milestones tied to construction and employment targets; abrupt termination would breach agreements the counterparties entered in good faith. The horizon honours in-flight contracts through run-off while closing the programme to new awards immediately.

Indoklás

This line is a capital injection into Paks II Zrt., the state company building the two new reactor units at the Paks nuclear site. It sits in this chapter because the Külgazdasági és Külügyminisztérium holds the ownership rights. The 2026 figure of 95,000.0 millió Ft is one tranche in a long sequence of capital injections; the company has received successive tranches as construction costs come due, with the state as the source of funds.[^2] The Paks II classification involves competing considerations that do not resolve cleanly to a single label. The case for treating the line as a Keep — nuclear generation as energy-security infrastructure — runs into the framework's distinction between a genuine network-economic element and a contestable one. Electricity generation, including nuclear generation, is a contestable activity: it can be financed, owned, and operated by private capital under licence, as it is in several jurisdictions. The "natural monopoly" framing does too much work here; the genuine network element is the transmission grid, not the power station. A state-owned, state-financed generation project is therefore a candidate for the same scrutiny as any other state commercial undertaking — particularly one whose capital injections are a recurring budget item rather than a financed, ring-fenced project cost. But the project is mid-construction. A large share of the cost is in signed engineering, procurement, and construction contracts with counterparties who contracted with the Hungarian state in good faith. Abrupt withdrawal of capital would not be a clean saving — it would strand a partly-built asset and trigger contractual liabilities. The honest classification is a phase-out of the *budget-financed* model over five years: the state stops injecting equity from general revenue and the project's remaining capital need is met through project-financing instruments — debt raised against the asset and its future generation revenue, as a privately-built power station would be financed. This is a debt-bridge in form: the bridge cost is the capital the project still requires while the financing model is converted, declining as project debt and, ultimately, divestment of the operating asset replace budget equity. The five-year horizon reflects the construction and financing-conversion timeline, not a political preference. This is not a saving that materialises in year 1 — the net saving in the first year is zero, because the project's capital need does not disappear; it is the financing source that changes. The saving accrues as budget equity is replaced by project finance and, at completion, the operating asset can be divested or run on a stand-alone commercial basis without recourse to the budget.

Indoklás

Consular protection of citizens abroad and the conduct of bilateral and treaty relations are core functions of national government — the rights-protection and rule-of-law-infrastructure category. A Hungarian citizen detained, bereaved, or stranded abroad has no voluntary substitute for consular assistance comparable to the one a domestic dispute has in the courts; the function is a genuine state responsibility, not a discretionary allocation. The mission network also services the legal machinery of treaty relations. Keep does not mean exempt from efficiency review: the network's size, the property portfolio behind the 7,192.0 millió Ft investment and 1,581.5 millió Ft renovation lines, and the ratio of representational to consular spending are all legitimate subjects of operational scrutiny. It means the function is not a phase-out candidate.

Indoklás

This line covers Hungary's assessed contributions to international organisations of which it is a treaty member, and EU-related payments. While Hungary's membership of any given organisation is a policy choice that the reform framework can revisit, the assessed dues of bodies the country chooses to remain in are contractual obligations of membership, not discretionary transfers. As long as Hungary is a member, the dues are owed; the decision to leave a given organisation is a separate policy question with its own costs and is not resolved at the level of a budget line. Classified Keep on the standing-membership premise, with the caveat that the membership decisions themselves are open to the broader reform debate.

Indoklás

This is the chapter's third-largest line and the budgetary base of the Stipendium Hungaricum scholarship system — state-funded places at Hungarian universities for foreign students, administered through the foreign-affairs portfolio as an instrument of diplomatic and economic outreach. The case for tax-financing it is weak on the framework's terms. The benefit is concentrated: it accrues to a defined population of foreign scholarship recipients and to the universities that receive the per-place funding. The cost is dispersed across Hungarian taxpayers, including the working family whose own children study at the same universities without a comparable subsidy. Consider the arithmetic at family scale. The line is 41,970.0 millió Ft. For a worker at a 540,000 Ft median monthly gross wage,[^4] the chapter's claim on the general tax pool that funds programmes like this is real money — a recurring transfer to a scholarship system whose recipients are, by design, not the taxpayer's own household. A Hungarian parent paying SZJA and the social contribution tax to fund foreign-student places, while financing their own child's education from after-tax income, is the seen-and-unseen mismatch in domestic form. The diplomatic-outreach rationale is genuine but it is a preference, not a rights-protection function: it belongs to the discretionary category. A four-year phase-out protects students mid-degree — a student who enrolled in reliance on a funded multi-year place must be able to complete it — while ending new intakes. The horizon matches a standard degree cycle.

