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.

The post Politician-Farmers Or Non-Politician Farmers Gain More From The Agricultural Subsidies? appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

• Romanian agriculture is the most fragmented in the European Union in every respect: 90% of farms cultivate less than 5 hectares. The remaining 10% of farms cultivate more than three-quarters of Romania’s total agricultural area.

• Half of the 2.8 million farms are excluded from state and EU subsidies because they cultivate less than one hectare of land.

• The fact that all subsidies depend on the size of the cultivated area demonstrably increases the number and size of medium and large farms. This also increases the amount of subsidies they receive each year.

• Romania claims that it does not support farms with huge amounts of public money only to make them more profitable. However, the figures prove the opposite. They show that fewer and fewer farmers receive more and more money, small farmers receive less and less money, young farmers are only now beginning to be really encouraged and a lot of money is flowing into green projects that require little effort.

„Hey you, there’s a bustard sitting by himself, beak
under wing in his dejection. Does he cower, or has
he croaked? Let’s see if he can fly. We’ve got to beat
the fence around him!”

We are all familiar with this group provocation aimed at terrorizing Miklós Toldi; János Arany’s narrative poem was required reading in school. Many of us learnt fragments from it by heart. We are aware of the great bustard metaphor by which György Toldi referred to his younger brother Miklós. But we don’t really know what a bustard looks like. This large bird is almost extinct in Romania. Yet even at the end of the 20^th century, it was a common sight in the area around Salonta, where Arany lived and wrote Toldi 180 years ago.

Agricultural subsidies have led to the return of the great bustard to Salonta: a major farmer in Salonta noticed the potential in the bustard protection program. He turned 90 hectares of poor-quality arable land into grassland and only mowed it after the bird’s breeding season ended. Together with the basic subsidy, this brought him 2000 lei per hectare, which was worth it for him.

As a result of years of effort by the Milvus Group, the Ministry of Agriculture launched a bustard protection program in 2018. The biologists with Milvus watched more and more birds in this area. The ministry announced this subsidy in 2024 , but no longer in 2025. The farmer in Salonta who applied for it and was so proud that people could see bustards on his land, sowed the field with winter wheat.

Compared to the others, this was a small subsidy package, but it highlighted the biggest problems with agricultural subsidies in Romania:

• few farmers could apply for it (it was launched only in 19 municipalities, near the birds’ habitat in Hungary),
• it was worth applying for only by big farms,
• and the ministry stopped it without even notifying the bird protection association that had worked out the professional background.

However, Milvus put a lot of work into ensuring that its grassland conservation proposals were included in Romania’s new agricultural strategy, replied biologist Attila Nagy, working for Milvus, in response to our inquiry.

Since joining the EU in 2007, Romania has spent €45 billion in public funds on supporting farmers and rural development. This represents at least 44% of the EU funds received by the country. The agricultural subsidies from the EU are higher and higher:

Subsidies for farmers amount to around one quarter of the overall EU budget according to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The main goal of the CAP is to provide farmers with income support so that they continue to cultivate the land and produce food despite the constant fluctuations in harvests caused by weather and climate crises and despite the fact that they could earn much more elsewhere. Ten years ago, the average agricultural income in the EU was only 40% of the average income, but by 2022 it had risen to 60%. In Romania, it is especially true that the rural population is much poorer than the urban population.

The CAP also aims to ensure that we eat better quality and healthier food that we can afford. It therefore seeks to compensate for the fact that producing tasty vegetables and fruit with fewer chemicals is more expensive. From 2021, its explicit goal will be climate and environmental protection, which is why it is now allocating a lot of money to soil-friendly cultivation, biodiversity conservation, and habitat protection and restoration.

Each Member State had to draw up a detailed plan setting out what it wanted to achieve with these billions from the Common Agricultural Policy during the seven-year budget periods. Romania developed a rural development plan, abbreviated as PNDR, for the 2014–2020 budget period, and National Agricultural Strategy abbreviated as PNS, for the 2023–2027 period.

Of course, there was some delay: the PNDR started in 2015 in terms of payments and even the 2023 payments were covered by the budget of this plan. Romania completed its new agricultural strategy by the end of 2022 and its name includes the period 2023–2027. After the transitional year of 2024, most of this year’s payments will already fit into the individual programs of this strategy.

Why should we deal with agriculture

besides being fond of good eats and excursions in the countryside? Because literally more than half of Romania’s surface is agricultural land. Of the country’s 23.8 million hectares, 14 million hectares are considered agricultural land, of which 12.7 million are considered agriculturally utilized.

We should focus on agriculture because millions of people in Romania still make their living from farming, while the entire sector is undergoing radical change before our very eyes. Fifteen years ago, one third of the population was directly involved in farming; now it is a quarter.

The agricultural census of 2010 counted 7.1 million people who were involved in some kind of agricultural work. Of these, more than four million worked less than 100 days a year, meaning that farming was not their main occupation, but they did participate in agriculture. In 2020, only 4.5 million people were farming, with three million working part-time: less than 100 days a year.

The mechanization of the agricultural sector, the depopulation and aging of rural areas are further reflected in the fact that the number of people actually employed in the sector has fallen by two-thirds. While the total number of employees in Romania fell by nearly 9% between 2013 and 2022, the number of employees in agriculture fell by nearly 66%, according to this agricultural study, which summarizes the sector’s performance between 2013 and 2022. The 2.5 million people employed in agriculture shrank to 878,000 in ten years.

We often talk (and write) about education or healthcare as issues that concern society as a whole. We all went to school, many of us teach and many of us have children in schools. We have opinions about it and want to have a say in what happens in schools. Similarly, we all eat, which means we are customers of agriculture, and millions of people farm.

In the past years, the ministry of education only spent two, at best three times more on our entire educational system than the amount the flowed into one productive sector, namely to agriculture and rural development (RON 30-46 billion vs RON 15-17 billion per year). The expenditures in education reached four times the amount of agricultural subsidies in 2024.

Compared to education, we don’t talk about agriculture half as much or even a quarter as much, at least not as a matter of concern for society as a whole. Meanwhile, it is rapidly changing and transforming the landscape we call our homeland.

There are one million less consumer. But how come?

While in 2010 there were 20.1 million people living in Romania, in 2020 there were only 19 million, according to official census data. (We have written here about why these figures do not reflect reality. But these are the official data, so we have to work with them.) This means that in the 2020s, there are at least one million less people eating in this country than in the 2010s.

At the same time, domestic agriculture is increasingly unable to meet our needs: we are importing more and more food, says Sorin Ionițescu’s aforementioned study. Let’s see how the Romanian agriculture performed between 2013–2022 when it was subsidized with roughly € 25 billion from public funds.

During this period, the total GDP grew by 121%, while the GDP generated by agriculture grew by 83%. Specifically, it grew from RON 34.42 billion to RON 63.04 billion, but at the same time, the share of the agricultural sector in the GDP fell from 5.4% to 4.5%.

In 2013, agriculture generated a GDP of RON 34.42 billion, with EU and Romanian state subsidies amounting to RON 8.1 billion. According to our calculations, EU and state subsidies contributed RON 15.5 billion to the 2022 GDP of RON 63.04 billion. This means that roughly a quarter of agriculture is financed by public funds.

Meanwhile the food prices in shops are high enough, so it is well worth importing many basic foodstuffs from abroad. While in the years following our accession to the EU, domestic products still accounted for over 80% of basic foodstuffs, by 2024 their share had fallen to 56% in grocery stores, according to data of the Competition Council.

Of the store chains’ own-brand products, which are typically the cheapest, less than half (48.8%) of food products were produced domestically. Even though transporting food from abroad inevitably increases its cost, it is still worthwhile importing staple foods into a country with a large and diverse agricultural sector.

In this increasingly competitive agricultural market, one thing has not changed in ten years: agriculture can produce four times as much with the public money flowing into it. The way food is produced and the food market itself have undergone a complete transformation. Production is much more concentrated: on increasingly large and sophisticated farms (as will be explained below), with a third of the number of legally paid workers. And we are exporting more and more food, but importing even more.

In the aforementioned period, between 2013–2022 the value of Romanian agricultural exports increased by 126%. Its share in total Romanian exports also increased from just under 11% to 13%. Meanwhile, however, the value of agricultural and food imports rose by 167% and their share in total domestic imports also increased from nearly 8.9% to 10.5%.

What are agricultural and rural development subsidies spent on?

The Romanian agency that manages agricultural subsidies, APIA, paid EU subsidies to farmers in only ten different programs and packages in 2007, but now pays them in 109. The Romanian budget contributes around 5 percent to this.

The two major sources of EU subsidies are divided according to their intended use. The source of subsidies paid per hectare or based on the number of animals raised is called the Guarantee Fund (FEGA). This source accounts for about two-thirds of the subsidies paid nationally and is intended to supplement farmers’ incomes.

The other source is the Rural Development Fund, FEADR. Part of this is managed by APIA and part by AFIR. The AFIR acronym may be familiar from many rural investment information boards, as it covers a good third of payments, sometimes even more. This fund includes certain climate and environmental subsidies for farmers, but many food processing companies and rural guesthouses also apply for it.

In Romania, many rural companies receive development funds from this source even if they have nothing to do with food production. Many rural municipalities use this fund to pave roads or build sewage systems. Tourist information offices, which mushroomed in villages and then often closed down, were also set up with this fund.

The aim of the fund is to compensate to some extent for rural disadvantages: the lack of infrastructure, or its scarcity, or poor quality. As there are fewer and poorer consumers, rural companies are not as profitable and find it more difficult to obtain credit for development. The EU is trying to partially offset this with this fund.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development decides what yearly subsidies can be applied for in addition to the standard payments per hectare and per animal raised. Romania’s National Agricultural Strategy serves as a guideline in this regard: in principle, the programs announced are intended to promote the main objectives of the agricultural strategy.

The current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) encourages Member States to give equal weight to the economic, environmental and climate sustainability of farms when spending subsidies. Forty percent of subsidies for 2023–2027 must be spent on climate and environmental protection.

Member States must specify which funding programs (and the budget for each program) they intend to use to promote the profitability, modernization, environmental and economic resilience, and the size of the budget for each program has been largely left to the Member States by the European Commission in the CAP and budget period running until 2027.

The goals of environmental sustainability are shared: soil protection, water quality and biodiversity conservation. There are also many similarities in the good agricultural practices that preserve these important environmental conditions: crop rotation, ban on plowing permanent grasslands, and minimal disturbance of arable land.

To find out why it is not good to disturb the soil and how soil-friendly farming is related to biodiversity and crop yields, it is worth listening to Dutch teacher Marc Siepman, with whom we spoke this summer:

However, it is up to the Member States to decide, for example, what level of crop rotation or soil cover farmers must achieve in order to receive environmental subsidies. They also decide how much money to allocate to these funding programs.

These programs are usually announced for four to five years, depending on what the ministry has agreed with the European Commission. Our current agricultural strategy covers the period 2023–2027, but most of its funding programs were only announced in 2025.

How can farmers find out about what is fundable?

Subsidies can be applied for during the spring months, from the first days of March until mid-May. APIA calls this the campaign period when its agents visit villages, meet with farmers at their county and local offices and inform them of any changes from the previous year, such as the discontinuation of an old subsidy line or the introduction of a new one. The most important information is also published in the daily and agricultural press.

However, meetings are also organized at various farmers’ associations or public estates, where more farmers can be reached with this information, explained Florin Bota, deputy director of APIA in Cluj County. Leaflets summarizing the various subsidies are sent to all mayor’s offices where farmers can see, at least in principle, what they should apply for. The most important information about the announced funding and deadlines will be sent in a mass message to farmers whose phone numbers are listed in the payment agency’s system.

It is common for livestock farmers to obtain the important documents for their subsidy applications from a local livestock breeding association. Agricultural registrars at municipal mayor’s offices provide a great deal of assistance to crop farmers by helping them fill in the data and documents required for subsidies, so that farmers arrive at their nearest APIA office with a half-completed application, explained Florin Bota. This also helps APIA staff, because there are a lot of farmers in Cluj County, with about 600 farmers being assessed by one agency staff during the relatively short two to two-and-a-half-month application period, said the deputy director.

It is no longer very common in Cluj County for new farmers who have not previously been in the system to apply for subsidies for several hectares, replied Deputy Director Bota with an indulgent smile when asked how a new farmer can find out what subsidies they are eligible for.

However, Florin Bota acknowledged that the size, language and complexity of the guidelines detailing the conditions for various subsidies, which previously exceeded 100 pages, may limit farmers’ access to subsidies. Many of them probably do not have the patience to read and understand 30-60 such pages. In addition, there are dozens of such guides for environmental and climate protection programs alone.

What do farmers need to be eligible for subsidies?

In addition to the subsidy application, you will of course need to provide your ID card, proof of your bank account and, if you operate your farm as a sole trader or company, proof from the trade registry that the main activity of your business is agriculture. If you only cultivate your own land, you must provide an extract from the land register to prove that it is yours. If you also cultivate other people’s land, the mayor’s office will certify, based on its own agricultural records, which and how large a plot of land you also work on. The competent veterinarian will issue a certificate stating what kind of livestock a farmer keeps.

The mayor’s offices manage the agricultural record, which is not the same as the land register. This record does not contain ownership rights and history related to land, but rather who cultivates the plots belonging to the municipalities. If someone cultivates land that is not or not only their own, the clearest solution is to conclude a lease agreement with the owner of the land they cultivate and present this to the mayor’s office when requesting a certificate for the parcel in question.

