The 2025 budget will be the budget of the government’s “new economic policy”, Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, said at a regular press briefing on Thursday.
Government unveils 2025 budget
“We can realistically expect that peace will become achievable in Europe next year,” Gulyás said, adding that would pave the way for more money to go toward economic development, pay rises, housing and family subsidies.
He said the government would double tax allowances for families with children, roll out zero-interest credit for young workers, and introduce new housing subsidies in 2025, while launching the Demjan Sandor Progamme to scale up SMEs.
The 2025 budget “carves into stone” pensioners’ annual bonus, equivalent to a full month’s pension, while ensuring the resources necessary for family subsidies and the implementation of measures in the government’s 21-point economic policy action plan, he added.
Addressing talks between employers and unions on a three-year minimum wage agreement, Gulyás said the sides were “close to a deal”. The government has issued a mandate to the national economy minister to offer government support in reaching an agreement, if necessary, he added.
Gulyás: EU competitiveness pact ‘turnaround’
The European Union’s competitiveness pact, adopted at an informal EU summit held under Hungary’s presidency in Budapest last week, could “bring about a turnaround”, Gergely Gulyás said.
The bloc faces “countless” challenges and “Brussels is more often than not a part of the problem rather than of the solution, therefore it is crucial that member states come up with initiatives serving the whole of Europe,” Gulyás said. He added that Europe was lagging behind China and the United States because its competitiveness had declined.
Companies in Europe pay significantly more operating costs, especially energy, than companies in the US and China, he said.
EU regulations in the past decade had not taken competitiveness into account, he said, focusing instead on a “forced and senseless” green policy that did not serve environmental protection goals but harmed the European economy, he added.
“We do not believe the declaration adopted in Budapest will improve everything, but it will be inevitable to prioritise competitiveness” in decision-making, Gulyás said.
Meanwhile, Gulyás said that securing peace was in Europe’s interest, adding that “the US presidential election has triggered a need to speak about peace… From now on the United States will shift from the side of war to the pro-peace camp.”
Concerning bilateral ties with the US, Gulyás said: “The alliance between Hungary and the US has never been as strong as it will be after Donald Trump assumes office.” He said this was also indicated by symbolic gestures, noting that the Hungarian prime minister had been the first among European leaders to speak with the president-elect.
He said the “disruptive factors will also disappear” and “we are sure that the United States will have an ambassador to Hungary who has read the Vienna Convention and will work for good relations between the two governments.”
Regarding the 2025 budget submitted to parliament this week, Gulyás said the bill was a reflection of the government’s “new economic policy”.
“We can realistically expect that peace will become achievable in Europe next year,” Gulyás said, adding that this would pave the way for more money channelled towards economic development, pay rises, housing and family subsidies.
He noted the government plans to double the tax allowance for families with children, roll out zero-interest credit for young workers, and introduce new housing subsidies in 2025, while launching the Demjan Sandor Progamme to scale up small and medium-sized businesses.
The 2025 budget “carves into stone” pensioners’ annual bonus, equivalent to a full month’s pension, while ensuring the resources necessary for family subsidies and the implementation of measures in the government’s 21-point economic policy action plan, he added.
Addressing talks between employers and unions on a three-year minimum wage agreement, Gulyás said the sides were “close to a deal”. The government has issued a mandate to the national economy minister to offer government support in reaching an agreement, if necessary, he added.
He said the goal was for an average gross wage of 1 million forints and a minimum wage of 400,000 in Hungary in the next few years.
Gulyás said the government would raise the amount of housing support employers may offer their workers with tax preferences. He said such measures supported government efforts to ensure housing affordability.
Gulyás said the government planned to press on with its scheme to raise teachers’ salaries next year, “to help teachers earn wages that reflect the importance of their profession”.
He said it was important to raise wages in water management, too, and pledged a 30 percent hike.
Government spokeswoman Eszter Vitalyos said the government will launch some 300 new infrastructure projects next year worth a combined 8,100 billion forints. She added that the projects earmarked for 2025 will cost the treasury 480 billion forints. Among them, she mentioned improvements along the Debrecen-Nyiregyhaza railway line, development of a major highway connecting the same two cities, the addition of new campuses at Pazmany Peter Catholic University and Obuda University, as well as upgrading Debrecen’s water supply and the sewerage system in Karcag.
Meanwhile, asked about leaked audio recordings of Peter Magyar in the leader of the opposition Tisza Party used “foul language to describe his own followers”, Gulyás said it was “obvious” that “Magyar deeply despises and looks down on his own voters”.
“Honouring the will of the voters is a fundamental requirement for participation in politics; voters’ trust cannot be earned otherwise,” he said.