Indoklás

This line draws on the EU state-aid category created to let member states subsidise firms through the post-2022 energy-price and industrial-transition shock — a framework that is, by its own construction and name, temporary. It is a second discretionary firm-subsidy channel running parallel to the General Investment Promotion Subsidy, distinguished mainly by the EU legal basis it cites. The same calculation and public-choice analysis applies: a politically-allocated cash transfer to selected firms, with the visible recipient set against the dispersed and invisible taxpayers and competitors. Because the framework is explicitly time-limited, the honest classification is a short phase-out aligned with the framework's own sunset rather than an indefinite Keep. Two years honours any aid already committed under the framework while ending new commitments.

Indoklás

Consular protection of citizens abroad and the conduct of bilateral and treaty relations are core functions of national government — the rights-protection and rule-of-law-infrastructure category. A Hungarian citizen detained, bereaved, or stranded abroad has no voluntary substitute for consular assistance comparable to the one a domestic dispute has in the courts; the function is a genuine state responsibility, not a discretionary allocation. The mission network also services the legal machinery of treaty relations. Keep does not mean exempt from efficiency review: the network's size, the property portfolio behind the 7,192.0 millió Ft investment and 1,581.5 millió Ft renovation lines, and the ratio of representational to consular spending are all legitimate subjects of operational scrutiny. It means the function is not a phase-out candidate.

Indoklás

Conducting foreign relations and negotiating treaties is a recognised function of a national government; the headquarters that staffs it is not a candidate for abolition. But the central-administration line has grown alongside the ministry's expanding industrial-policy remit, and a foreign ministry that returned to a diplomatic-core mandate would need a smaller headquarters than one that also administers a 107 milliárd Ft subsidy programme and a state-enterprise portfolio. Holding the line nominally lets real-terms erosion at 2-3% inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, in step with the phase-out of the discretionary programmes the headquarters currently administers.

Indoklás

Tied aid credit is concessional state lending to foreign governments on the condition that the borrowed funds are spent on goods and services from Hungarian firms. It is simultaneously a development-aid instrument and an export subsidy: the recipient government gets below-market credit, and a selected set of Hungarian exporters gets guaranteed orders. The export-subsidy element is a discretionary transfer to specific firms financed by the general taxpayer, with the same calculation and public-choice features as the direct investment subsidies. A three-year phase-out reflects that tied-credit facilities are extended under framework agreements with partner governments; existing credit lines run for defined terms and the commitments to partner governments should be honoured to the end of their agreed periods rather than abrogated.

Indoklás

A "factory rescue" line is a programme to keep specific industrial operations running with public money when their own revenues would not sustain them. This is the soft-budget-constraint mechanism in its clearest form: a firm that would otherwise have to restructure, find a buyer, or close instead receives a transfer that lets it continue at its current scale. The cost is not only the 10,234.2 millió Ft. It is the capital and labour locked into an operation the unsubsidised market would reprice or release — workers and machines that a closure or sale would move toward uses customers actually pay for. The chain runs straight: if a plant cannot cover its costs from what buyers will voluntarily pay, the subsidy does not fix the underlying mismatch; it freezes it, and charges the taxpayer for the freeze. There is no reliance interest of the kind that justifies a phase-out: a discretionary rescue fund creates no contractual entitlement to perpetual rescue. The line can be closed in a single budget cycle.

Indoklás

This line funds organisations carrying out foreign-economic-development and trade-promotion activity. Trade promotion — connecting Hungarian exporters to foreign markets — is an activity that the firms which benefit from it could fund themselves, through chambers of commerce, sector associations, and paid trade-mission participation, at a scale that reflects what exporters actually value it at. Where the beneficiaries are identifiable commercial firms and the activity is a commercial service to them, the case for tax-financing rather than fee-financing is weak: the diffuse taxpayer is funding a service whose value is captured by a specific and organised set of exporting firms. A three-year phase-out lets the organisations transition to a membership-and-fee model in which exporters pay for trade-promotion services in proportion to the use they make of them.