In most mayor’s offices, this register is a paper-based list and there is great resistance to digitizing it and sharing it with other offices, according to a source who has previously worked with several offices.

This is how you apply for public money

Farmers applying for support take these certificates to their nearest APIA office, where the official who registers the application in the APIA system will tell the farmer what other types of support they can receive for that area and crop or pasture, in addition to the basic support per hectare, if they meet certain conditions, explained Florin Bota, deputy director of APIA in Cluj County.

They discuss with the farmer what conditions he meets and then check off in the system what subsidies the farmer is applying for on which areas of his land for that year. The basic subsidy per hectare ranged from € 85 to € 100. An additional amount of around €25 per hectare is available if the farmer running the farm is under 40 years of age and has been farming for less than five years. This can be claimed for a maximum of five years.

Income support for small farmers has developed in a very interesting way in recent years. In the payment years of the previous budget period (2015–2023), an additional €5 per hectare was paid for the first five hectares, and nearly €50 per hectare for hectares between five and thirty. This means that if a farmer cultivated a maximum of five hectares, they received a maximum of €25 extra per year. However, if they farmed at least 30 hectares, they could receive up to €1,250 per year. Furthermore, this was not only available to small farmers, but to anyone for their first 30 hectares. The new agricultural strategy remedies this unfairness by allowing farmers to claim the extra €50 for between one and fifty hectares, and those who cultivate more than fifty hectares are not eligible.

For some of the climate and environmental subsidies, farmers must commit to meeting the conditions for one year and for others, for five years and sign these commitments in a separate document. If they violate any of the conditions during this period, they will be required to repay the subsidies received in previous years, clarified the deputy director of APIA in Cluj County.

At least once a year, each farmer visits APIA to sign the subsidy application. But many already apply online on the AGI Online platform where all farmers who have registered have access to the more important details about their land, said Florin Bota. Map data, crops grown, subsidies requested – farmers can see all of this on their own phones. They can also support their applications with photos and the system only accepts photos that the farmer has taken from a specific location and angle based on GPS data.

Approximately 40% of the more than 27,000 farmers in Cluj County already submit their subsidy applications online. If the system indicates any errors or if the officials request additional information from the farmer for one of their applications, the farmer can supplement or correct it until the autumn payment period, explained Florin Bota. The APIA officials do not aim to punish farmers, but to help them obtain as much support as possible.

They are aware that half of farmers are not eligible for any support because they cannot meet the basic requirement of farming: at least one hectare on plots of at least 30 ares. (According to the 2020 agricultural census, 1.5 million of the 2.8 million farms did not reach the one-hectare size.) Only those with 10-15 hectares can be considered real farmers, noted Florin Bota. In his opinion, a farmer with less than five hectares can only produce enough for himself and his family.

The chats I had at the market do not necessarily support this. There is a seller at the farmers’ market who cultivates a total of one hectare of land with his family, does nothing else, and brings seasonal produce from there to the market in Cluj-Napoca twice a week. Of course, his goods are not the cheapest.

Many larger farmers are dissatisfied with the one-hectare entry threshold and would like to see it raised to two or five, said Deputy Director Bota. They are dissatisfied because, in their opinion, many small farmers do not produce anything, but because of the subsidies, they do not lease their land to them either.

Several of my sources who used to work for APIA agreed that farmers with between one and five hectares receive such a small amount (often less than €1,000 per year) that it can easily be classified as welfare aid. Many use it to pay their land tax, buy fertilizer or seeds. They need it, but it is nowhere near enough to run their farms, let alone develop them.

The combined effect of public money and the market: the big fish eats the small

Statistics contradict those dissatisfied with subsidizing the small farms: the small farms are quickly disappearing in Romania. In the ten years between the two agricultural censuses, half a million small farms under one hectare disappeared from the two million. Of the nearly one and a half million farms between one and five hectares, 400,000 disappeared in just ten years. Statistically, nearly 900,000 farms that disappeared during the ten-year period were all in the size category of less than five hectares.

The number of farms between five and ten hectares decreased by 20,000, while the trend reversed for farms larger than ten hectares. The number of farms larger than 10 hectares increased from 82,000 to 118,000 in ten years.

Not only did the number of small farms decrease, but the total area they cultivated also declined. Small, practically backyard gardens have not lost as much land: a quarter of those under one hectare disappeared in ten years, but their total area decreased by only a fifth.

This shows the viability of farms under one hectare and people’s attachment to backyard farming. One and a half million such farms have survived in circumstances where, unlike their larger counterparts, they have received no subsidies and are under pressure from the larger farms to sell or lease their land.

However, the total area cultivated by small farms that can be considered self-sustaining, i.e., those between one and five hectares, has decreased dramatically from 3.2 million hectares to 2.3 million hectares. The loss of one million hectares of land by farms smaller than five hectares is reflected in the gain in land by farms between ten and one hundred hectares.

This larger size category cultivated only 1.6 million hectares in 2010, but by 2020 it had grown to 2.6 million hectares, even though the total agricultural area used in Romania decreased by half a million hectares during this decade. The total area, including arable land, pastures and hayfields, shrank from 13.3 million hectares to 12.7 million hectares.

In the size category between ten and one hundred hectares, the number of farms increased by 50%, from 69,000 to 102,000. Meanwhile, the area they cultivated increased by 6%. In other words, not only did the number of farms of this size increase, but they also became larger. Farms between 20 and 50 hectares doubled their total area in ten years.

It is no coincidence that this is where the extra part of agricultural subsidies, which is 50% of the basic amount per hectare, was directed. A message from the central management of APIA dated 2021 also praised the farmers that they pooled land to improve productivity and competitiveness and it was visible in the smaller number of applications the Agency got for more hectares.

It is likely that some farms larger than 100 hectares have also grown, but this is not reflected in the statistics. This has happened partly because farms larger than 100 hectares are grouped into a single category in the 2010 agricultural census, even though there is a significant difference between a 101-hectare farm and a 1,000-hectare farm. The 2020 survey treats farms over 100 and 500 hectares, 500 and 1,000 hectares, and over 1,000 hectares as separate categories.

On the other hand, it is not possible to show farms over 100 hectares because, although the number of farms over 100 hectares increased from 13,000 to 16,000 in ten years, the total area they cultivated decreased from 6.5 million hectares to 6.1 million hectares. Now, more really large farms are cultivating less land than ten years ago.

Of course, this did not reduce the enormous inequality that characterized the Romanian agriculture. In 2010, 3.7 million farms under 100 hectares cultivated 6.8 million hectares and 13,000 farms over 100 hectares cultivated 6.5 million hectares. In 2020, 2.8 million farms under 100 hectares cultivated 6.6 million hectares, while 16,000 farms over 100 hectares cultivated 6.1 million hectares.

How much public money should a farm receive?

No matter which decision-maker or expert I have listened to over the past year, everyone emphasized that farmers cannot be expected to work for free or even at a loss. Economic predictability and social security is important to them, and indeed, one of the main goals of the common agricultural policy in Romania is to make farms more profitable.

But how profitable? Not only does the previous or current agricultural strategy not address this issue, but the question has not even entered the public discourse in Romania. Everyone agrees that farmers deserve a middle-class lifestyle. That, despite the constraints of farming, they too should be able to go on holiday once a year.

How much public money should we allocate for this, considering the size of the farms? The European Commission plans to limit the maximum amount that a single farm can annualy claim in agricultural subsidies in the budget period starting in 2028. This summer, it announced an upper limit of €100,000, which has already sparked opposition from farmers.

Environmental and small farmer protection organizations have long been calling for this cap, since the lack of it, i.e., unlimited payments per hectare, has clearly encouraged the disappearance of small farms and the growth of larger ones.

While smaller farms, by their very size, generate greater diversity with crops grown and natural boundaries between fields, larger farms are more prone to monocultures and to plowing under wooded, bushy patches, which, as plot boundaries, also provide shelter for pollinating insects, small animals and many plant species.

I spoke in more detail with plant ecologist Thomas Kuhn about how farm size and farming methods affect biodiversity:

The biologist’s conclusions are clear: while industrial farming can feed more people at a lower immediate cost, small-scale farming preserves or even increases biodiversity, which is also beneficial to large farms. There are no longer enough people in rural areas to engage in traditional farming, but those who still farm or are planning to do so in the future must be given a financial incentive to preserve species diversity.

Romania has never debated what would be a fair amount of public money to support farms that are already financially successful. And now there are farms in the country that are more profitable than the EU average. The EU measures the performance of farms in terms of so-called standard output (SO). This expresses in euros how much value is generated per hectare, so to speak, at the farm gate, i.e. before taxation.

In Romania, due to the predominance of small farms, the average SO of farms is extremely low. In 2020, it was €4,029, compared to the EU average of €38,700. However, according to Agatha Popescu’s study, Romanian farms with an SO exceeding 100,000 have already reached the EU average, while farms with an SO between 250,000 and half a million have exceeded the EU average.

Nevertheless, we finance these large companies with the same average amount per hectare as small farms between one and ten.

Fewer and fewer farmers get more and more money

Payments have been increasing, meaning that more large farmers receive support relative to the number of large farmers than small farmers do relative to the total number of small farmers cultivating the land.

However, neither APIA nor the Ministry of Agriculture mentions this. However, this is very clear from the payments if we categorize them a little and it is also clear from APIA’s annual reports if we read them together. These show that 20-30,000 fewer subsidy applications are submitted each year, but the number of hectares receiving subsidies is increasing.

The data for payments made in 2023 and 2024 comes from this online database, while payments made between 2020 and 2022 were still available on this website at the beginning of 2025. This allowed us to compare payments made over a five-year period. We found that in 2020, 3.5 million payments accounted for €2.5 billion in subsidies, while in 2024, only 2.3 million payments accounted for €3.3 billion in total subsidies. In just five years, the number of payments fell by a third, while the amount paid out increased by a third.

To get a clearer picture, we separated the payments made to family farms and those made to commercial farms and processing plants. The basis for the division is not whether the farm is operated by a private individual or a business because the subsidy system also encouraged farmers applying for support to register as sole traders or family businesses (abbreviated in Romanian as PFA, II, IF).

In the list of payments, we categorized the names as family farms where a personal name appeared, but also those where the name or abbreviation PFA, sole proprietorship (întreprindere individuală), or family business (întreprindere familială) appeared. This allowed us to roughly separate farms that are run only by the farmer and family members (probably with occasional day laborers) from those whose corporate form allows them to hire employees (limited liability company, joint stock company, commercial company, etc.).

As it turned out, the National Institute of Statistics also categorized farms in this way in its agricultural censuses organized every ten years. These agricultural censuses also show that corporate farms cultivated nearly one million hectares less land in 2020 than they did ten years earlier. Meanwhile, family farms expanded their land area by 360,000 hectares in the same ten-year period, during which the total area under cultivation decreased by half a million hectares.

After 2020, however, subsidies shifted towards corporate farms. While they received half a billion euros less total support in 2020, in 2024 they received the same amount, 1.64 billion euros, as family farms.

This suggests that the statistically documented expansion of medium and large farms continued after 2020. It also reflects the fact that the 2014-2020 rural development plan (whose budget even covered some of last year’s payments) supported not only agricultural companies, but any company registered in rural areas in order to increase rural employment.

The fact that small farms have fallen even further behind in terms of subsidies this decade, with subsidies going mainly to medium and large farms, is clearly evident from the distribution of the number and amount of subsidies.

The number of small payments of less than €100 made to family farms has almost halved in five years. In 2020, APIA made 1.1 million such payments, but by 2024 this figure will have fallen to just 672,000. The number of payments between €100 and €1,000, which are still only on the level of social aids, has also fallen by more than a third, from two million to 1.3 million.

Family farms received even less than the payments of between €1,000 and €10,000 in 2024 than they did in 2020. This indicates that farms smaller than ten hectares receive virtually no realistic support, even though 2.7 million of the 2.8 million farms fall into this size category and this category cultivates one-third of Romania’s total agricultural area.

On the other hand, the number of payments over €10,000 increased by 50% by 2024, and the number of payments between €100,000 and €1 million doubled. The same trend can be observed among companies: the number of payments up to €10,000 decreased over the five years examined, while payments over €10,000 increased by at least 50%.

In fact, we are paying more than one million euros in public funds to companies: to 38 companies in 2020 and to 58 companies in 2024. In this millionaire category, at least the amount of subsidies has not increased at the same rate. While in 2020, the 38 companies received €91 million, or an average of €2.4 million per company, in 2024, the 58 companies received “only” €133 million, with an average of €2.2 million.

The shift towards higher payments is also reflected in the increase in amounts per category. The total amount of payments under €1,000 made by companies has fallen by more than half in five years. The amount of payments up to ten thousand euros has increased slightly, while their number has decreased, meaning that fewer companies are now receiving more money in this category.

The amount of payments between ten and one hundred thousand euros increased by 50%, as did their number. The amount of payments between one hundred thousand and one million euros almost doubled. While the number of supported companies increased by 76%, the amount of support increased by 85%.

The amount of payments to family farms exceeding €100,000 tripled, while the number of such payments only doubled. The final amount of €38 million in 2020 exceeded €100 million several times in the following years.

We pay several times that amount to companies: whether they are farms operating as larger enterprises or processing plants. In 2020, companies received €337 million in subsidies in payments exceeding €100,000, and in 2024, this figure will rise to €627 million. The average amount per payment per company has increased to over €100,000 in the last five years.

It’s worth paying attention to these payments above € 10,000 and 100,000 keeping in mind that at present the average price of one hectare agricultural land amounts to € 8,000 – 9,000.

Why is it important to know what we’re paying for?

