We usually look at politicians’ asset declarations around election time to get a bit more acquainted with our elected representatives through their pockets. However, I spent a lot of time in 2025 poring over the asset declarations of the mayor in a village in Cluj County. I was particulary interested in farming subsidies received by Sallai János, mayor of Sic village.
Some residents of Sic said that the mayor decides at his own discretion how much local land to lease and to whom, so that the person in question can then apply for farming subsidies from the state. One of my sources, who agreed to be named, confirmed that when he first bid on pasture land with the livestock cooperative he had set up a good ten years before, they had to admit to the cooperative, at the behest of the local government, a person who only kept animals on paper, otherwise they would not have been granted grazing.
While trying to find out why all official investigations about János Sallai, the mayor of Sic who has been in office for 35 years, have been dropped, I also looked into how honestly he declares his income to his own voters. Neither his nor the local councilors’ asset declarations were available on the local website during the entire 2024 election season. In the database of the National Integrity Agency I found Sallai’s retroactive declarations of assets and interests until 2008.
The Agency for Payments and Intervention in Agriculture (APIA), was surprisingly helpful when I requested information about the agricultural subsidies paid to János Sallai, his wife, son and daughter in recent years. After reviewing the documents received from the two government agencies, it became clear that the mayor had mostly concealed the actual amount of farming subsidies that he or his family members had received. Neither he nor his family members make their living from agriculture and they confirmed this when I asked them about it.
I compared the average per capita subsidies received by the immediate family in 2022-23 with the average amount received by private individuals in the village during the same period. The mayor’s family members received an average of RON 53,000 in farming subsidies over two years, while the village residents received an average of RON 37,000. (I did not even include the rural development subsidies received by their companies in this calculation.)
But what’s going on in the county?
This brought about the idea of examining how typical it is throughout Cluj County for farmers holding political office to receive on average more agricultural subsidies than farmers who are not involved in local political decision-making. In other words, those who are not mayors or local councilors.
With this in mind, and with the intention of understanding the farming subsidy system, I applied for the 2025 scholarship offered by the international Bertha Foundation, which I won together with Miklós Attila Szőcs Boruss, president of the ALPA – Land for Life association. Here we published what I understood from the farming subsidies granted in Romania in the fast five years:
- that it is in the interests of both APIA and farmers that fewer farmers receive more money;
- that most of the huge sums paid for green purposes and to make agriculture more environmentally friendly can be claimed through greenwashing. And now there is another two-year window of opportunity for us to have a say in how this vast amount of public money is spent.
It took several weeks to download the declarations of assets and interest of more than a thousand local politicians from 2024. It took several months to filter out the data for Cluj County from the national database of agricultural payments for 2023. (After presenting the figures, I will explain why we focused on 2023, why it was difficult to obtain the subsidies for Cluj County and finally how we managed to get the figures.) In the end, we were able to identify the subsidized farmers in Cluj County who had been applying for these subsidies for years.
That is to say we got a statistical answer to the question about the number of settlements in Cluj County in which the mayors and local councilors receive on average more agricultural subsidies than experienced farmers who have already gained routine in applying for subsidies.
The answer: in nearly half of the 75 rural municipalities in Cluj County, local politicians received higher agricultural subsidies on average. In 2023, a village mayor or local councilor received an average of €666 more in agricultural subsidies than a regular farmer who does not hold local political office. Local farmers who are politicians received an average of €3,356 in subsidies in 2023, while farmers who are not politicians received €2,690.
In other words, even though there is a relative majority of villages where the average subsidies are of a similar magnitude, together with those where the average for farmers is much higher than that for local politicians: where politicians receive more money, they receive so much more that the average for all villages in the county will be €666 in favor of politicians in 2023.
Of course, this statistical average masks significant differences between villages. While farmers in Baciu and Aiton received an average of €5,000 more in subsidies, and those in Viișoara received €10,000 more, local politicians in Feleacu received €10,000 more, those in Borsa €30,000 more, and those in Gârbău €35,000 more than farmers who did not hold political office.
The noticeable difference in money
Of the 31 municipalities where local politicians received more support on average, 22 show a really big difference in favor of local politicians. In these municipalities, they receive on average several times more than their fellow farmers who do not hold political office. These villages are Aghireș, Borșa, Buza, Călățele, Chinteni, Chiuiești, Feleacu, Frata, Gârbău, Geaca, Iara, Jichișu de Jos, Măguri, Mărgău, Panticeu, Sânmărtin, Sânpaul, Sic, Suatu, Tritenii de Jos, Unguraș and Valea Ierii.
If we look only at the two averages for these rural municipalities, the financial advantage for politicians is nearly €6,500. The average total subsidies for local politicians was €8,202, while for ordinary farmers it was €1,704 in 2023.
In terms of political affiliation, we see roughly the same distribution across the county in these villages, although social democratic mayors are overrepresented in the sample. Of the 22 municipalities, eleven are headed by Liberal Party (PNL) mayors, seven are under Social Democratic (PSD) leadership, three are led by DAHR (RMDSZ) or DAHR-affiliated mayors, and one is headed by the mayor of the ADU (United Right Alliance) electoral coalition. The majority faction in the local councils also has this political color.
Why did we look at farming subsidies in villages?
Because agricultural areas are mainly located in rural areas. In villages, farming is a way of life, a source of income and even a means of accumulating wealth. Statistics show that this is not the case in cities, where there are many more ways to earn a living and collect wealth.
