42 billion Ft for village roads — through a discretionary grant tournament.

Rationale

The Magyar Falu Program (Hungarian Village Programme) channels development funding to settlements with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants — local infrastructure, rural roads, small shops, civil organisations. At 42.0 milliárd Ft across the three sub-lines it is, taken together, the second-largest discretionary block in the chapter after priority sectoral support. The classification has to separate two things the programme bundles. Rural local infrastructure — village roads, basic municipal facilities — is a legitimate object of public expenditure; the question the framework presses is not whether small settlements should have functioning roads but *through what channel* they are financed. Routing settlement infrastructure through a centrally-administered, discretionary, application-and-award programme run from the ministry concentrates the allocation decision in central officeholders, who choose which settlements receive which awards. That is a subjective allocation: a central body, without a market price or a rules-based formula, deciding which village gets the road this year. It also creates a structural dependency of settlement administrations on the centre and on the application cycle. The classical-liberal direction is to move local-infrastructure financing onto a transparent, rules-based, per-capita or formula footing under the control of the settlements themselves and their own (locally-raised and formula-shared) revenue — the subsidiarity principle — rather than a discretionary central grant tournament. The "civil and other support" sub-line (6,700.0 millió Ft) is the weakest of the three: discretionary grants to civil organisations selected centrally, the same subjective-allocation pattern as the "other organisations" line above. Phase out the centrally-administered programme over four years. The horizon honours the in-flight, part-completed road and infrastructure projects already approved under the programme — those run to completion — while the financing of rural local infrastructure is migrated onto a rules-based, formula-driven local-revenue footing. The phase-out is of the discretionary central channel, not of rural roads.