The APIA’s annual reports do not specify how much support each farm receives by size category. If we do not know how much public money we are using to support large farms that are already competitive and profitable, how much we are spending on developing medium-sized farms, and how much money we are allocating to maintaining the diversity, diversity, and resilience provided by small farms, then we cannot even begin to think about what is more beneficial to society and which goal we should spend more public money on.

We need to figure out what is most important to us here in Romania because the European Commission has already outlined how it envisions spending the large development funds in the new budget period beginning in 2028. The core of this idea, which has been vehemently attacked in Romania since its publication in the summer, is that the EC would merge the Cohesion Fund with agricultural subsidies and leave it up to the member states and regions to decide for themselves whether they want to use this money to develop industry, infrastructure or agriculture in each region.

Farmers felt that this would jeopardize their guaranteed, hectare-based subsidies and Germany, along with the Eastern European member states, opposed the idea. All Romanian politicians who have spoken out on the issue so far have criticized the consolidation of development funds. The President of the EC, Ursula von der Leyen refined her message in November and said the Common Agricultural Policy will continue to play an income-supplementing role worth almost € 300 billion from 2028 onwards, and will not be merged with the Cohesion Fund.

The EC also intends to give a role in decisions on rural development funds to those EU regions that have neither administrative nor political power in our country. In Romania, these regions have no decision-making powers; we are still trying to govern the country using the county system from 1968. In other words, the EC’s vision benefits countries that know themselves, know what they have, and know what they want to do at the regional level. They have a clear picture of their present and their future.

Romania does not have a clear, realistic, official and public understanding of itself in the field of agriculture. From the data collected in the agricultural censuses repeated every ten years, we can conclude how subsidies (along with market and demographic processes, of course) have influenced the agricultural sector.

However, this makes it difficult to understand and influence how public money should be spent from 2028 onwards in an agricultural sector as divided as Romania’s. For the time being, Transylvanian politicians are waiting to see what will be decided in Brussels in the discussions between the European Commission and the European Parliament on the next budget period. Meaningful consultations with agricultural organizations on their priorities after 2027 have not yet begun in Romania, according to Csaba Könczei, vice-chair of the Chamber of Deputies’ Agricultural Committee.

The Ministry of Agriculture said it is in constant consultation with farmers’ representative organizations, but reported only one meeting. Ten representatives of two major farmers’ associations visited in the Ministry on 7 October where they talked about how the agricultural subsidies should stay separated from the cohesion funds, the subsidy from the Romanian state should increase to 30% and the government should reject the EU’s proposal to set an upper limit on direct payments, as this would harm the competitiveness of medium-sized and large farms.

There are still two years left to ensure that other considerations are taken into account alongside the interests of large farmers. This is because the direct payment system

has so far given medium-sized and large farmers an advantage.

Ten years ago, APIA recorded 1,1 million subsidized farmers, stated the press of the time.

The APIA representatives I spoke to also interpret the figure published by APIA as the number of individual grant applications. It also publishes the number of hectares receiving support. This is how it looked over the past five years:

In other words, while the number of subsidy applications fell by 400,000 over ten years and by almost 100,000 over the last five years, the number of subsidized hectares increased by 150,000. The number of applications is decreasing by 20,000 to 30,000 per year, which is equivalent to the farmers of an entire county giving up subsidies each year, while the number of subsidized hectares is increasing. EU subsidies are going to fewer but larger farms.

Two other data sets show that the number of applications may not correspond to the number of individual farms receiving support. The 2020 agricultural census counted not 826,000 but only 648,000 farms that received EU subsidies in that year and the previous two years.

On the list of payments for 2020, we found only 808,546 unique identification codes, with payments going not only to farmers but also to rural companies and local governments for infrastructure development. This means that there must be more unique identifiers in the system than there are farms. But according to our data, there would have been an absurd situation where more farms received subsidies than there are farms and all other subsidized companies and municipalities combined.

In any case, my sources at APIA unanimously stated that the agricultural census data was incorrect, and that at that time, subsidies were definitely paid to more than 800,000 farmers. If this was indeed the case, it increases skepticism about public and official data, as well as about how well the Romanian state knows itself and how it can plan strategies based on contradictory data.

The system anomaly described above did not occur in the following two years, during which APIA still published the unique identification codes. From 2023, it will no longer publish these, even though it has completely reliable data on exactly

how many and what size farms it pays subsidies to and for exactly how much land.

I saw this with my own eyes. One of my sources at APIA, who asked to remain anonymous, showed me what they see on their internal system: almost every bush, updated weekly. They receive fresh satellite images of the entire country every week, and with a couple of clicks, they can project onto any area to see which farmer received what kind of support in which part. All this goes back years. With two more clicks, they can bring up the land registry data, the old paper-based land registry names, and the new digital land registry land designations.

Two farmers cannot receive subsidies for the same area because the system immediately flags the overlap. Officials notify both farmers to clarify the overlapping areas, otherwise the subsidy applications cannot be finalized. The system also uses satellite images to verify that the farmer is actually growing the crops for which he applied for subsidies, that he is complying with various environmental conditions, and that he has not cleared his land by burning. If the system detects signs of burning, the farmer is notified and must obtain a certificate from the fire department confirming that he did not set fire to the vegetation on his land.

According to its own annual reports, APIA has at least 2.3 million farms listed in its database. The list of individual payments can be searched by name and settlement how much money someone got, but they have never published the area or the number of farm animals the individual got paid for. This is not disclosed even upon request, citing the GDPR.

The Ministry of Agriculture boasts every year that it managed to spend 95% or even 98% of the EU subsidies for agriculture.

But what does APIA disclose then?

Basically, accounting data on the total amount paid out to all farmers who applied for a particular subsidy program. In addition, it sometimes provides the average amount per hectare, most recently for 2022.

Let’s see how this works. APIA reported that in 2022, it paid out €897,639,433 in basic subsidies per hectare. In theory, everyone who is included in the subsidy system receives the same amount, and all other types of support (if someone is young, an organic farmer, or a smallholder) are added to this basic support as extras. Of course, the amount paid for arable land and grassland is different, but let’s temporarily ignore that.

It also stated that the average amount per hectare was €96.28. If we divide the total amount by the average, we get that in 2022, APIA provided some form of subsidy for 9.3 million hectares, statistically speaking. However, APIA also stated in its report and press releases that it provided support for 9.9 million hectares in 2022.

This does not tell us how many individual hectares were subsidized, how many hectares received only basic support, how many received the more generous environmental subsidies, or how many hectares are cultivated by farmers who receive extra subsidies because they are under 40 or because they cultivate less than 50 hectares.

In other words, the official data does not tell us how public funds earmarked for specific purposes (farm succession, helping small farmers, operating cooperatives) are being used. Is it worth spending money on generational change and climate protection, or is everyone just chasing subsidies?

One third of the funds are spent on climate and environmental protection

If we look only at the total amounts spent, Romania is doing very well. One third of all subsidies go to basic support per hectare (€800 – 900 million) and income support for farming on smaller areas (€100 – 180 million) per year. Another third of subsidies (€960 million – €1.1 billion) goes to programs related to climate and environmental protection and greening.

The third billion covers everything else: rewards for achieving and selling certain crop yields (around €250 million per year), livestock farming and animal welfare investments, attracting young farmers, extra support for less common crops or breeding animals to make them more marketable, etc.

The amount of climate and environmental payments is so exceptionally high that we took a closer look at what it covers. Applications can only be submitted for areas that are already included in the basic support and these green subsidies are also based on the number of hectares. In addition, multiple types of green subsidies can be applied for the same area if it meets the various conditions.

Half of the billion-euro amount was paid out for climate- and environment-friendly farming in the years examined. This basically means that permanent grasslands cannot be plowed, crop rotation must be practiced on arable land and extra money is paid if there are ecologically important landscape elements on or next to the arable land: nitrogen-fixing crops, field margins, tree rows, individual trees, bushes, hedges and buffer zones along rivers or standing waters. The Transylvanian landscape abounds in such features.

A quarter of the amount, €250 – 270 million, is paid for areas that are restricted in some way by nature itself, such as the usability of mountain grasslands due to altitude. Anyone who maintains at least one hectare of pasture and/or hayfield above 1,000 meters can claim compensation for harsh mountain conditions.

In addition, extra subsidies can be requested for areas where certain protected animal species live, if the farmer undertakes not to disturb the area during the species’ critical life stages and not to use any chemicals at all. This costs between €130 and €200 million per year. The state pays the highest compensation for pastures and hayfields where certain species of Maculinea butterflies live. In the part of the Mezőség between Kecsed (Alunis) and Magyarszovát (Suatu), if these pastures and hayfields are maintained by hand only, the state pays €410 per hectare, while if light machinery is used, it pays €331.

The second most profitable is the protection of the corncrake (Crex crex): the state pays €310 per hectare if the grassland in question is maintained only by hand and €231 if light machinery is used. The state rewards manual maintenance of the grassland feeding areas of the lesser spotted eagle (Aquila pomarina) with €269 per hectare and mechanical maintenance with €190. If this eagle hunts on arable land, the farmer can claim €151.

Organic farming and showcase greening

It is clear that 85-90% of these green payments do not require any particular effort, whereas organic farming receives little funding, between €55 and €100 million per year. However, the reward for converting to organic farming is high, at €300-600 per hectare, and depending on the crop, farmers receive €280-450 per hectare if they maintain their land as certified organic. The transition, obtaining certification, and chemical-free production all require time and effort. The state finances the transition for two to three years and maintenance for five years.

The state’s ecological commitment is also undermined by the fact that, on the one hand, it offers funding for environmentally friendly farming methods (but does not disclose how many people have applied for subsidies for no-till farming and for how much land), and on the other hand, it still subsidizes the price of diesel fuel burned during heavy machinery cultivation from the state budget. By this scheme, the Romanian government reimburses part of the excise tax on hundreds of millions of liters of diesel fuel.

In December 2025, the government increased the fuel subsidy to 163 million euros for that year. This means it allocated 60 percent more to subsidize fossil fuels in agriculture than it did to organic farming in its best year, 2024.

The wasteland scandal also showed that greening funds could be obtained without any effort and that the Ministry of Agriculture had grossly underestimated the number of applicants seeking money without making any effort. In the spring, it promised €58 per hectare to farmers who left 2% of their land fallow or if they incorporate new landscape elements into their arable land. These two elements could be combined in any way.

In early November, the ministry announced that so many people had applied for this subsidy that APIA would only pay €20 per hectare. No one knows what preliminary estimates were used to justify the €58 promised in the spring, but it is certain that the ministry set easy, not-so-green conditions. For example, stones could be included as new landscape features alongside trees, tree rows, and bushes.

What is more, no ecological conditions were imposed on the two percent of land left fallow, so that the uncultivated land would not be concentrated in huge plots. This means that if there is a wetland at the edge of a hundred-hectare arable field and the farmer does not cultivate the two hectares surrounding it, he will still receive the extra €2,000 for the hundred hectares without having to do anything. There is no requirement for the uncultivated area to form islands or ecological corridors within the huge cultivated plots for pollinators, small animals, and other plants. This means that farming the land does not become more difficult, it just brings in more money.

When announcing the correction, state secretary Emil Dumitru declared that the farmers applied for this subsidy with 5.7 million hectares of ploughland. According to the 2020 agricultural census, arable land in Romania covered 8.5 million hectares. This means that the vast majority of farmers, who already receive subsidies, met the “greening” conditions and applied for the extra money.

The bigger the area, the smaller the subsidy should be

Romania has just begun to introduce more serious restrictions on the environmental component of agricultural subsidies. The aim is to prevent people who own large areas of land from exploiting their agricultural land for ecological purposes, simply to pocket the high state subsidies. Previously, this was rarely the case.

In the rural development plan for 2014-2020 (but also in some of the 2024 payments), only compensation payments for mountain pastures and hayfields were limited by a so-called degressive reduction. In other words, only those who applied for this support for less than 50 hectares received the full amount of €97 per hectare. The amount gradually decreased to €25 per hectare at the 50, 100, and 300 hectare thresholds, but it was still possible to apply for support for areas larger than 300 hectares.

The current agricultural strategy for 2023-2027 appears to tighten this principle and extend it to all pastures and hayfields that are of high natural value or where the farmer undertakes to restrict mowing and grazing in order to protect the species mentioned. First, if the farmer cannot prove that they keep at least the minimum number of animals, they cannot claim these compensation payments. In other words, they must prove that they actually use the areas for farming for which they are requesting support. This is a realistic tightening of the previous conditions.

On the other hand, if we look at the specific amounts, they have increased. Although this type of support is being reduced in several stages, it starts at a higher amount per hectare and stops decreasing at 100 hectares. A farmer with 101 hectares of pasture receives half of the €142, just as a farmer with 302 hectares of pasture does. This means that those who have previously applied for large areas can now claim three times as much money: €71 per hectare instead of €25.

Nature conservation payments above this amount are reduced to 90% of the amount for areas of 10 hectares or more, and to 80% for areas of 50 hectares or more. Above 150 hectares, or 200 hectares for certain species, this type of compensation cannot be claimed at all. The clear message here is that at this size, the costs of maintaining such pastures and hayfields must be covered, whether it is hares that graze on them or eagles that come there for lunch.

The farmers’ trust is the hardest to cultivate

Although all surveys show that farmers who have joined cooperatives are more successful on the market, one of the least utilized parts of the Romanian subsidy system is the money earmarked for the establishment of producer cooperatives. Due to forced collectivization, it is understandable that older farmers are resistant when they hear about cooperatives, but younger farmers also find it very difficult to come together. More than half of the approximately 4,000 agricultural cooperatives have been established since 2020.