Indoklás

Consular protection of citizens abroad and the conduct of bilateral and treaty relations are core functions of national government — the rights-protection and rule-of-law-infrastructure category. A Hungarian citizen detained, bereaved, or stranded abroad has no voluntary substitute for consular assistance comparable to the one a domestic dispute has in the courts; the function is a genuine state responsibility, not a discretionary allocation. The mission network also services the legal machinery of treaty relations. Keep does not mean exempt from efficiency review: the network's size, the property portfolio behind the 7,192.0 millió Ft investment and 1,581.5 millió Ft renovation lines, and the ratio of representational to consular spending are all legitimate subjects of operational scrutiny. It means the function is not a phase-out candidate.

Indoklás

Conducting foreign relations and negotiating treaties is a recognised function of a national government; the headquarters that staffs it is not a candidate for abolition. But the central-administration line has grown alongside the ministry's expanding industrial-policy remit, and a foreign ministry that returned to a diplomatic-core mandate would need a smaller headquarters than one that also administers a 107 milliárd Ft subsidy programme and a state-enterprise portfolio. Holding the line nominally lets real-terms erosion at 2-3% inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, in step with the phase-out of the discretionary programmes the headquarters currently administers.

Indoklás

Consular protection of citizens abroad and the conduct of bilateral and treaty relations are core functions of national government — the rights-protection and rule-of-law-infrastructure category. A Hungarian citizen detained, bereaved, or stranded abroad has no voluntary substitute for consular assistance comparable to the one a domestic dispute has in the courts; the function is a genuine state responsibility, not a discretionary allocation. The mission network also services the legal machinery of treaty relations. Keep does not mean exempt from efficiency review: the network's size, the property portfolio behind the 7,192.0 millió Ft investment and 1,581.5 millió Ft renovation lines, and the ratio of representational to consular spending are all legitimate subjects of operational scrutiny. It means the function is not a phase-out candidate.

Indoklás

This is the operating budget of the apparatus that administers the investment-subsidy programme analysed above — the staff and overhead of running the grant fund. It has no rationale independent of the fund it administers. As the General Investment Promotion Subsidy winds down over four years, the administrative apparatus winds down with it; a three-year horizon brings the operating cost to zero slightly ahead of the grant run-off, since the closed-to-new-applications fund needs less administration than an open one.

Indoklás

This line funds collective marketing and communication for Hungarian wine. The reasoning here is close to a candle-makers' petition turned on its head: a state line that pays to advertise one domestic industry's product is a transfer from the general taxpayer — including every taxpayer who does not drink wine, and every producer in every other sector that gets no comparable marketing subsidy — to the winemaking sector. Wine producers benefit from marketing their product; that is precisely why marketing is something producers fund themselves, individually and through voluntary trade associations and regional wine bodies, in proportion to the value they place on it. There is no rights-protection rationale and no reliance interest of the kind that warrants a transition period — a marketing appropriation creates no entitlement. Generic-product marketing is the textbook case of an activity that the beneficiaries can and do fund voluntarily; the line can be closed in a single cycle.

Indoklás

The Hungary Helps Program channels Hungarian humanitarian and development assistance abroad, with a focus on persecuted Christian communities and faith-linked development projects.[^3] Humanitarian giving to communities abroad is a paradigmatically voluntary activity: it is the category of spending that charitable donation, church collection, and voluntary association fund directly and at scale, in proportion to what donors actually choose to give. When the state taxes citizens generally and then allocates the proceeds to humanitarian recipients chosen by the foreign ministry, it substitutes a political officeholder's allocation for the donor's — and a Hungarian citizen who would not have chosen to fund a given project still funds it, while a citizen who would have given more is taxed rather than asked. The activity is worthy; the question is the financing channel, and the voluntary channel exists and works for exactly this category. A two-year phase-out lets in-flight grant commitments to specific projects run off while ending tax-financed new grants; the underlying humanitarian impulse migrates to the voluntary giving and church-based channels that fund this work elsewhere.

