From the 2026 budget audit
The Fund's transparent channel — and it is 24 times smaller than its discretionary one.
1.5 billion Ft flows through published competitive tenders; 35.6 billion flows through individual committee decisions. The Fund's own structure reveals which channel it prefers.
About 335 Ft per employed Hungarian per year for the tender channel — a small fraction of the 7,900 Ft the individual-grant channel costs each worker.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: minority and diaspora organisations that win grants through a published tender with stated criteria. The unseen: the precedent the ratio sets — a fund with two award routes operating the discretionary one at twenty-four times the size of the transparent one is a fund in which political selection, not stated criteria, is the operative mechanism.
Objection
"The tender route is the Fund's most transparent and accountable channel — phasing it out removes the mechanism that best disciplines grant allocation."
Answer
A tender with criteria set by a central body is more transparent than a case-by-case decision, but it is not a market signal of what served communities value. A voluntary endowment inherits the tender mechanism and runs its own competitive rounds funded by diaspora and business contributions — with the decisive difference that no taxpayer is compelled to fund it. The transition preserves the procedure; it ends the compulsion.
Share if you think diaspora donors should run Hungarian minority grant rounds, not a state committee.
The analyst's verdict
Grants awarded through tender procedure
Rationale
This is the chapter's competitive-tender channel — the grants awarded through a published call with ex-ante criteria rather than by individual Committee decision. Procedurally it is the cleanest line in the chapter: a tender with criteria is more transparent and less exposed to political selection than a case-by-case grant. But procedure is not the framework's test. Whether the award is by tender or by individual decision, it remains a discretionary state allocation of resources toward minority and diaspora cultural activity, financed by compulsory Hungarian tax revenue, and the calculation difficulty is unchanged — a tender ranks applications against criteria a central body wrote, which is not the same as a market signal of what the served communities actually value. It is classified Phase-Out on the same logic and the same five-year horizon as the substantive programme lines, and migrated to the same voluntary-endowment vehicle, which can run its own competitive grant rounds funded by diaspora and business contributions.
Transition mechanism
Linear reduction over five years (301.5 millió Ft per year), folded into the voluntary-endowment transition established for the larger programme lines; the endowment inherits the tender mechanism for its own grant rounds.
Affected groups
Minority and diaspora organisations that win tender grants. The transition is the same as for the individual-grant line; the tender mechanism itself is preserved inside the voluntary vehicle.
Free Society Institute
Support independent analysis
Our research is free, open, and unsponsored. If you find it valuable, help us keep it that way.