However, there are more and more local examples and even in Cluj County, that show that the key to competitiveness and profitability in such a fragmented agricultural sector is not necessarily size, but rather consolidation into producer cooperatives. In the Lunca Somesului Mic Cooperative 11 farmers farm on 15 hectares and now they transport seasonal vegetables to the regional warehouses of two national retail chains with their own trucks. And it has its place by the Someș-Arieș Cooperative farming on thousands of hectares, breeding thousands of animals that produces millions as profit from time to time.

Farmers did not exhaust the budgetary frameworks allocated for cooperation in previous periods, and payments only increased from €2 million to €6 million from 2021 onwards. The data from two years ago show that the cooperatives at that time were mainly established to make more effective use of EU subsidies. More than half of them existed only on paper and did not submit balance sheets reporting on their economic activities. Even so, the share of cooperatives in total agricultural production increased from 2% in 2020 to 4% in 2022.

The amount paid for the operation of cooperatives in 2024 has already risen to twenty million euros, but the demonstrable results are yet to be seen.

The history of the twentieth century, with its land redistributions, imperial and regime changes, and then restitution, completely fragmented agriculture in Romania and Transylvania. Nowadays, the state hardly restricts the consolidation of plots of land; in fact, to a certain extent, it actively encourages it.

However, social trust has also fallen apart along with the plots of land, and the state is investing very little in rebuilding it. Encouraging cooperatives is one small and slow way of doing this. Transparency can structurally build the state’s credibility and trust in it. This can be achieved by openly stating, or at least openly discussing, what we are spending public money on in agriculture now and what we will spend it on in the future and how we can achieve a real balance between economic and environmental-climatic sustainability.

Anna Anghel was extremely helpful in downloading, cleaning, filtering and displaying the data in this article.

The opening image shows one of the renovated gates of Alunișu, Cluj County. Photo: Tünde Szabó

This article was produced as part of the 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

The post Why Is It Worth Subsidizing The Farmers? appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

She lives in a neat environment, her clothes are clean and their home is shining. She’s dancing gracefully, she’s smart, kind and polite. She has one fault: she was born in the wrong place. We met on the last day of the mock exams when she set foot for the first time in the main building of her school. Since she had attended the same educational institution but went to its much more modest building located the shantytown. 

It’s been four years ever since, but I still couldn’t forget the girl’s gaze as she turned inward feeling the injustice she suffered and helpless sadness stamped on her face. 

There is still segregated education in Laura’s city school in Szeklerland, in the “posh Udvarhely” up to this day as in so many educational institutions around Transylvania and Romania although the law prohibits the educational segregation of children on any grounds if they are separated against their will.

But I wanted to tell you a much merrier story, namely that you should picture that there is a place where the Lauras can get a chance and everybody can profit from it. This place is in the heart of Szeklerland, at the foot of the mountains, the land of the logging workers as it used to be called, and this world famous village is called Zetelaka. Of course not everything is perfect here either, but in Zetelaka necessity and life made people adopt some clever decisions that could be interesting worldwide as well.  

It wasn’t easy to put this story together since the seven-headed dragon wandered off, the princess got vexed, the haggis ran away and the Gypsy women milked the moon, so lend me your ears!

The seven-headed segregation 

Once upon a time there was a monster called segregation. It turned up everywhere where the Roma lived, and in vain did they fight it with weapons, fire and the law, it still constantly reared up its head. It took pleasure mostly in conquering the towns: Csíkszereda / Miercurea Ciuc, the proud county seat of Hargita County, the posh Udvarhely/Odorheiu Secuiesc and the less posh but aspiring Gyergyószentmiklós / Gheorgheni. 

Although these towns had everything they needed and then some more in vain as all princes made efforts to stay on their good side, a village succeeded in defeating the beast. This is what the story is about.  

Lots and lots of Roma live in Zetelaka. Or not really. Or well, I don’t know. I can explain it: most of them used to live in a place called Gátmege or Gátmegett or even Gátmögött (pronounced as such for the sake of the locals of Keresztúr and Szeged) that was separated from the rest of the village by the legendary Nagy-Küküllő river. Well yes, except that these Roma would travel abroad so often that they got ashamed to be called Gypsies and started to identify as Hungarian and live like the non-Romani. 

They went to great lengths and thought that those who identify as Hungarian and not Roma or Gypsies would get more gold from the treasuries of the Szülőföldön magyarul (Hungarian in the Homeland) programme. But it wasn’t true, king Viktor’s only condition being that the children attended Hungarian-medium classes. But just in case, in the place in question most said nevertheless that they weren’t Roma. 

And this is how it amazingly occurred

that in the 2021 census only 4 people declared that they were Roma, but when asked at school about their children’s ethnicity, 26 Roma children were enrolled. According to the researchers however at least 400-500 Roma lived in the village counting 4000 inhabitants. 

Although they identified as Hungarian and proudly wore the Szekler folk costume once they could afford it, everyone in the village still knew they were Roma. And if no one asked, they would also refer to themselves as Gypsies or Roma. They even called each other Gypsies.  

They lived in three separate areas, and they didn’t really socialise. Most of them lived in the Gátmegett colony. The others lived on what used to be called Cigány Street, now known as Szent Imre Street. This part of the village – made up of small huts and improvised shacks – lies in the upper part of Zetelaka, a bit off the main road to the right, near the edge of the village. They were tent-dwellers, though not the wealthy kind who build grand palaces in Etéd / Atid, along the Nyárád river’s (Niraj) valley or on the banks of the Aranyos (Arieș). 

Although in most parts of Transylvania the tent-dwellers and the Gábor Roma are considered to be at the top of the Romani social hierarchy, in Zetelaka and in the Csík/Ciuc region they represent a less wealthy group. Still, they preserve their traditions, including the wearing of the traditional skirts and the hats. The people from Gátmegett refer to them as “Gypsies” and because they are poorer and belong to a different social stratum, they don’t really want to socialise with them.  

In the place called Hegyben only a few families lived and they were said to be “troublesome.” That is, they had some ugly affairs in the past, but lately they’ve been trying to run their businesses under lawful circumstances. I don’t really know for sure because I don’t know them personally—this is just what I’ve heard.

And now I’ll tell you what you can expect from this fairy tale in which the beat of segregation was defeated: 

1. Once, there were three primary schools in Zetelaka: the Alszeg, the Belső Street and the Tófalva schools. Teaching was discontinued at the Alszeg school because there were too few children. Most Roma children attended the Belső Street school since it was closer to them, both for kindergarten and later for primary school. However, at a certain point they came to make up about half of the students and when their numbers grew, they did not behave properly. As a result, Hungarian parents began taking their children either to the town or to the other school. 
2. The segregation sought to separate Roma children from Hungarian children, but the school leadership did not allow it. Five years ago, schooling was reorganized into districts: two school zones were created within the village and the village was divided in such a way that the area called Gátmegett was split right down the middle. One half of the Roma children were assigned to the Belső Street school and the other half to the Tófalva school. 
3. The Roma parents were not always happy about this because the Tófalva school is a bit farther away and the children had already grown used to the Belső Street building during their kindergarten years.  
4. The teachers at the Tófalva school were not very happy about it, as they hadn’t taught that many Roma children before. 
5. The teachers at the Belső Street school could breathe out a bit but not literally, as the children don’t stink. This is exactly what I want to dwell on.  
6. After the ascension to the EU many Roma found work abroad, they earn decently, build houses, buy cars do absolutely everything in their power to live like Hungarians. But they don’t really succeed in it, but they strive and this is what segregation cannot stand. 
7. I’ve left it for last, but there is another factor in the story that’s just as important, one more thing that segregation hates. And this is none other than the after-school program run by Caritas. 
8. Segregation is fuelled by people not getting along with each other, by their failure to understand where the other person comes from or what kind of life they’ve had before. And it constantly strives to make one group of people very smart, very clean and very rich, while the other group is poor, uneducated, and dirty. 
9. This is why Caritas has programs that bring people together—elderly people with the young, pregnant mothers with new mothers—so they can get to know, understand and maybe even come to like one another. For Caritas’ programs to function, money is needed, and this is usually paid by Hungarians or foreigners. That’s why they tend to grumble a bit, but after all, it’s not only about how much money we have; it’s also about whether we get along with each other and whether we live our everyday lives in a good spirit. 

The characters:

Mayor Attila Nagy, headmistress Enikő Abrán, Elemér Sebestyén, deputy headmaster of the P. Boros Fortunát school, former headmaster and councilman, former deputy headmaster András Kacsó, Csilla Dimén English teacher, the teaching staff of the schools in Tófalva and Belső Street, the staff of the Caritas organisation of Gyulafehérvár / Alba Iulia: Norbert Tókos, István Sándor, Kinga Noémi Varga, Alexandra Benedek, the Simons, the children. 

The establishment of school districts is a taboo topic in Zetelaka. As a journalist, I have never found it this difficult to report on a success story. Whoever I ask either pretends they haven’t heard about the districts or doesn’t want to talk about it, including the decision-makers. The first person who bravely explains what happened and why is the deputy headmaster, Elemér Sebestyén. 

He takes over the story from here: 

– When the school in Alszeg closed because of the decrease in the number of children, all the Roma wanted to enrol their children in the school on Belső Street where there were classes in which half of the pupils were of Romani origin.  

Hungarian parents started taking their children to the other school instead. Of course, they didn’t openly say why—there were all kinds of explanations, like a grandparent lives nearby so the child can go there at noon, or the sibling already attends that school. But when a parent who lives right across from the school on Belső Street came in and asked to transfer their child to the Tófalva school, it became obvious what the real reason was. We could see that something had to be done.  

There was a time when half of the class was made up of Roma children. There was a primary school teacher who would drink, sometimes she would disappear for weeks, she had a Roma class for one year. But the ones who were the most outraged were the Roma because they were being segregated. They didn’t want to be placed in separate classes; they wanted their children to attend the school on Belső Street.   

If Roma children study separately that won’t lead to anything good,

because then they don’t adapt to most of the norms, especially regarding school requirements,’ continues the deputy headmaster. The difficulties with adaptation stem from the fact that their life rhythm is different: at seventeen or eighteen, they drop out of school due to pregnancy. Even now, we have a student who announced that her belly is growing and that she won’t be coming to school anymore. 

There is a program that provides a 700 RON (about 150 EUR) scholarship to school-going young mothers, but most of the time, no matter how hard we try to persuade them, they are too ashamed to come back to the classroom. 

We had a clever girl who was an above-average student, living off what she learned at school. She received no support at home, failed fifth grade because her parents took her to Poland in May. She couldn’t complete her semester exams, which were required to pass and the same thing happened the following year. If her parents had only sent her to school regularly, she could have even graduated—she had that kind of ability, concludes the deputy headmaster.  

Something must be done

As the school leaders, headmistress Enikő Abrán and deputy headmaster Elemér Sebestyén, explain, 2019 was the year when it became clear that something had to be done. Nearly half of the classes were Roma, which resulted in 29 students being enrolled in Class A and 13 in Class B. The law changed—previously, everyone could enrol their child wherever they wanted; now districts could be established. They initiated the process and after the approval of the school inspectorate, in 2020 it was also confirmed by a local council decision that children living above the Gáspár Bridge—which exactly divides the Roma settlement called Gátmegett—would attend the Tófalva school and those living below the bridge would go to the school on Belső Street. 

This was supposedly communicated to the parents as well, but the Roma parents we asked hadn’t heard about it. At enrolment, they were only told which school and which teacher their child would be assigned to, not why. A few Roma parents were upset at first—why their child had to go to the farther school when they had already attended the Belső Street kindergarten—but eventually they came to accept it. 

– Teacher Előd was deeply dedicated, now I say it was better this way. Under his guidance, every Roma child learned to read and write,’ said one mother. She has several children and had previously faced problems at school because they are Roma. One of the teachers humiliated her daughter—making her scrub the kerosene floor in her clean, new white trousers and mocking her for having been born with only one arm.   

And the Romanian teacher was determined to fail her other child. Because of this, she had to go to the headmaster’s office several times. Her daughter, now in ninth grade, recounts that she also had problems, she was teased and had to stand up aggressively once or twice and since then there have been no issues with the bullies. She plans to complete all twelve grades and is studying tourism. Her mother encourages her. The mother herself only completed eight grades because she became ill and from then on ‘I would go to school one week and spend the rest herding the cattle’. 

Ethnic school conflicts occur today in isolated cases, 

say the teachers. There’s also the stereotype that it’s typically the Roma who cause trouble. Years ago, there was a severe case where a Roma child stabbed a Hungarian child in the leg with a knife, but after reviewing the security footage, the Hungarian mother withdrew the complaint because it turned out that her child had been bullying and teasing the Roma child for a long time.

“There are problematic children in both ethnic groups. Sometimes there are even more among the Hungarian children than the Roma, but Hungarian parents find it hard to admit it”, says Csilla Dimén, an English teacher, who currently has Roma children in every class she teaches, averaging between one and three per class.

She began to see the Roma differently when she started organizing a fundraiser for them with the Gereben Association. She sees and appreciates their effort, noting that they are very ambitious and strive to integrate into school and community life. From an academic perspective, however, many of them lag behind and for this reason, the teacher is not necessarily in favour of desegregation. In her view, they would make more progress and be more motivated if they competed with each other, rather than many of them struggling with gaps that are impossible to catch up on. 