Indoklás

This line funds the back-office and technical infrastructure that the consular network depends on. It is part of the same rights-protection function as the missions themselves and stands or falls with them. Operational-efficiency review applies; phase-out does not.

Indoklás

Conducting foreign relations and negotiating treaties is a recognised function of a national government; the headquarters that staffs it is not a candidate for abolition. But the central-administration line has grown alongside the ministry's expanding industrial-policy remit, and a foreign ministry that returned to a diplomatic-core mandate would need a smaller headquarters than one that also administers a 107 milliárd Ft subsidy programme and a state-enterprise portfolio. Holding the line nominally lets real-terms erosion at 2-3% inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, in step with the phase-out of the discretionary programmes the headquarters currently administers.

Indoklás

This line funds economic-development grants to Hungarian-minority communities and businesses in neighbouring countries. The activity is a discretionary transfer: the foreign ministry selects recipient projects and businesses abroad and funds them from the Hungarian general taxpayer. The recipients are commercial and community organisations outside Hungary; the beneficiary is concentrated and identifiable, the cost diffuse. There is no rights-protection or rule-of-law-infrastructure rationale, and a discretionary grant line creates no contractual entitlement to continuation. The line can be closed in a single cycle.

Indoklás

This funds the operating apparatus of the Hungary Helps Agency — the body that administers the programme analysed above. Its rationale is derivative: it exists to disburse the grants. As the grant programme phases out over two years, the agency that administers it phases out with it. Because the protected party here is the agency's employees — a small professional staff with general administrative and project-management skills — the appropriate bridge mechanism is severance-with-overlap rather than a generic glide. Severance applies to the payroll component of the line, not the whole envelope. The chapter does not break out the agency's payroll separately from its other operating costs. No audited payroll breakdown for the agency was located during this analysis; the payroll component is therefore estimated at roughly 40% of the operating line — about 657 millió Ft — by analogy to the typical personnel share of small Hungarian government-agency administrative budgets. This estimate is flagged for primary-source verification against the agency's annual report to Parliament. On that basis, the non-payroll operating cost (about 986 millió Ft) ends in year 1, and the payroll component is protected through a single overlap year of severance, during which staff keep their salary and may take new private-sector employment; the full line then reaches zero in year 2.

Indoklás

Consular protection of citizens abroad and the conduct of bilateral and treaty relations are core functions of national government — the rights-protection and rule-of-law-infrastructure category. A Hungarian citizen detained, bereaved, or stranded abroad has no voluntary substitute for consular assistance comparable to the one a domestic dispute has in the courts; the function is a genuine state responsibility, not a discretionary allocation. The mission network also services the legal machinery of treaty relations. Keep does not mean exempt from efficiency review: the network's size, the property portfolio behind the 7,192.0 millió Ft investment and 1,581.5 millió Ft renovation lines, and the ratio of representational to consular spending are all legitimate subjects of operational scrutiny. It means the function is not a phase-out candidate.

Indoklás

This programme supports the Csango Hungarian-speaking communities in the Bacau region of Romania, principally through cultural and educational activity — language teaching, schooling, and community institutions. The activity differs from a commercial-development grant: it funds ongoing educational and cultural institutions on which families have come to rely for their children's schooling. That reliance is what distinguishes this line from the immediate-cut cross-border development grants. Abrupt withdrawal would strand children mid-schooling and community institutions mid-operation. A three-year phase-out gives the supported institutions time to transition to voluntary, diaspora-funded, and church-based financing — the channels through which minority-community cultural and educational work is sustained — while honouring the reliance of families currently enrolled. The activity is a preference, not a rights-protection function; the phase-out reflects the reliance interest, not a different classification of the underlying spending.

Indoklás

A scholarship programme defined by the religious identity of its recipients is a discretionary transfer in which a political officeholder selects beneficiaries by a subjective criterion. Education support, like humanitarian giving, is a category that voluntary mechanisms — church scholarships, denominational funds, charitable foundations — fund directly and well; faith communities have organised exactly this kind of scholarship support throughout their history, financed by their own members. There is no reliance interest justifying a phase-out at the programme level: a discretionary annual scholarship line creates no contractual entitlement, and where individual students hold mid-degree commitments those can be honoured as a small residual within the receiving institutions. The line can be closed in the 2026 cycle, with the activity returning to the voluntary religious and charitable channel that is its natural home.

