Parties submit amendments to budget bill

Budapest (MTI) – More than 500 amendment proposals were filed to the 2016 budget by Friday’s deadline, most of them by opposition parties.

Lajos Kosa (Fidesz) proposed to add 1.5 billion forints (EUR 4.85m) to funding for national sports centres in connection with the World Aquatic Championships Budapest is hosting in 2017.

Cabinet chief Janos Lazar proposed to spend 300 million forints more on the Hungarian National Gallery and 1 billion forints more on the Budapest Operetta and Musical Theatre. He also suggested to regroup funding to benefit the Liget Budapest project, especially the Fine Arts Museum, Ethnology Museum and the Technical and Transport Museum.

Peter Harrach (KDNP) would spend 300 million forints more on church-run health care institutions and 80 million forints on the programmes of the Aron Marton Memorial Year.

Fidesz lawmakers Robert Balazs Simon and Akos Kara proposed a 4.9 billion forint budget for sports facilities in Gyor, northwest Hungary, in connection with the 2017 European Youth Olympics Festival to be organised in the city.

The entire Socialist parliamentary group was behind a proposal to allocate 285 billion forints for wage rises for social-service workers including teachers and health-care workers.

Another Socialist-sponsored bill would regroup 64 billion forints for wage hikes in higher education and funding for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Under this bill, another 250 billion forints would go towards welfare-related spending, including family allowances and disability and rehabilitation benefits.

A Socialist lawmaker’s bill would spend 35 billion on government-sponsored rental housing and 50 billion for building the M4 motorway.

Among hundreds of bills submitted by the radical nationalist Jobbik party, one sought to move 96 billion forints from the Prime Minister’s Office’s emergency budget to fund housing support schemes. Another bill proposed to raise payroll spending at the state agency for schools (Klik) by 35 billion forints and at higher education institutions by 20 billion forints.

Another Jobbik-sponsored bill would spend 3 billion forints on supporting in-vitro fertilisation programmes.

The small opposition LMP party proposed to increase support to higher education by 15 billion forints with an additional 10 billion forints for staff pay rises there. Another 12 billion forints would go towards schools in disadvantaged regions and 2.3 billion forints to National Parks in compensation for the land-based subsidies they lost, according to the bill submitted by LMP.

Economy Minister Mihaly Varga submitted the 2016 budget bill to parliament on May 13, pledging to leave 170 billion forints more with households next year. The budget targets revenue of 15,790 billion forints, expenditures of 16,551 billion forints and a deficit of 761.6 billion forints or about 2 percent of GDP.

Photo: MTI