From the 2026 budget audit
A 'temporary' crisis subsidy that has become a second permanent grant fund.
This 40.8 billion Ft line uses an EU state-aid category designed for the 2022 energy shock to run a parallel firm-subsidy channel alongside the main investment-promotion fund.
Roughly 10,200 Ft per taxpayer per year — 40,825 million Ft through a channel that calls itself temporary while running year after year.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: firms receiving crisis support under a legal framework named for an emergency. The unseen: the taxpayer who funds what is in practice a second discretionary grant fund, operating alongside the first, with the same allocation logic and the same public-choice problem.
Objection
"The energy crisis was real — firms needed help to survive the transition."
Answer
The framework was created for a specific shock; that shock has passed. A temporary instrument that continues running creates permanent expectations of rescue, which is what makes it structurally identical to the investment subsidy. Committing no new aid and running off what was already promised is the honest implementation of what the framework's own name advertises.
Share if you think 'temporary' should mean what it says.
The analyst's verdict
Temporary Crisis and Transition Framework
Rationale
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.
Transition mechanism
Commit no new aid under the framework; run off committed support over two years, in line with the framework's temporary design.
Affected groups
Firms with committed crisis-framework support; no diplomatic-service impact.
Free Society Institute
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