Indoklás

A residual discretionary line supporting the operating costs of "other organisations" connected to the ministry's remit. An open-ended "support for the operation of other organisations" line is the structural form most exposed to subjective allocation by political officeholders: it has no defined function, no defined recipient class, and no contractual entitlement attached. It can be closed in a single budget cycle.

Indoklás

This line transfers operating and capital resources to commercial companies the ministry owns. A state enterprise that requires an annual resource transfer from the budget to function is, by that fact, not covering its costs from what its customers voluntarily pay — the soft-budget-constraint pattern again. The transfer crowds out productive capital and shields the enterprise from the discipline that would otherwise force it to reprice, restructure, or be sold. The amount is small, but the principle scales: a budget transfer to a state-owned commercial company is a candidate for elimination, with the underlying ownership question — whether the state should hold these companies at all — referred to the broader privatisation track. Closing the transfer line forces the question.

Indoklás

This line funds subsidiary companies held within the Paks II ownership structure. Its rationale is entirely derivative of the Paks II project: the subsidiaries exist to serve the construction and operation of the reactors. The line therefore phases out on the same five-year schedule as the parent capital injection — as the project converts to project financing and the operating asset is commercialised, the subsidiary transfers convert with it.

Indoklás

This line funds a training subsidy administered through the ministry's portfolio. A state-financed training subsidy to selected firms or individuals is a discretionary transfer: the awarding authority decides which training activities qualify and which applicants receive support, without a market price to discipline those decisions. Where training has value to the employer, the employer has a direct incentive to fund it — training that raises worker productivity generates returns the employer captures; where training has value to the worker, the worker likewise has an incentive to invest in it from future earnings. A state subsidy layered on top does not resolve the question of which training is worth funding; it creates an incentive to design activities to match the subsidy criteria rather than to respond to actual skills needs. The amount is modest but the structural problem is identical to the larger discretionary-transfer lines in this chapter. There is no contractual reliance interest justifying a phase-out: a discretionary annual appropriation creates no entitlement to continuation. The line can be closed in a single budget cycle.

Indoklás

This line funds regional development tasks in the Central Danube corridor — a geographically-targeted discretionary programme administered through the foreign-affairs portfolio. Regional development grants directed to specific geographic areas or specific projects within them are a variant of the same category as the cross-border development grants analysed above: a transfer from the general taxpayer to a defined set of recipient communities or organisations, allocated by a political officeholder without a market price to guide the selection. Where infrastructure or development in the Central Danube corridor has value, the affected local authorities and communities can fund and prioritise their own development through their own budgets, EU cohesion fund allocations, and the ordinary capital-investment processes. Running a separate ministerial appropriation for regional tasks duplicates the budget channel and adds a layer of discretionary allocation without adding analytical clarity about which projects merit priority. The amount is modest and the line carries no contractual reliance interest; it can be closed in a single cycle.

Indoklás

A discretionary support line for organisations and professional programmes under the ministry's supervision. Where the line funds genuine ministry functions those are already provided for in the central-administration title; a separate discretionary support line for supervised organisations is a transfer whose allocation rests on the ministry's judgement, with no market discipline and no contractual entitlement on the recipient side. The amount is small; the line can be closed in a single cycle.

Indoklás

Conducting foreign relations and negotiating treaties is a recognised function of a national government; the headquarters that staffs it is not a candidate for abolition. But the central-administration line has grown alongside the ministry's expanding industrial-policy remit, and a foreign ministry that returned to a diplomatic-core mandate would need a smaller headquarters than one that also administers a 107 milliárd Ft subsidy programme and a state-enterprise portfolio. Holding the line nominally lets real-terms erosion at 2-3% inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, in step with the phase-out of the discretionary programmes the headquarters currently administers.

Indoklás

Official representation of the state — receiving foreign delegations, state visits, the ceremonial functions attached to the offices of the head of government and head of state — is an ancillary function of offices that themselves have a recognised constitutional basis. The lines are bounded and modest. Outright elimination would be analytically premature, since some representational capacity attaches legitimately to these offices; but there is no case for expansion. Holding the lines nominally lets real-terms erosion discipline them gently while signalling that protocol spending is not a growth area.

