Agreement with EC to be followed by ‘unprecedented’ wage hike for teachers

An “unprecedented” wage hike awaits teachers if the government reaches an agreement with the European Commission on EU funding currently withheld due to the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism, the prime minister’s chief of staff said on Thursday.

The government is hoping to raise teachers’ wages to 80 percent of the average salary of university graduates by 2025, Gergely Gulyás told a regular press briefing.

Wages may be raised by 21 percent in January 2023, by 25 percent in 2024, and by 29-30 percent in the two subsequent years, he said.

Of the three major wage hikes teachers have received in the past 30 years, two were awarded under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government, he added.

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The government has agreed with the European Union to take 17 measures, mostly in connection with the public procurement system. The proportion of single-bid procurements will be reduced and cooperation with the European Union’s anti-corruption taskforce OLAF intensified, Gulyás said.

Orbán on Thursday thanked in a letter the EU heads of state and government for their decision to extend the deadlines, he said. Hungary is striving for a fair agreement, and the government is totally committed to fulfilling its pledges, he added.

Meanwhile, Gulyás said Hungary’s energy supply is secure. Even if the country received not a single molecule of gas during this period, it still has enough gas stored to last six months, he added.

The chief of staff said Hungary has significant storage capacities and high storage levels, and it has also made significant gas purchases.

Skyrocketing energy places in Europe has triggered inflation and exchange rate problems in Hungary, he said.

There are two major challenges to be faced in Europe: the availability and the price of energy, especially natural gas, Gulyás said. Prices are exorbitantly high and energy is not always and necessarily available from its usual sources, he added.

The current crisis has underlined the need to effect several changes in Hungary’s energy system, he said.

If the government reaches an agreement with the European Commission, Hungary would use the credit part of the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) for the green transition and upgrading its electricity network, he said.

Meanwhile, Gulyás said that whereas solar panel installations were feeding the energy into the electricity network, current regulations would have to be changed because the network cannot take in any more energy until a major upgrade is carried out. The requirement to feed the electricity back into the network will be suspended in the case of new applications for solar panels, he added.

Asked about Orbán’s meeting on Monday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Gulyás said the two leaders discussed EU sanctions against Russia among other matters. The sanctions should be discussed calmly and reviewed in a way that Europe’s interests are also taken into consideration, he said. Gulyás argued that rising energy prices triggered by the sanctions and the continuing threat of them had put all European economies in an extremely difficult situation.

Though Hungary has introduced “Europe’s biggest utility support scheme”, the situation is still “an extremely heavy burden” on the state, and further support schemes will have to be launched, Gulyás said. He added, however, that no other European country could compete with Germany’s 200 billion euro plan to shield companies and households from soaring energy prices.

Meanwhile, Gulyás said Europe would have to decide which sanctions should be extended when they expire in December.

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Source: MTI