However, she considers it important that they stay in the school system as long as possible because even if they don’t fully master the curriculum, they can still learn the rules of social life. She believes it is increasingly common for Roma children to at least complete vocational school: the forestry program is advantageous in this regard because since it is a mountainous area, many forest workers are needed and students start the job with some knowledge and experience; they are not entering the forest for the first time after finishing the programme. 

The school has also tested segregated education, 

but the experience was – teachers recounting an incident from many years ago – that when the proportion of Roma exceeds a certain critical number, the classes start forming cliques along ethnic lines and the number of incidents increases not only among the children but sometimes even escalating to physical aggression toward the teacher. 

But they cannot speak openly about it since officially there are no Roma living in the village. And as the law forbids it, there’s no segregation either and it cannot be solved on this ground. From here, it’s all uphill.

At the last census in Zetelaka only 4 people identified as Roma and according to headmistress   Enikő Abrán only 26 chose the Roma ethnicity when enrolling to school. Some parents almost slapped the registrar feeling offended that they are not Gypsies. – What language do we speak? Hungarian, so we are Hungarian! 

That is why they cannot apply for Roma programmes either.

The headmistress explains that she is making efforts to combat student dropout, even traveling to the neighbouring village of Máréfalva / Satu Mare to recruit students.

Up to the 8^th grade, the school in Zetelaka performs rather well. Reviewing the statistical data and reports from the educational inspectorate shows that the only significant struggle is Romanian. However, after that point, the better students are drawn away by the nearby town, creating a vicious cycle: because of poor graduation exam results, even those who would otherwise be satisfied with the school’s vocational offer choose not to stay.

This could be a chance for the Roma children. 

According to the data provided to us by Lóránt Izsák-Székely, the school inspector of Hargita County, a total of 3,602 Roma children are attending school this year in the county, from kindergarten to high school, two-thirds of them in rural areas. In 19 educational institutions, their proportion exceeds 60%, which is considered segregation if it does not reflect the ethnic composition of the settlement.

This includes the Somlyó and Erdőalja schools in Csíkszereda / Miercurea Ciuc, the Téglagyár Elementary School and Pitypang Kindergarten in Gyergyószentmiklós/ Gheorgheni, as well as the Ficánka – Kézenfogva Kindergarten and the Tompa László Elementary School’s Budvár campus in Székelyudvarhely / Odorheiu Secuiesc, with a total of 330 students. This represents nearly one-tenth of all Roma children. 

Based on the study conducted by sociologists Andrea Sólyom and Tamás Kiss, the towns are pushing the Roma families to the villages by evictions and the high cost of living.   This is why more than 2,000 Roma children attend rural institutions, where they are doubly disadvantaged. The teachers’ qualifications and the level of infrastructure are generally inversely proportional to the number of Roma children.

In rural areas, 421 Roma children study in institutions where their proportion exceeds 60%, which corresponds to 16 schools. This includes the catchment area of Székelykeresztúr / Cristuru Secuiesc and the regions of Alcsík and Kászon. Nearly half (920) of the Roma children enrolled in rural schools attend buildings where more than 30% of the students are Roma. In urban areas, this proportion is over half i.e. 659 out of 1,092 children.  

The declining number of children in both Hungarian and Romanian grades forces the otherwise indifferent or even racist decision-makers and headmaster to reach out to the Roma community. And although progress is slow, there are results. 

They work abroad for integration 

It is a fortunate coincidence that the financial situation of Roma parents is improving exponentially thanks to work abroad. Every character, from passers-by on the street to the operators of community centres, teachers and headmasters, up to the mayor, says that the improvement in their financial situation has significantly changed the perception of the Roma. 

– There’s nothing wrong with them; these are honest, hardworking people! – declares, slightly indignant at the question, an older woman who is just hanging a gate key on the street by this side of the bridge. Another lady says, “We’ve become more empathic; we tolerate each other better”. 

About ten to fifteen years ago, it was still common in public discourse in Szeklerland to link the Roma to crime. Now, after talking with many Hungarian people from Zetelaka, it became apparent that they no longer associate theft with ethnicity, but rather with poverty or a difficult family background. And also, that someone doesn’t steal out of malice, but because they are forced to ‘get by’ in order to survive”.

I couldn’t find any Hungarian parent who admittedly had their children transferred to another school because of the Roma classmates. According to the teachers, the parents did not oppose the change in principle; they only complained when the ten-year-old classmate beat up the little six-year-olds on the way home. 

Back in the day they kicked in the door of the town hall 

In his childhood, Roma children were dirty, sat in the back row and often dropped out even in primary school. However, the situation today is completely different – I press the mayor for an answer, who doesn’t want to say anything with a negative connotation. He watches over the current, fundamentally good situation, into which a lot of work has been invested. Yet solutions are only born out of problems.   

He says that when he took over the office in 2012, there were problems. It was commonplace for groups of Roma to arrive at the town hall and try to exert pressure by making a lot of noise to get their way. That was when he first faced the Roma-Hungarian problem and cultural and social differences. 

He says he does not know much about the Roma, but he realises that, as mayor, it is his responsibility to change the situation in the interests of peaceful coexistence; the problems cannot be swept under the carpet. But you can’t force something on the majority that they’re not ready for. He thinks the walls need to be torn down from both sides.

That’s why the cooperate with the Caritas Alba Iulia foundation, 

whose staff also acts as mediators in the life of both communities. István Sándor programme manager says that they organise many a joint programme, for instance when the Roma clean the streets of their settlements, the group of local seniors cook for them and they eat together. 

The message this sends to the Roma is that the Hungarians in Zetelaka care about the Roma settlement being nice and tidy and are willing to work towards this goal. Alternatively, the Caritas staff collect and list the requests of those living in the Roma settlement and present them to the mayor’s office. This way, the problems are not fragmented, and they also help to formulate them so that the parties not only hear but also understand each other. 

But what do the teachers say?

While the situation of teachers on Belső Street improved visibly, teachers at the school on Tófalva Street were shocked to find that suddenly there were many Roma children in their classes after the establishment of the districts. The 5^th graders who have just graduated are now in their first year of secondary school, and according to their teacher, the five years spent with the eight Roma children, two of whom did not start school with them but were repeating the year, were challenging. One of them repeated the year again, while the others were able to move on to 5^th grade. 

Since Cigány Street (officially named Szent Imre Street) and Hegy (Mount) also belong to their district, since the redistricting, they have had more Roma children than those on Belső Street. 

Teachers on Belső Street, on the other hand, are relieved. They say that, on the one hand, it is very good that the parents’ financial situation has improved greatly thanks to job opportunities abroad, and that there are no longer any hygiene problems. 

About ten years ago, one of their colleagues contracted hepatitis because there were problems with toilet training. When the stool just rolled out, it was fine, but when the child had diarrhea, it was a disaster, they say with horror. 

Since then, the world has opened up for the Roma, they have become more demanding and Roma parents now want to give their own children the same things that Hungarian children get.  

Tell Teach I’m off to France!

On the other hand, the result of work abroad, especially in the case of the tent-dwellers, is that they take the children with them to Poland, France in April and often they do not come back until the end of November or early December. During this time, they don’t attend school and as a result, they cannot complete the school year, so they have to repeat the previous grade. – Last year, one of my first graders greeted me by saying that their Roma classmate had been there and bid farewell saying: “Tell the teacher I went to France. I’ll be back later,” says one of the teachers.

The other problem is the large age gap, which the law allows. Due to repeating grades, some children have up to 470 absences. It happens that a child who has barely turned six looks in awe at their ten-year-old classmate, who seems almost like an adult, with their slicked-back hair and shiny black shoes, says one of the teachers from Belső Street. 

– It may be that the 10-year-old and the 6-year-old are at the same academic level, but a six-year-old still needs to be told stories, while the ten-year-old is often thinking about girls or boys. In two or three years, they’ll be marrying them. The ten-year-old already shows the six-year-old certain things in the bathroom, complains a teacher from Tófalva Street. She adds that many of their days have to start with washing hands because the children come to school dirty.  

They regret segregation 

Out of the five teachers at the Tófalva school, maybe one has no issues with the school districts. She has a Roma girl in her class who has fully integrated and is a good student, while the other teachers’ lives have become more difficult.  

One of them trustingly asks whether any official action can be expected as a result of the article because there are many Roma children in her class and a lot of problems. This surprises me because she has received a lot of positive feedback from the Roma parents.  

According to another teacher, if the Roma haven’t been able to integrate after nearly a thousand years, then perhaps it’s not worth forcing this desegregation. It would be better if they went to separate classes, like they did in the past. She feels that there are only expectations placed on them: to treat Roma children the same as Hungarian children, but the Roma parents don’t even listen to their requests. For example, it’s no problem if the child is sick, travels and misses school, but they should call the teacher. Then, they show up eventually with a note. But the note doesn’t teach them how to read or write! – she says.

The problem with segregation, as defined by the Ministry of Education’s framework regulation, is that it leads to high dropout rates, difficulties with continuing education, perpetuates social prejudices, increases social costs and reduces economic revenues. According to OECD data, individuals who grow up in poverty and are educated in segregated environments pay on average 10-30% less in taxes over the course of their lives than their peers who were educated in integrated settings, which results in a direct loss of revenue for the state.  

Mária Coré, a teacher of Roma origin recounts in an Átlátszó Airday podcast that segregation is justified only if there is no other solution or temporarily if the children lagging behind attend activities that help them catch up with the others. Afterward, even in cases of long physical distance, a school bus must be provided, and the children must be educated in desegregated conditions.   

The parents are more eager to participate in community activities  

Teachers see many Roma children falling behind because their parents do not support them. This is mostly because they cannot help them with their studies or because they are abroad and the children are being looked after by their grandparents. A grandparent feeds them and keeps them clean, but cannot help them with their studies, and so the children fall behind. ‘It’s a shame, because they are smart and were among the first to learn to read’, says their teacher about a pair of Roma twins. 

The teachers were particularly pleased that Roma parents also attended school celebrations, such as the alphabet celebration. They didn’t use to in the past. The children were left out of field trips (this still happens today, as parents are afraid to let their children go on overnight trips) and even if they did participate in celebrations, their parents were not there. They might have been there during the performance, but they did not stay for tea party.

Nowadays, they often stand aside, but they are there. The teachers are all the more delighted to have them there because they taught these parents when they were children. They attribute this to the fact that they are now better integrated into the community, they know the rules and take them for granted.

Another serious problem 

–– not solely a problem of the Roma –– but rather more frequent in the Roma families is that the children spend too much time on their phones, they go to sleep very late, they are tired, in the morning they are already tense, some of them drink energy drinks before school. 

There are still more Roma children coming from unstable family backgrounds than the average: one or both parents are abroad, chronically ill, mentally ill or living in blended families. This leaves its mark on the children’s behaviour: when their parents arrive or leave, their children are “out of their minds.”

Although there are fewer large families than before, it still happens that an eighth-grade girl and her sick father are left to care for two or three younger siblings for months while their mother earns money abroad. Or the older half-siblings are in state care until the house where they can all live together is built.  

The teachers are left alone 

Teachers are unable to compensate for these shortcomings and as it turns out, they have not received any organised training in teaching disadvantaged children or in Roma culture. For example, many teachers resent the fact that some parents lie. 

However, what is considered a lie in one culture is considered politeness in other culture: saying what is expected of them. It may happen that at that moment he is sincerely convinced that he is telling the truth when he says that his child will be going to school the following week because in that context he is telling the truth to the person he is talking to and then in another context he goes off with his child to earn money. Because putting food on the table and the family take precedence over the previous promise and they do not even understand what the problem is with this.

The schoolyard in Tófalva is a cheerful, welcoming place.

There is only one primary school teacher there who, as an instructor of the afterschool programme, took part in the training sessions on Roma culture, organised in the time of deputy headteacher András Kacsó. In addition, the Caritas organised a lecture on the topic.

We contacted the county school inspectorate and the Apáczai Csere János Teachers’ House to find out whether such training opportunities are available in Hungarian. The Apáczai House regularly organises courses on the education of disadvantaged children and those with special educational needs. A training programme specifically focusing on Roma-related issues is also planned for this year; however, there is a participation fee of around 300 lei for these courses. 

Training programmes for school and health mediators are also organized, with an entry fee of approximately 2,000 lei, we are told.

The mayor is not aware of the existence of school districts,

so he cannot give an account on it, he says during our interview. Nevertheless, he has invested a lot of energy in improving the lives of the Roma community and, above all, in the Roma-Hungarian coexistence. But he does not want to take credit for the achievements. 

He can help with infrastructure investments: drinking water has been introduced to the Gátmegett shantytown and now asphalt and sewage disposal are planned. Attila Nagy says that more and more people are complying with building regulations, building on legally registered land and paying taxes, even among the Roma, although there are still many tax arrears on that side. The introduction of a neighbourhood watch, the banning of street vendors and stricter enforcement of housing conditions have also promoted Roma-Hungarian coexistence: anyone who has no tax debts elsewhere and meets the housing conditions stipulated by law can move to Zetelaka.

He was the one who primarily embraced the work of Caritas; in our case the afternoon activities. This started as a grant program and when the grant expired, he asked the headmaster whether it was effective or should be discontinued.

– Oh, don’t discontinue it, as it’s too good!

– was the answer. Teachers also report that cooperation with Caritas is very good and this is mutual, with positive feedback from the civil organisation as well. They have worked together to teach children to read and write and school teachers are happy to have their help. And it would be even better if more children attended, they say.  

The location, however, is far from ideal. The walls are extremely damp, the air is humid, I have to step outside after ten minutes for I can barely breathe. They are trying to address the problem with dehumidifiers. It is only later that I notice that the bathroom is separated inside one of the study rooms, which is also used as a storage room.