Indoklás

Official representation of the state — receiving foreign delegations, state visits, the ceremonial functions attached to the offices of the head of government and head of state — is an ancillary function of offices that themselves have a recognised constitutional basis. The lines are bounded and modest. Outright elimination would be analytically premature, since some representational capacity attaches legitimately to these offices; but there is no case for expansion. Holding the lines nominally lets real-terms erosion discipline them gently while signalling that protocol spending is not a growth area.

Indoklás

Official representation of the state — receiving foreign delegations, state visits, the ceremonial functions attached to the offices of the head of government and head of state — is an ancillary function of offices that themselves have a recognised constitutional basis. The lines are bounded and modest. Outright elimination would be analytically premature, since some representational capacity attaches legitimately to these offices; but there is no case for expansion. Holding the lines nominally lets real-terms erosion discipline them gently while signalling that protocol spending is not a growth area.

Indoklás

This line funds Hungarian participation in European Territorial Co-operation Groupings (EGTCs) — cross-border co-operation bodies between local and regional authorities on either side of an EU internal border. The line is a discretionary subsidy to these co-operation structures; the participating authorities, if the co-operation has value to them, can fund their own participation from their own budgets. The amount is small and the line carries no individual reliance interest. It can be closed in a single cycle.

Indoklás

Consular protection of citizens abroad and the conduct of bilateral and treaty relations are core functions of national government — the rights-protection and rule-of-law-infrastructure category. A Hungarian citizen detained, bereaved, or stranded abroad has no voluntary substitute for consular assistance comparable to the one a domestic dispute has in the courts; the function is a genuine state responsibility, not a discretionary allocation. The mission network also services the legal machinery of treaty relations. Keep does not mean exempt from efficiency review: the network's size, the property portfolio behind the 7,192.0 millió Ft investment and 1,581.5 millió Ft renovation lines, and the ratio of representational to consular spending are all legitimate subjects of operational scrutiny. It means the function is not a phase-out candidate.

Indoklás

A small line funding international development co-operation activity. Development assistance, like humanitarian giving, is a category for which voluntary financing channels exist and operate at scale. The amount is immaterial and the line carries no reliance interest; it can be closed in a single cycle. The principle is the same one that applies to the larger Hungary Helps line — the size is not the criterion.

Indoklás

Conducting foreign relations and negotiating treaties is a recognised function of a national government; the headquarters that staffs it is not a candidate for abolition. But the central-administration line has grown alongside the ministry's expanding industrial-policy remit, and a foreign ministry that returned to a diplomatic-core mandate would need a smaller headquarters than one that also administers a 107 milliárd Ft subsidy programme and a state-enterprise portfolio. Holding the line nominally lets real-terms erosion at 2-3% inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, in step with the phase-out of the discretionary programmes the headquarters currently administers.

Indoklás

Conducting foreign relations and negotiating treaties is a recognised function of a national government; the headquarters that staffs it is not a candidate for abolition. But the central-administration line has grown alongside the ministry's expanding industrial-policy remit, and a foreign ministry that returned to a diplomatic-core mandate would need a smaller headquarters than one that also administers a 107 milliárd Ft subsidy programme and a state-enterprise portfolio. Holding the line nominally lets real-terms erosion at 2-3% inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, in step with the phase-out of the discretionary programmes the headquarters currently administers.

Indoklás

Conducting foreign relations and negotiating treaties is a recognised function of a national government; the headquarters that staffs it is not a candidate for abolition. But the central-administration line has grown alongside the ministry's expanding industrial-policy remit, and a foreign ministry that returned to a diplomatic-core mandate would need a smaller headquarters than one that also administers a 107 milliárd Ft subsidy programme and a state-enterprise portfolio. Holding the line nominally lets real-terms erosion at 2-3% inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, in step with the phase-out of the discretionary programmes the headquarters currently administers.

Indoklás

A contingency line for legal proceedings the ministry is party to. Defending and pursuing the state's legal position is a rule-of-law function. The amount is immaterial.