Who decides which Hungarian minority organisations deserve to exist?

Rationale

This is the largest single line in the chapter — 45% of the envelope — and it is the line where the mechanism is most exposed. "Egyedi támogatás" means exactly what the Hungarian says: individual, case-by-case grants, not awarded through a published tender with ex-ante criteria but allocated by decision of the Fund's Committee to named recipient organisations. The statute itself sets up two distinct channels — public tender ("pályázati eljárás") and individual grant — and the budget shows the individual-grant channel running at roughly 24 times the size of the tender channel (35,559.8 against 1,507.5 millió Ft). The bulk of the chapter does not pass through a competitive, criteria-based process. This is the structure in which subjective allocation by political officeholders becomes the operative mechanism. A committee chaired by the minister responsible for national policy decides which organisations among the Hungarian minority and diaspora institutional landscape are "of national significance" and how much each receives. There is no market price for minority cultural advocacy, no revealed willingness-to-pay that could discipline the allocation, and — because the recipients' budgets depend on the grant rather than on the constituencies they serve — the recipient organisations have a structural incentive to shape their activity toward the priorities of whichever administration controls the Committee. The seen is the funded Hungarian-language institution abroad. The unseen is the filtering effect: minority organisations whose programme aligns with the funding administration's view of nemzetpolitika are sustained; those that diverge are not, and the divergence need never be stated because the grant is discretionary by design. Phase-Out rather than Immediate Cut because the protected parties are real. A significant number of Hungarian-minority schools, churches, cultural associations, and media outlets in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine have built multi-year operating plans around this funding stream; abrupt removal would close functioning institutions serving communities with no domestic Hungarian-language alternative. The honest path is a five-year glide that lets recipient organisations rebuild toward voluntary financing — diaspora giving, the substantial cross-border Hungarian business community, congregational and membership support, and tuition where the recipient is a school. The Hungarian church-school sector inside Hungary itself demonstrates that community institutions sustaining a national curriculum can operate on a mixed base of per-pupil funding plus church and parental contributions rather than on discretionary central grant. The reform does not abandon the Hungarian minority; it removes the political officeholder from the position of deciding which minority institutions deserve to exist.