The mayor has reportedly tried several times to relocate the centre, as he, too, recognises that the conditions are unhealthy. However, the process has proven complicated in several respects, largely due to strong resistance from local residents. Finding a centrally located facility would be crucial: the building of the now-closed Alszeg school would have been suitable, or other school buildings in the village centre, but the people concerned did not agree to the move.

Despite this, there are always too many applicants for the afterschool programme. The law stipulates the order of priority according to which children must be admitted, Kelemen Boróka explains, showing the relevant document. The centre employs two full-time staff members and one part-time employee. The afternoon sessions are led by Norbert Tókos; Kinga Noémi Varga works as the psychologist, and Boróka Kelemen is the social worker.

Among other things, Boróka organizes family visits and is responsible for keeping contacts. Norbi and Noémi are on site between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., next to the main building of the P. Boros Fortunát School, in the basement of the library.

In the morning, they do paperwork and prepare for the afternoon activities and the children arrive after noon. Lunch, homework, and individual activities are on the agenda every afternoon. Except for Fridays when they have Superar choir. It is a social, musical programme that develops community, entertains, provides a sense of achievement and develops rule-abiding skills, says Norbi.

But what about the results?

Eight years have passed since 2017 and now the first class they worked with since first grade has graduated. While 29% of students achieved an average below five in 2023, 28% did so in 2024, and only 18% did so in 2025. So the smaller grades increased and the average grades achieved at the competence tests show an upward trend in some subjects. While in 2017-18 there were eight school dropouts, six of whom were Roma, in the 2023-24 school year only four dropped out, but all of them were Roma.  

So the strategy works based on the reports of the stakeholders and the available figures. I won’t go into detail about how the authorities drove me to tears with their data. In short: the tables came as images, without interpretation, with abbreviations, in miniature size. In fact, the results of the national surveys of 2^nd and 4^th graders could be relevant, but neither the school nor the school inspectorate stores data on them. And the school inspectorate’s annual reports have different criteria every year, which makes comparison impossible. Unfortunately, the buses that were the focus in 2021 cannot be compared with the results of eighth graders in 2023. 

They lived happily ever…

The situation of the Roma in Hargita County is not facilitated by the fact that the recently deceased Roma specialist school inspector, Attila Kari, has been replaced by a former mayor working part-time, Lóránd Izsák-Székely, who, however well-intentioned he may be, cannot change the world in four hours a day.  

What could still be done in Zetelaka is to raise awareness and promote the values of Roma culture, so that assimilation, i.e., melting into the majority, does not occur, but rather inclusion. This would allow Roma people to embrace their identity and teachers would better understand why Roma children behave differently from their peers. 

During my research, it has repeatedly came up that the school mediators have proven effective in other municipalities in combating school dropout rates. Currently, mediator training is being organised by the Roma party, according to the county Roma school inspector. The situation in Zetelaka can actually be replicated in other settlements, especially in cities, but also in villages. Where Caritas or the Maltese Association or other civil organisations have programs that also involve Roma, all that is needed is to redraw the school districts to eliminate segregation and begin the process of integration.

I have the feeling that the characters in the Zetelaka story are all a little afraid.

But there is nothing to be afraid of. This method has already been successfully used in several places in the Czech Republic to eliminate segregation, and the progress made can be thoroughly substantiated with data.

Their experience shows that three factors are necessary to successfully eliminate segregation. One is political will, another is redrawing school districts so that segregation cannot occur and the third is the community-building and bridging work of civil organisations. All of these are present in Zetelaka and all that is needed now is some fine-tuning so that they can sing along with the Superar choir: “I turn off the light in my head, / I light a candle in my heart, let it shine! / If the world is offended by me, / Then I know my path is leading me in the right direction.” 

Photos edited by Helga Tóth.

In preparing this article, we collaborated with the Czech website Okraj.cz and the Italian SlowNews portal.

The article was supported by the solution-focused program of Journalismfund Europe and Transitions.

The post Zetelaka has defeated the beast of segregation  appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

The authorities are equally silent on the issue of developments in the village, which have been under investigation for years. We will now take a look at these developments and show how a local construction contractor and the mayor’s family are profiting from them.

We shall also reveal the violation of the law by which the mayor and his office have effectively concealed important municipal documents, even though this obfuscation is not punishable by law. Mayor János Sallai gets both political and financial benefits from this:

• voters mainly know what he tells them in person;
• his opponents have little insight into how the office operates and it is impossible to trace back even the decisions of the local council for years;
• locally, people do not know how much agricultural subsidies the mayor and his family members receive in addition to their salaries and businesses although they hardly farm at all.

The pride of Transylvanian identity

Szék / Sic is one of the most famous rural settlements of the Hungarian community in Romania, located about 30 km east of Cluj-Napoca. The people of Sic are rightly proud of their village’s past and its famous and rich folklore. Both of these features make it stand out among the villages of Transylvania, as do its tourist potential and the visible prosperity of its inhabitants.

The inhabitants of Sic supplemented their farming income with seasonal work in Cluj and Budapest as early as the middle of the 20^th century. Since then, many have remained in the cities or abroad, so despite relative prosperity and newcomers, the population of Sic has been declining by 10% every decade. According to the latest census data, more than 90% of its 2,234 inhabitants are Hungarian. János Sallai has been elected and re-elected mayor since 1992: before the informant scandal, he represented the Hungarian political party in Romania, the DAHR [Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania] and later ran as an independent, but with the tacit support of the DAHR.

Decades ago, Sallai already saw potential in rural tourism, according to the press of the time. He introduced piped drinking water and natural gas to Sic earlier than most villages in Transylvania, although sometimes such public utility projects took up to ten years to be completed. He had even the village’s smallest streets paved more than ten years ago, but residents are able to connect to the sewage system this year. He established a country house and a tourist information centre with government support.

Several guesthouses are trying to make a living in the village. Two private initiatives are working to preserve folk culture: the dance house museum of Michel Van Langeveld, who has passed away this year, and the Blue House, which was purchased by the Sic Civil Circle Association to serve as a community centre and later as a village museum in the renovated farmhouse.

We wrote more about Sic and the mayor last fall, when we detailed the developments for which the mayor did not seek permission from the authorities and controversially initiated or terminated them. These include the establishment of the salty bath spa in Sic that dries and pollutes the reed by the village, the paving and covering of the brook bed running through the village and the paving conducted after the sewerage works.

At that point, we were forced to point out Mayor János Sallai’s strange relationship with the facts and his own past. He even went to the Constitutional Court to have the information proven by documents and made public since 2008 deleted, namely that he had been an informant for the Securitate before 1990. Then, in an interview with us, he denied not only that he had reported to the Securitate, but also that he had appealed for years to have his past as an informant erased. But in vain.

However, by doing so, he calls into question the credibility of all the information that he himself is the source of.

The scandal didn’t crush the mayor

During our interview conducted with him, he repeatedly stated that he believed his local rivals were inciting people against him and that he had been expecting us to show up even before last year’s municipal elections. Sallai has been claiming since 2007 that he has been the victim of political smear campaigns. He explained this by saying that the police had launched an investigation against him for the unlawful payment of social benefits and for informally carrying out road repairs and procurements, such as supplying stone for certain road repairs through his son’s company. To our knowledge, nothing came happened with the case, but it was at this point that Sallai gained more serious local rivals.

Although Béla Markó,then the president of DAHR, campaigned in Sic in person during Romania’s first EP elections, in November 2007 more people in the village voted for the rival László Tőkés, who was running as an independent, than for the DAHR’s European Parliament candidates. In the spring of 2008, the local branch of the Hungarian Civic Party was formed, which supported Márton Csorba, the deputy mayor at the time, in the summer municipal elections.

In this election, Sallai was put under the most pressure, as his past as an informer was revealed. The DAHR distanced itself from him and appointed a rival candidate, but Sallai and Csorba, both running as independent, made it to the second round. Sallai won this round with 57% of the vote. Since then, he has been winning with an increasingly high percentage of the vote, with no opposition from the DAHR, only tacit support.

Márton Csorba ran for mayor once more in 2016, unsuccessfully. In 2024, his son, Szilárd Csorba, youth vice president of the Alliance of Hungarians in Transylvania, ran against Sallai, admitting that he did so to prevent personal conflicts and passions from dominating the local campaign, and won 30% of the vote.

Not a grain of sand was seen in the ditch

Personal conflicts arose between Csorba sr. and Sallai between 2004 and 2008, when they jointly managed the village. Márton Csorba told us that they stirred things up when, as deputy mayor, he refused to sign off on the contractor’s claim that they had laid the required amount of sand under the gas pipes that were being laid at the time, when he could not see a single grain of sand in the trenches. However, he did see the scandalous investment in the never-used retirement home, which also fell through and the mayor’s son is now profiting from the building.

Over the past ten years, matters concerning Sic have disappeared from the daily press. There are no regular reports on the once popular dance camps, Sic Days, village development and even the annual Bartholomew’ Day celebrations are rarely mentioned. The image of the former model Hungarian village has faded.

Sallai himself does not consider it his duty to disclose every detail of the matters we asked him about. ‘I’m not bound to reveal everything, am I?’ he cut in when we tried to clarify how long he had owned the company that operates the Sóvirág Guesthouse.

Three years ago, an excavator broke through the presumably illegal gas connection at this guesthouse while digging a trench for the next phase of public utility works. Márton Csorba, who runs a sawmill nearby, learned about the investigation that was launched at the time. He often visited the site during the three-day investigation, was stopped by the police and after learning from them what had happened, he notified the local press.

Only GherlaInfo in Gherla reported that the police, together with employees of the gas company, had identified an illegally connected, approximately 75 m long gas pipeline. The Hungarian press in Cluj County has been silent. The prosecutor’s office in Gherla, leading the investigation, has not provided any substantive information for three years and does not appear to be working on the case. Yet the family and background interests surrounding the guesthouse are not that complicated.

Gas at the mayor’s guesthouse

During the period when natural gas was introduced, the Sóvirág Guesthouse and the adjacent wedding hall were operated by two separate companies. One of them was founded in 2005 by the mayor’s daughter, Zsuzsi Pap (Sallai) and less than ten years later it merged into the family business, Tipca. Tipca Import Export Ltd. was founded by János Sallai in 1993, just under a year after he was elected mayor.

Sallai couldn’t remember exactly when he opened the guesthouse, but according to a description on an accommodation booking website, it all started in 2000. Tipca Import Export, which operates the guesthouse, switched to hospitality in 2007, but animal breeding, carpentry and joinery, electrical installation and painting and decorating also appear in the company’s business profile at the time.

2007, the year we joined the EU, brought about another important change to the company: the mayor had to leave the business. His wife, who had been Tipca’s company director, also left. The company was taken over by the mayor’s son, János Sallai, who has the same name. His sister, Zsuzsi, received a 30% share in the company in 2014 when her company merged with Tipca, according to the company database.

The benefit of having two companies behind the two units of the guesthouse was that both could apply for EU funding. Both were built with pre-accession funds: one under the Phare program and the other under the SAPARD program, according to the mayor’s first 2008 asset declaration, which we downloaded from the databases of the Integrity Agency (ANI). The mayor confirmed during the interview that the two units were built with Phare and SAPARD funds.

When, well over three years ago, they found the gas pipe that shouldn’t have been there, even though his son had owned the guesthouse for 14 years, the mayor referred to it as my guesthouse at that heated council meeting, where the local opposition, the then councillors of the MPP [Hungarian People’s Party], called for his resignation. They objected that the gas theft case was cast over the entire village.

“Sometimes I say ‘my guesthouse’. It doesn’t mean anything. So they [his children – ed.] run it, it’s all theirs,” was one of the mayor’s responses when we asked him about his choice of words. His other response was that he also refers to it as our guesthouse and that he and his wife also go to help out at the guesthouse when the children ask them to.

The pipe and the gas

We spoke with János Sallai and his son about the gas issue a few weeks apart. The only thing they agreed on was that the guesthouse definitely did not steal gas as it was supplied via a legally installed pipe.

The mayor said that the gas pipe found three years ago does lead to the guesthouse, but he assumes that the company that built the gas network left something unfinished there. According to him, the contractor wanted to connect the gas when the Sóvirág buildings did not yet exist. This contradicts the mayor’s 2008 declaration of assets, according to which the later-built unit of the guesthouse had already completed in 2006. The gas connection works began around that time, and according to several sources, the actual gas supply only started years later.

János Sallai Jr. said that the gas pipe, subject to investigation, is not even connected to the later-built unit of the guesthouse. Since that building was also built with grant money, Sallai Jr. said it is possible that a separate gas connection was part of the project, but in the end, they did not connect a separate gas pipe to that building, but instead connected it to the first one.

Even the name of the suspected crimes contradicts their explanation:

illegal gas connection and classified fuel theft. In response to our question, the prosecutor’s office pointed out these two suspicions a few weeks after the investigation began. The suspicion of fuel theft would not have arisen if the pipe had not been connected to the guesthouse and the gas supplier had not suffered any losses. The first article reporting on the investigation concludes by saying that the damage will be assessed, but for years we have been asking the prosecutor’s office in vain whether the damage has been assessed and how much it is estimated to be.

In the meantime, however, we learned that Sallai Jr. had paid the damages to the gas supplier, CPL Concordia. We received some very interesting answers when we asked about this. The mayor declared he didn’t mediate between his son and the gas supplier.

“I have nothing to declare on the matter. No… Let’s not get into it; they didn’t conduct any investigation whatsoever, nothing” ‒ replied Sallai Jr. when asked whether he or Tipca had paid the damages to the gas supplier CPL Concordia. He then repeated that he did not wish to comment on the matter.

