Hungarian Socialists call for budgetary cttee to hear finmin

The Socialist head of parliament’s budgetary committee has initiated a session of the body with a hearing of the finance minister over the government’s amending next year’s budget.

Speaking at a press conference broadcast on Facebook on Thursday, Zoltan Vajda slammed the government for “bypassing parliament” when changing the budget, saying that budgeting was “not the government’s internal affair”.

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Vajda insisted that the budget could not be amended through government decrees and that the government should submit a new draft “based on the real situation” to parliament. He also noted that he had called the original draft, submitted last summer, “fictitious” and had said it had “nothing to do with reality”.

Next year’s budget was planned with an inflation rate of 5.2 percent, whereas “this figure could be three or even four times as high”, he said, adding that the growth target was 4.1 percent while “the economy could even shrink”.