Hungary's best young-researcher programme — in the wrong chapter.

Indoklás

The Lendület ("Momentum") Programme, launched in 2009, funds research groups led by competitively selected young researchers, with the explicit aim of attracting talented scientists back to Hungary and retaining those already here. Of every line in this chapter, Lendület has the strongest functional case: it is the one item that is genuinely a competitive, peer-reviewed research-funding instrument rather than a learned-society function or an administrative pool. Awards go to research groups selected on scientific merit through an application process, and the programme is structurally sounder — competitive, merit-based, with defined multi-year group cycles — than the opaque chapter-managed pool lines elsewhere in this chapter. The classical-liberal question, however, is not whether the programme selects well — it does — but whether competitive research funding belongs in a learned society's chapter at all. After the 2019 reorganisation, Hungary's research institutes and the bulk of the research-funding architecture sit outside the MTA. A competitive grant programme for young researchers is precisely the kind of instrument that belongs in the consolidated, openly contestable research-funding system — alongside the other peer-reviewed national science-funding calls — not as a chapter-managed line inside the budget of the learned society. The phase-out here is therefore not an abolition of the function but a relocation: the Lendület instrument, with its competitive selection intact, is migrated to the consolidated research-funding body over five years, so that all competitive Hungarian research funding faces a single open contest rather than being fragmented across institutional chapters. The five-year horizon protects the grant cohorts: a Lendület award runs for a fixed multi-year term (the programme's calls run on roughly five-year group cycles), and every current group must be allowed to complete its funded term before the line closes in this chapter. This is the chapter's most consequential classification, and it is worth being explicit that the relocation must not become a defunding. Hungary's gross R&D spending was about 1.4% of GDP in 2022 — below the EU-27 average of roughly 2.2% and below Czechia's share. The convergence gap with Czechia and Poland is partly a capital-and-productivity story, and research funding that genuinely raises productivity is not the kind of spending the framework treats as rent. The recommendation is structural, not budget-cutting: consolidate competitive research funding into one contestable system so that every forint of it faces the same open peer review, rather than leaving a well-run instrument as a ring-fenced line whose location owes more to institutional history than to funding design.