The manager of CPL Concordia stayed silent. First, I visited the company’s headquarters in Cluj-Napoca, where the Italian director, Andrea Gualdi, sent word through his secretary that he did not wish to discuss the matter. An hour later, I sent my questions by email, in case he changed his mind. In addition to the damage and possible compensation, I was also interested in whether someone could join their network without the network builder knowing or Concordia noticing the gas loss.

The director opened the email containing nine questions within a minute. Then twenty more times in the next hour. At least, that’s what the email tracker program I use showed.

Why has the investigation been dragging along for over three years?

Last autumn, both János Sallai Sr. and János Sallai Jr. said that they had not yet been called in to testify in the case. In other words, in the two and a half years since the investigation started, the prosecutor’s office has not questioned János Sallai Jr., who runs the guesthouse, either as a witness or as a suspect.

Over the past year, I have regularly asked the prosecutor’s office in Gherla why this case is so complicated that they are not making any progress: they are not pressing charges, but they are not closing the case either. The prosecutor’s office did not respond. I argued in vain that the case was of public interest due to the involvement of the mayor and his family, the prosecutor’s office repeated that it could only provide information about the investigation to those who had some kind of criminal status in the case.

Citing the same reason, the prosecutor’s office in Gherla is also keeping quiet about two other cases, which are entirely public matters. It has not even disclosed whether the investigation is still ongoing and, if so, what crimes are suspected. We know from the DNA [National Anticorruption Directorate] and private individuals that they investigated two otherwise justified public investments, but there is no official information about the closure of the proceedings.

No one ages in Sic anymore

More than ten years after the retirement home was ready, the DNA was still investigating, confirmed Márton Sallai, pastor of the Reformed Church congregation in Sic. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office questioned him as a witness around 2016 because the building in which the local authorities in Sic established a retirement home with government aid is owned by the Reformed Church. However, the retirement home never operated.

The church-owned building in the centre of the village used to be a denominational school before nationalisation, then a cultural centre during the communist regime, and later a warehouse. In the years following the change of regime, it fell into complete disrepair. Since the building was listed in the municipality’s inventory, the mayor said, Sallai spent years looking for ways to have it rehabilitated. When the National Investment Company (CNI) announced government subsidies for retirement homes, the mayor seized the opportunity and applied for financing.

The building was renovated and furnished in 2004 with 300,000 lei received from the CNI, according to the mayor’s recollections. Some beds were even donated, confirmed the mayor and Márton Csorba, who became deputy mayor in 2004. However, the retirement home never opened because the municipality did not have the money to pay for cooks and caregivers, explained János Sallai.

Although the call for tenders stated that additional funds would need to be raised to operate the retirement home, the tender itself did not cover this, nor did it stipulate any obligation to operate the facility, said Sallai.

Márton Csorba and the minister remember it otherwise.

According to Csorba, the rehabilitation tender did indeed stipulate that the building renovated for this purpose should then operate as a retirement home. He said that inspectors even visited the site when he was deputy mayor. He specifically remembers the mayor sending the office caretaker to the basement to fetch the sign that had to be hung on the retirement home before the inspectors arrived.

The inspectors did not speak to him, he was not in office at the time and he does not know how the mayor handled the situation. He also does not understand how the office could have received government funds and a permit for the rehabilitation works when the building was not owned by the local authority. The mayor rejected his assumption that the application had included the cadastral number of another building, one that was actually owned by the town hall.

According to him, only the renovation financed by the grant was inspected, and everything was found to be in order, as was the case ten years later during the police investigation. However, the latter investigation also covered the ownership of the building, but it is not known whether it was closed due to the absence of a criminal offense or possibly due to the statute of limitations. In any case, the prosecutor’s office did not press charges, said the mayor.

If its function is social, it cannot be maintained

Minister Márton Sallai recalls that when he arrived in Sic in 2008, the presbyters at the time told him that the building belonged to the parish and that, if they wanted, the local council would return it to the church’s management.

‘I said at that time that we didn’t want it since the retirement home was not operating (nevetherless it was fully furnished: there were beds, nightstands, there was a kitchen as well as central heating) and I didn’t want the state to hold us accountable for not having started the retirement home five years earlier, as it was the purpose for which it had been rehabilitated,’ said the minister. And the parish did not have the means to care for the elderly and pay for healthcare staff.

Márton Sallai understands that the earlier nationalisation of the building was never entered into the land registry, so the building legally remained in parish ownership. During an investigation in the mid-2010s, the police asked him to find the parish’s decision that transferred the building to the local council for renovation. However, he could not find such a document.

Meanwhile, the parish won more than two million euros for the renovation of the church. The works were carried out between 2013 and 2015, with the parish providing accommodation for the workers at the contractor’s request. This is why they asked for and eventually got back the building of the nonexistent retirement home, which had previously been vacated by the town hall.

A retirement home turned into a family business

The building was already structurally unstable at that time, explained the minister. According to the mayor, it is structurally sound, but because it was not in use, rain leaked in, causing the walls to crack. During the renovation of the church, the minister sought the opinion of a structural engineer, who advised that it would be best to have the building demolished.

The building, which was constantly decaying, was not demolished even after it was no longer needed as a workers’ hostel. The parish was unable to make use of it, explained the minister, and no entrepreneur in Sic was interested in it. So when the mayor’s son applied to rent it in 2022, they gave it to him. More precisely, the mayor’s new family company moved into it to start a new business with more public funds.

In 2020, János Sallai Jr. took over Chicibalazs Const Ltd., which had been involved in construction until then. In 2021, he handed it over to his mother, the wife of Mayor Sallai. According to the company’s new profile, it will manufacture household products from paper and cardboard. To start production, the company received €160,000 from the AFIR rural development fund. It only had to contribute 10% of its own funds.

According to the tender panel, production should have started by 2024 at the latest. When we visited it in the spring of 2023, the building was still in ruins, but by the summer of 2024, the central part had been repaired and a huge roll of paper was put behind its glass door. They will manufacture lightweight paper products, which the building can handle, replied János Sallai Jr., who said that it was not a problem that the building could be accessed only by a pedestrian walkway. Trucks cannot drive up, but smaller cars can.

According to Márton Csorba, production has not yet started this year, but the site has been closed off. For decades, residents of the upper part of Csipkeszeg street have been using the path next to the building to reach the village centre. This year, however, the grassy courtyard of the building was fenced off along with the path, eliminating this well-trodden shortcut.

Csorba was bothered by the fact that the parish did not call for tenders in the case of the building, but instead allowed the mayor’s family to rent it immediately. According to the minister, they were constantly looking for tenants, but János Sallai Jr. replied that the building had not been advertised. He negotiated with the Cluj church district because they wanted to rent it for a longer period of time in exchange for having it renovated against a very low rent. We finally learned from the minister that the church had rented the building for 11 years for fifty euros a month.

After publishing the Hungarian version of this article, we received the lease agreement itself from János Sallai Jr. This shows that Chicibalazs Const Ltd. pays fifty euros of the monthly rent of € 200 to the parish, and undertakes to maintain the building for eleven years from the remaining € 20,500.

Farming money not the land

Over the past three years, other companies owned by members of the mayor’s family have also received rural development subsidies. According to the public database where data are available on the platform only for two years, the mayor’s daughter’s beauty parlour received €14,000 in 2022 because it operated in a rural area while the overall yearly turnover of the company hardly exceeded €5,000 that year.

Tipca Import Export Ltd., which is now owned by the mayor’s son, received €26,000 in public funds in 2023, with a turnover of €110,000. These amounts are not out of line with the rural development subsidies received by other limited liability companies in the region, most of which receive between €14,000 and €26,000. After publishing the Hungarian version of this article, the rural development agency revealed that it payed €118,680 to Tipca out of a total €220,000 payed in the village in 2023.

In addition to these grants, the mayor and his family also get significant income from agricultural subsidies on an individual basis. Much more than the mayor has ever admitted. For much more than they have declared to farm.

Mayor János Sallai has a duty, as part of his position, to declare and publish his own assets and those of his family members living in the same household. He did not bother with the publication: neither his nor the local councillors’ asset declarations can be found on the local website. We downloaded them from the ANI databases, as it is unrealistic to expect voters to know where to find these documents.

In his asset declaration, the mayor listed his children’s income and real estate until 2013, presumably because they lived together until then. After that, he only listed his own and his wife’s salaries as income. He only listed agricultural subsidies from 2019 onwards, and even then, he listed much less than the actual amount: RON 10,000 per year, rising to RON 16,000 lei in 2023.

Therefore, we requested the APIA payment agency to provide information on the annual agricultural subsidies received by János Sallai since 2007 and the subsidies received by his family members since 2015. Between 2007 and 2023, the mayor declared a total of RON 553,000 as salary and RON 46,000 in agricultural subsidies. In reality, however, he received RON 170,000 from APIA during this period, nearly four times the amount he declared. In 2013-14, for example, he received almost as much as his annual salary at the time. Meanwhile, he listed 14 hectares of land as his own.

Together with his close family, he has received a total of RON 700,000 in agricultural subsidies since 2015. His family members have also earned well from “farming”: his wife received RON 122,000, his daughter RON 175,000 and his son RON 224,000 in agricultural subsidies between 2015 and 2023. It is also worth marrying into the Sallai family: the mayor’s son-in-law, Zsolt Pap, has been the deputy mayor’s advisor for years. And, of course, he too has been receiving RON 30,000 in agricultural subsidies annually since at least 2022.

The mayor’s office keeps track of how much land each farmer cultivates (whether on their own or leased land). The mayor’s office issues certificates to farmers stating how much land they farm, i.e., how much land they can claim agricultural subsidies for from APIA.

Not a hobby sum for hobby farmers

We 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 average agricultural subsidy for family members was RON 53,000, while for village residents it was RON 37,000 for two years. (We did not include subsidies received by companies in this calculation.)

An even bigger problem is that the state generously supports the welfare of people who demonstrably do not make a living from farming. Sallai himself has been mayor for 33 years, his children run businesses in other fields and his wife will manufacture household paper products even though she is on disability pension, according to her husband’s latest asset declaration.

János Sallai Jr. answered with a clear ‘no’ when asked if any of them were farmers by trade. He said that the family members only had a few hectares and a small farm and none of them were involved in large-scale production or animal husbandry.

During the interview, Mayor Sallai tried to give the impression that he and his wife were some kind of hobby farmers who spent a few hours each afternoon working on their land. But he also said that “we don’t really produce much.” He ultimately justified the large sums we confronted him with by saying that most of them were the so-called butterfly subsidies.

Soaring amounts

Although butterfly subsidies seems like a fairy tale phrase, they are very real and substantial support. As it turns out, part of the Sic area also falls within the protected area of the large blue butterfly (Maculinea). This rare butterfly species only lives in chemical-free meadows and pastures as untouched as possible. To minimize disturbance to these areas, the Romanian government pays up to four times the standard subsidy for ploughed fields and hayfields to those whose private or leased land falls within such areas. Mowing is only allowed in these areas during certain periods, but according to the mayor, the shrubs must be cleared.

The clearing of the hayfields from bushes came up when we asked why he had only declared a quarter of the actual support he had received personally until last year. ‘I don’t think so… Did I forget?’ ‘I don’t know. I’ll look into it.’ ‘I usually report what I receive.’ After we got through these rounds of disbelief and denial, Sallai said he thought he only had to report the amount remaining after the cost of clearing the field.

We explained to him that he had to report his income on the form, not just the profit he made from it, but as an experienced filer of asset declarations, he should have known that. In any case, the fact that we brought up transparency had a positive outcome: in his asset declaration at the end of 2024, he listed RON 66,000 in APIA subsidies.

Does transparency corrupt the elections?

However, he has not yet fulfilled his promise to publish all documents of the local administration on the website, as required by administrative law. Examples of such documents include

• his own as well as the counsellor’s and the registrar’s declaration of assets and interests;
• agenda items, draft resolutions, resolutions, and minutes of local council meetings;
• the agenda and date of the meetings of the specialist committees, so that anyone from the community who wishes to do so can attend;
• mayoral decrees, building permits;
• the civil servants’ salary scale;
• the draft budget and the adopted budget.

All this should go back years, so that anyone (local residents, former inhabitants of Sic, newcomers, political supporters and opponents, even journalists) can trace who said what, what they decided and did in the affairs of the community and with its assets. Currently, only fragments from last year and the year before are available on the website and even those are not necessarily logically ordered. As a result, everyone mostly relies on the mayor’s verbal statements.

‘I’m aware that it’s not working; it’s not that I’m unaware. I’ve asked two or three times guys, did you make it, did you post it? I wouldn’t like to get in trouble because of it, because it’s not the way it’s supposed to be. There are shortcomings, but we will fix them, that’s for sure. So my plan is not to hide it, or that everyone would say or think that we have made it disappear or wanted things to disappear; that’s not true. […] It’s not our goal to make everything unclear and non-transparent’, said the mayor, when we confronted him with the fact that while previously a few years’ worth of local decisions and minutes had been posted on the local website,

by the beginning of 2024 the website got completely empty, all documents were removed.

There were at least three reasons why the mayor’s promise was not credible even then. We knew that his local political rivals had been trying for eight years to obtain the minutes of council meetings, which should be public by default, by submitting separate requests for information. After that, the office began to publish the minutes.