“We learned from none other than the party leader himself that representatives of foreign interests are in the European Parliament and in the Tisza Party,” Gulyás said. He said it was in the country’s interest that Hungary was represented by MEPs “who can, notwithstanding any domestic dispute, promote the national interest”.
Asked about his past relationship with Magyar, Gulyás said there had been things the two of them had agreed and disagreed on, “but we were in full agreement that he’s insane”.
Asked to comment on Magyar’s insistence that he was being bugged and that the government was using AI to create damaging content about him, Gulyás said: “These are claims that come from insanity.” He said there was no evidence to back up Magyar’s claims, and the government had never and would never use the secret services to spy on its opponents.
Gulyás said Evelin Vogel, Magyar’s former partner, had never received any assignments from Fidesz. He said he also had no knowledge of Vogel having received any assignments from companies linked to Fidesz, “but I’m also reading the news reports about this, and the statements made in the press are clear”.
He rejected Magyar’s allegation that the government operated “a private secret service of its own”. “The Hungarian government has a regular secret service operating within the constitutional framework; we have no other secret service,” he said.
Gulyás dismissed opinion polls indicating the Tisza Party was ahead of Fidesz, saying that such pollsters did not gauge public opinion but tried to shape politics. He also cast aside a report suggesting that the government had ordered a poll measuring the suitability of Magyar and Orban for the post of prime minister.
On the hacker attack against the Defence Procurement Agency, Gulyás said the agency had been breached by a hostile, non-state foreign hacking group, adding that the agency did not handle any sensitive data related to the military infrastructure, so no such data could be acquired by the hackers.
He said the investigation was still under way, but based on the reports so far, no highly sensitive military data had been accessed. Responding to another question, he reiterated that the data acquired included encrypted data and procurement data, but the agency’s records did not contain sensitive data related to the national defence structure.
Meanwhile, regarding a possible bilateral economic package between Hungary and the US, Gulyás confirmed that the US ratification of the double taxation treaty was part of it, adding that he could not say any more for now, but the goal was for both Hungary and the US to end up better off with the pact.
Regarding energy trade, Gulyás said the security of supply was served by obtaining energy from as many sources as possible, and if several sources were available, then “we are sensitive to price; if we can buy energy for cheaper or for as much as we are buying it now, then we would be happy to buy it from anyone.”
Gulyás said that US companies had treated Hungary reasonably and fairly, so Hungary had been an attractive investment environment for US investors in recent years, notwithstanding “the openly hostile US administration that cancelled [the] double taxation [agreement]”, Gulyás said.
He said the US president-elect had made pledges that could have a negative impact on the European economy, including the Hungarian economy. But the government’s aim was to conclude a pact with the US that would also benefit Europe, he said. “We don’t want to reach an agreement at the expense of Europe.”
Answering a question, Gulyás said he was not authorised to say what the Hungarian prime minister had discussed with Trump regarding Ukraine or what the US president-elect planned.
Regarding the Russia-Ukraine war, he said Hungary was unlikely to fundamentally shape the thinking of the US leadership in this area as the two countries were of such different weights, but government representatives were talking to those who would play a leading role in the new administration, he said.
Gulyás said the future US administration would pursue its own China policy, but friendship between the two leaders would not entail the two states following exactly the same policies.
“We have to prioritise Hungarian interests, and the Hungarian — and European — interest is to trade with China,” he said, adding that trade is also in the interest of the US as “they would be in big trouble if China chose not to finance the US debt”.
The question, he said, was what a new US tariff policy would serve: a temporary volume reduction or the preparation of a larger Chinese-US agreement. He said he would not rule out either eventuality.
Gulyás also noted that Trump was critical of both Germany and China because there was a US trade deficit with both states.
Gulyás dismissed reports that Orban had attended a private event held by the US president-elect as “fake news”.
Asked about a peace deal that would leave NATO membership open to Ukraine and guarantee the restoration of its sovereignty in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, Gulyás said nobody had questioned that Russia was committing acts of aggression against Ukraine and that it had violated international law. The occupied territories would therefore not be recognised as Russian, he said. The chance of peace, he added, had shot up since Trump’s election.
At the same time, “there is a military reality”. Most experts agreed that time was on Russia’s side, he said. “This means peace is in Ukraine’s interest too. The only alternative would be if NATO intervened, but even the Biden administration rejected that.”
The main issue is the nature of guarantees that Ukraine could be given to ensure that Russia would not repeat the attack “or go even further”, Gulyás said.
Meanwhile, commenting on antifa demonstrators’ attack on a reporter of Hungarian HirTV, Gulyás said Brussels had “issues with security and freedom”. “It’s no wonder that reporters can’t work freely in a place where events organised by conservative parties are banned by the mayor himself,” Gulyás said, referring to a conference scheduled and cancelled before the European parliamentary elections. “Today, Brussels is not part of the free world,” he said.