Cluj County consists of 81 local government units, including 6 cities and 75 rural municipalities. In the largest cities, Cluj-Napoca, Turda, Dej and Câmpia Turzii, we did not find any current councilors receiving APIA subsidies. In four of the six cities, two-thirds of the cities, there are currently no such local politicians. The other two towns, Huedin and Gherla, are led by politicians who have received only a few hundred euros in subsidies.
However, only 15 of the 75 municipalities i.e. one-fifth of them are led by people who, according to our data, did not receive agricultural subsidies in 2023. In the vast majority, i.e. 60, the farmers also hold a local political office. Or at least they receive agricultural subsidies.
Why 2023?
We used the 2023 farming subsidies as a basis because this is the closest year for which local politicians have declared their assets.
First, we searched through the municipalities’ websites to compile a current list of councilors. We would have failed miserably here, as many municipal websites still listed the names of councilors who had been elected in 2020 or earlier, instead of those who had been elected in 2024. We could not completely trust the websites summarizing the election results either because in several cases, the person who won a seat on the council did not eventually occupy their office.
Therefore, we requested data from the Cluj County Prefect’s Office, from which we received the names of all the mayors and councilors in the county relatively quickly.
Since many mayor’s offices had not updated the names on their local websites for years, we had no chance of downloading the asset and interest declarations of all mayors and councilors from there. These are often not published even if the current list of councilors is available on the website.
However, those who are currently mayors and councilors, could only run in the 2024 municipal elections after submitting their declarations of assets and interests to the National Integrity Agency (ANI). In the spring of 2024, they had to declare their income for 2023.
At the end of May 2025, the Constitutional Court ruled that our elected representatives would no longer be required to publish their asset declarations. Somewhat alarmed that an administrative decision by the ANI would also remove already published asset declarations, we downloaded the 2024 declarations of assets and interest of more than a thousand local politicians in Cluj County within a week or two.
Most of the subsidized politician-farmers declare the income
After reviewing more than two thousand declarations using software (and many manually), we identified more than two hundred politicians in Cluj County who received agricultural subsidies. We suspected that not everyone had declared their subsidies, so we also looked them up on the 2023 national list of payments.
The good news is that of the 211 local politicians receiving agricultural subsidies, we found only 34 who had failed to declare some or all of this income. Some are only concealing a few hundred euros, but others have failed to declare thousands or tens of thousands of euros received as APIA subsidies.
We reviewed the declarations of interest because there was a possibility that someone had applied for agricultural subsidies not in their own name but in the name of their company. Or they were members of a farming organization that also received agricultural subsidies. We found only two such companies, which we were able to link to specific individuals and two livestock cooperatives. We also included the subsidies granted to these cooperatives in the average for councilors because at least one of them has several councilors as members, and we cannot consider the grazing rights granted to the cooperatives to be independent of the fact that councilors are also members.
This is why it was hard to find Cluj County in the farming subsidies
In order to compare the average subsidies received by mayors and councilors with the average subsidies received by non-politician farmers, we had to calculate the latter as well. But first, we had to get the numbers. Why wasn’t this easy, given that all 2023 payments are public on the AFIR rural development agency’s website? Let’s dive into the deep waters of payments.
Each payment is listed separately on the AFIR website. The following information is provided for each payment
- the name of the subsidized individual, company or local government,
- the name of the settlement where you applied for the subsidy (i.e., not the name of the municipality, but the name of the village),
- the name of the grant program or package if applied for,
- and the amount depending on the funds they were subsidized from,
- then the total amount.
However, it turned out that one third of the settlements in Cluj County have the same names as other settlements in other counties. This would have resulted in too much variation. Therefore, we sent letters to APIA for weeks, asking them to send us only the list of payments in Cluj County from the otherwise public national list. The national APIA refused, citing the GDPR and its own regulations.
In the meantime, however, we figured out how to strengthen the basis for comparison if we did not receive the list of payments for Cluj County. In 2022, APIA still published the individual identification codes used in the payment system. These can be used to filter out cases where two farmers with the same name in the same municipality applied for agricultural support.
What’s more, in 2020, APIA even published the postal codes. This means that the 2020 payments can be mapped with complete certainty. Therefore, those who have read this far can see how €2.5 billion in agricultural and rural development subsidies were distributed among the counties in Romania in 2020:
Let’s zoom back to Cluj County. For those settlements whose names also appear in other counties, we took the payments for those settlements in Cluj County where the personal name was identical to the name found in the 2020 list for a settlement in Cluj County and we saw from the individual identification number that they also received subsidies in 2021 and 2022.
A stronger basis for comparison
This means that those who applied for subsidies in 2023 but had not done so for the previous three years were definitely excluded. But we know from the deputy manager of APIA in Cluj County that there are basically no new farmers applying for subsidies. In return, we got the experienced farmers on the 2023 list who have been applying for subsidies for years. In other words, we were able to compare the average subsidies given by local politicians with those who have already been experienced in applying for subsidies.
It is therefore truly shocking that local politicians received an average of €666 more in subsidies in the villages of Cluj County than farmers experienced in applying for subsidies but who did not hold political office.
There are very different stories unfolding in the 22 villages where local politicians receive several times more than farmers. Next year, we would like to explore at least a few of these, but we are open to any other tips in this sense.
Anna Anghel provided invaluable assistance in downloading, cleaning, filtering, and displaying the data.
Opening image: Scythe sharpening at the scythe course held at the 2025 Méra World Music Festival. Photo: Tünde Szabó
This article was produced as part of the 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.