Asked about the hearings of European commissioner candidate Oliver Varhelyi in the European Parliament, Gulyás said the process had been drawn out due to the EP’s “well-known hatred for Hungarians”.
Regarding the government crisis in Germany, Gulyás said a new government could have a positive impact on Hungary’s economy. In the upcoming snap elections, the conservative Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists (CDU-CSU) were expected to forge an alliance with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), he said, adding that he expected a CDU/CSU-led government to have a “better economic policy”.
Whereas last week’s EU summit made no decisions on changing climate policy goals, a German government without the Greens, “more linked to the economy”, would create a new situation “and put the matter on the table again”, he said.
Commenting on attacks on Israeli football fans in Amsterdam, Gulyás said anti-Semitism was rooted in migration, not in the war Israel was fighting. “Where migration is not rejected, anti-Semitism cannot be curbed,” he said, adding this was the reason why Jews were safe in central Europe, especially in Hungary.
The management of migration had always brought about a rejection of European cultural traditions, Gulyás said. “It’s clear that migration brings about a new system of laws, anti-Semitism, a rejection of European family law, and rough and aggressive homophobia,” he said.
Commenting on the elections in Romania, Gulyás said proposed changes to Szekler Land’s public administration would “separate Hungarian communities from one another and turn a Hungarian majority into a minority”. He called on Transylvanian Hungarians to vote at the Dec 1 elections to thwart those plans.
Regarding Hungary’s access to the EU’s Erasmus and Horizon programmes, Gulyás said an anti-corruption law could not be used to “take away Erasmus grants from a country”.
Gulyás said the procedure was legally baseless. “The law doesn’t count for anything any more in Brussels,” he declared, adding that Hungarian students had been stripped of their grants while “certain third-country students” were enjoying them instead.
Government Spokeswoman Eszter Vitalyos said the government established the Pannonia and HU-rizont grant schemes to take the place of Erasmus. In 2024, 10 billion forints was earmarked for the Pannonia programme, with 1,600 students already granted trips and 1,500-2,000 applications under review, she said. This half-year, some 3,000 students are expected to join, she added.
On the topic of wage hikes for judges, Gulyás said the justice minister had been instructed to start talks with the National Office of the Judiciary, the National Judicial Council and the Supreme Court on a long-term wage agreement. “As far as I know, we are on the cusp of an agreement,” he added. Judges would receive “reliable and substantial” hikes over three years, amounting to over 50 percent by the start of 2027, he said. Other judicial employees, “who currently have tragically bad salaries”, would get larger hikes, he added.
On the issue of pensions, Gulyás said pension hikes last year exceeded inflation, and the government was working to maintain that trend, partly by enshrining 13th month pensions in law. They will also pay pension supplements if economic growth surpasses 3.5 percent, he added.
Asked about the forint exchange rate, he said the matter was under the central bank’s purview. Gulyás said the government had no target rate but aimed to avoid hectic gyrations.
Put to him that the 2025 draft budget calculated with 397.5 forints to the euro, Gulyás said: “Looking at last year’s exchange rate, that seems a mostly realistic estimate,” adding that the budget was yet to come into force.
Commenting on a Habitat for Humanity survey on housing poverty, Gulyás said: “excluding NGOs financed by [American financier] George Soros, barely any surveys condemn Hungary.” According to EU reports, the ratio of those living under the poverty line had fallen to 10 percent from 35 percent in 2010, he said. “Hungary probably has more people living in poverty than that … so the government still has its work cut out.” Meanwhile, 1.1 million more people have a job now than in 2010, he added.
Meanwhile, the government’s investment programmes had lifted regions such as those around Debrecen and Nyiregyhaza — “which were definitely among the most backward in 2010” — to become some of the most developed areas in the country, he said. Now investments would have to target the south of the country, he added.
Put to him that electricity had been the most expensive in Hungary in the EU in the past few days, Gulyás said: “No one is buying electricity at the fixed exchange rate in Hungary; neither companies nor households. So reports that electricity was the dearest in Hungary is basically fake news. In reality, Hungarian households are paying the least for electricity in the EU.”
Gulyás: Employer housing support thresholds to rise
The government will raise the amount of housing support, with tax preferences, that employers may offer their workers, Gulyás said.
Tax preferences on the employer housing support will apply to a monthly HUF 150,000 per employee, or HUF 1,800,000 per year, on top of the HUF 450,000 annual sum allowed under existing rules, Gulyás said.
Employees under 35 are eligible for the support for rent or home loan repayments, he added.
He noted that the tax preferences on the HUF 150,000 of monthly housing support would be equivalent to those for employer top-ups for the SZEP voucher card.
Gulyás said the measure would support government efforts to ensure housing affordability.
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