We were also aware that a few weeks before our interview, János Sallai and the office he manages had received a warning from the prefect of Cluj County that the village registrar must comply with his legal obligation and publish the documents of the local council and the office on the village’s website. When we asked about this, the prefecture told us that, unfortunately, the administrative law doesn’t stipulate any penalties for incompliance.

The 2022 methodology of the information law lists several types of documents that must be published on the town hall’s website. This law at least gives citizens the opportunity to sue the public institution that failed to provide them with information. However, it is still up to the mayor to decide whether to initiate disciplinary proceedings against the employee who failed to disclose or send the requested documents to the applicant.

We knew from the public procurement database that three months before last year’s local elections, the mayor’s office in Sic commissioned a company to update the local website. Neither the amount of RON 934 allocated for this purpose nor the prefect’s warning had much effect on the project and six months later the website was still completely empty. The website has been updated this year, but it contains far fewer official documents than before it was emptied last year.

The mayor communicates with residents via Facebook. He posts public information on the SIC Info page. He regularly announces council meetings, but no longer reports on decisions. However, he posts the annual expenditures and planned budget items in an easily understandable manner. He no longer reports on specific payments, even though some of the larger items have interesting, even family-related connections.

Money farming on the local hayfields

One source of revenue for the local budget of Sic comes from the leasing of communal pastures. Several individuals and companies are involved in livestock farming and about two dozen of them have established a livestock farmer cooperative. The cooperative was established in 2013 by Dániel Gergely Márton because at that time it was necessary to bid for municipal pastures. As a large-scale farmer, he outbid everyone else, but he did not need all of them and did not want to antagonize the other breeders, he explained when we asked him about it.

However, he had to admit in the cooperative people who he knew did not keep animals, otherwise the mayor’s office would not have signed the lease agreement with the cooperative. The cooperative was used, Dániel said quite openly, to receive the APIA subsidy, which was used to pay the rent for the pastures. Dániel left in 2016, unable to tolerate the grumbling of the other members, even though he had put the pastures and the cooperative in order by then.

From then on, APIA has also tightened the conditions for receiving subsidies: some of the sheep had to be transferred to cooperative ownership so that the cooperative itself could farm, rather than just receiving state subsidies. In 2016-17, there was a minimal amount of business turnover. However, there has been no sign of farming since then. The public balance sheets reveal that the cooperative has had a yearly RON 200,000-400,000 revenue and zero business turnover.

In other words, the cooperative does not sell animals or dairy products and most or all of its income comes from state subsidies. Half to two-thirds of the income remains as profit.

Sándor Filep has been running the cooperative since 2017. He said they sell lambs, but explained that sales are weak and the cooperative is weak. He could not say why their sales do not appear in the accounts. He confirmed that the only members of the cooperative now are those who actually keep animals.

A rock solid business from public money

Sándor Filep is not only a livestock farmer, but also a construction contractor. Several of his companies have signed contracts worth substantial sums with the mayor’s office. For example, he received RON 1.5 million between 2020 and 2022 for concreting the stream bed without a water permit, as we reported in our article exposing unauthorised investments.

We saw for ourselves that his company continued the concreting works on the stream bed even after the water authority had stopped the work but had not yet issued the flood protection permit. When we suspected that he was building one of his houses without a permit, as we did not see an information board at the construction site, he replied that he had been working on rebuilding that house for three years and that the board must have disappeared during the process.

We compared the public balance sheets of his two companies, Filbeton and Beton Fil, with the data available on the public procurement portal. These show that Filbeton Sic Construct Ltd.’s annual revenue between 2019 and 2023 is consistently lower than the amounts won in public procurement. It is highly likely that it had no orders other than municipal works. (The price of these was not always paid in the year in which the company won the contract, hence the discrepancy.) Beton Fil is a company with much lower sales, where no such clear correlation was apparent.

András Zsoldos is also a member of the management of the livestock farming cooperative. His company, Zsoldos Farm, has signed a contract with the mayor’s office this year for various earthworks worth around RON 150,000, as revealed by the public procurement portal.

It had to be propped up, yet investigated

Mayor János Sallai admitted that he likes to hire Sándor Filep because he works cheaply and does not ask for an advance payment. Sándor Filep said that the town hall paid him for all the work he contracted to do. Sallai, however, wanted to illustrate how careful he is with public money by not paying in full for the small retaining wall that holds back the slippery ground on the alley leading to the old retirement home that has never existed, where his wife’s company now theoretically operates.

Sándor Filep’s companies have built several concrete and stone retaining walls and parking lots in Sic over the past five years. No one questions the need for parking lots near churches and parishes, but an investigation has been launched because of the retaining wall around the Reformed parish. Márton Csorba filed a complaint because, in his opinion, the local government spent public money on private property.

The older retaining wall was constantly cracking and had become dangerous, explained minister Márton Sallai. The county road winds between the Reformed church and the parish in the centre of Sic, where the parish house is a few meters higher than the road level. The at least one hundred meter long retaining wall holds the ground below the parish so that it does not collapse onto the county road.

The parish did not have the money to replace the crumbling retaining wall, but the municipality let it know that it would build the retaining wall with public funds if the parish requested it and if it could be built 2.5 meters further in to create a parking lot for the congregation members.

Márton Sallai took the relevant parish documents with him when he went to be questioned by the National Anticorruption Directorate. The investigation was still ongoing in the summer of 2022, but he has not received any further information since then. When we contacted the National Anticorruption Directorate, they replied that they had handed the case over to the prosecutor’s office in Gherla, which has not provided any information either.

Márton Csorba has been fixated on him for years,

because even though he wanted to be mayor, he wasn’t elected, says Mayor Sallai about every official matter we brought up. János Sallai Jr. and Sándor Filep also accused Csorba of hindering every investment out of envy.

Both Sallai Jr. and Sr. accuse him of other things, but when we asked them why they didn’t report these matters to the authorities if they were criminal offenses, they just kept repeating that they would then have to deal with Csorba all the time. According to Csorba, they are making things up and spreading rumours about him that they cannot prove.

Csorba gives him enough work, says Mayor Sallai, as he has had to search for documents for several investigations, which the office sometimes gets back from the police and the prosecutor’s office and sometimes does not. He says that the authorities do not even notify him when they close a case in which he has no criminal liability.

‘I’m not the kind of person who is constantly thinking about reporting this or that. Maybe the time will come. And it will definitely come because he’s been doing this for thirty years,’ said the mayor about Csorba and his own intentions.

Pride and justice

Csorba accuses the mayor of wrongdoing in a gazillion other cases. Here, we have only written about those cases in which the mayor’s handling of public funds and other public assets is truly questionable, and about which we have been able to obtain information from official and other local sources.

We took the same approach with Márton Csorba, whom the mayor mentioned in connection with a tax fraud case and a case involving public debt.

Unlike János Sallai, Márton Csorba described both incidents in detail. He received a suspended sentence of one and a half years in the VAT fraud case because his accountant had transferred fictitious invoices through the eight companies she worked for, including Csorba’s and then reclaimed the VAT. None of the company managers knew about this, Csorba said, but they had to pay the fine because a company manager is responsible for everything that happens in his company and must know everything. The mayor’s lawyer attended every hearing in this case, Márton Csorba noted.

The other case began when Csorba was still a local councillor. According to Sallai, he was absent a lot, so they removed him from the council. Csorba says he did not attend the meetings because at that time they did not send them the agenda items in advance, so he did not know what he would have to decide when he went there. The council voted to have him removed and he challenged this decision in court.

Csorba lost the lawsuit, so he was ordered to pay the court fees, which he has refused to do ever since because he considers the decision unfair. He says that if the office needs the money, it should initiate enforcement proceedings against him, which the office has not done so far.

In addition, Márton Csorba celebrates Bartholomew’s’ Day every year on 24 August at the monument in Sic together with the mayor, local councillors and county leaders of the DAHR.

The festive speeches are, of course, about new beginnings because although the Tatars ravaged Sic on Bartholomew’s’ Day in 1717 and killed almost all of its inhabitants, the community was able to get back on its feet, among other things by mining the salt beneath its feet. How to face and overcome the moral crisis caused not by an external enemy but by the decisions of its own leaders is a question that the proud community of Sic still has to answer.

This article was produced as part of the 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

The post Investigations Bounce Off The Eternal Mayor Of Sic appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

Átlátszó came under attack because of their role in the “Hungarian Money” (hungarianmoney.eu) cross-border investigative journalism project led by Átlátszó Erdély based in Romania. (Átlátszó Erdély was inspired by Átlátszó, but the two organisations are independent in terms of organisation and funding).

Apart from Átlátszó (Hungary), and Átlátszó Erdély (Romania), project partners were Centar za Istraživačko Novinarstvo Srbije (Serbia), Oštro (Slovenia, Croatia) and Investigatívne Centrum Jána Kuciaka (Slovakia).

The “Hungarian Money” (hungarianmoney.eu) project was one of a series of cross-border investigative journalism projects led by the minority Hungarian-run investigative project Átlátszó Erdély based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a project that monitors the Hungarian state’s support of minorities abroad and its publication was in the public interest.

We condemn the smearing campaign against Átlátszó that is centered around an unchallenged investigation two years after its publication. During the preparation of the project, Bethlen Gábor Fund was asked to comment on a number of questions that were raised by project partners but the Fund never replied.

We, the undersigned partners of the investigative project, call on the involved actors to stop the smearing campaign against Átlátszó and specifically call on the Hungarian government to condemn these blatant attacks against regional independent media and the incitement of hatred towards Átlátszó and its journalists in Hungary.

Milica Šarić – Centar za Istraživačko Novinarstvo Srbije (Serbia)

Anuška Delić – Oštro (Slovenia, Croatia)

Lukáš Diko – Investigatívne Centrum Jána Kuciaka (Slovakia)

Zoltán Sipos – Átlátszó Erdély (Romania)

Tamás Bodoky – Átlátszó (Hungary)

The post We stand by Atlatszo and condemn incitement against journalists appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

At the end of the campaign for the Hungarian parliamentary elections, in the evening of the 31^st March several journalists in Transylvania and people close to the Hungarian opposition received pictures of a plastic bag containing some wrinkled and partially burnt ballot papers lying on an illegal dumping site near Târgu Mureș.

After checking the veracity of the information, we reported about the ballots as well. The news spread like wildfire, and that very day every political side built its own narrative on it.

According to the Hungarian opposition, the dumped ballots were evidence of systemic fraud during the voting process aboard. Fidesz and the related organisations including the DAHR and the HNCT spoke about deliberate political provocation.

The case won’t be investigated

We will never know which narrative is closer to the truth as the National Electoral Office and later the Supreme Court rejected the investigation of the case. They reasoned that the election law was applicable only on Hungarian territory.

“(…) the deed did not happen in Hungary and consequently it cannot possibly investigate the activity of unknown individuals on the territory of Romania, for lack of jurisdiction” – the reasoning read.

We have learnt from unofficial police sources that the Romanian authorities are still investigating the case. We have no information as to whether they have been contacted by the Hungarian authorities. As the disposed papers were the ballots for the Hungarian elections, the question is whether the case could be prosecuted under Romanian law.

Nevertheless, there are many other pending questions. We tried to find out who the source taking the photos was, and the deeper we dug, the more suspicious the story became. Below we have collected the most important unanswered questions that can be set out based on the little information available.

What exactly did we see?

The bag and its contents are in the possession of the Romanian authorities. We only have a few photos and a video taken on site, as well as an eyewitness’ account. Based on them, all we can put together is that there were about a dozen ballots and slightly more reply envelopes (inner and outer envelopes) in the transparent plastic bag (which an eyewitness talking to Átlátszó Erdély compared to a simple household garbage bag).

Some of the ballots were filled out (in favour of opposition parties), and the margins of the ballots were singed. According to the eyewitness, there were some inches of ash in the bag. Declarations of identification (the documents that reveal the voters’ names and contact information) could not be identified in the pictures taken of the pile of documents. It was not possible to determine from the images whether the ballots were original or not.

There is no evidence that the ballot papers and envelopes were burnt on the site. In the photos, the thin plastic garbage bag is intact, and didn’t melt. All signs show that the ballot papers were set on fire somewhere else, the ash and the partially burned ballots were placed in the plastic bag, and then the bag was disposed among the construction debris.

Are these really traces of voter fraud?

According to an obvious and virally spread explanation, these ballots are evidence of voter fraud during the postal voting process: some individuals directly interested in the victory of Fidesz deliberately destroyed the envelopes containing some votes in favour of the opposition, replacing them with envelopes containing the “right” votes.

A source of ours volunteering in the collection of mail ballots said that the mail ballots were transported by car from Târgu Mureș to the Consulate General in Miercurea Ciuc. (The road where the bag was found is on the route between Târgu Mureș and Miercurea Ciuc.) The envelopes were opened one by one, and the ballot papers replaced. In the following, we shall prove why this assumption is unrealistic.

How could it have been done? The basic condition would be that the offenders would have needed to know which envelopes contained votes for the opposition. If the envelopes (outer and inner) had not been sealed, that could have been easy to find out.

However, if they were sealed – and the majority of envelopes were probably sealed – it is not clear how the “problematic” votes could have been sorted out without opening all the envelopes. Given that Fidesz received 94% of all postal votes, every twentieth envelope could have contained votes cast in favour of the opposition. Opening all the envelopes could have been obviously much more costly (all votes would have had to be put in a new envelope) than profitable.

Let’s suppose that the ballots cast for the opposition could have somehow been identified. In this case, if the offenders had blank, unfilled ballot packages, they could have filled in the blank ballot papers, put the identification sheets from the “problematic” envelopes in the envelopes, and then sealed the envelopes and turned them in at the consulate. If this really happened, we get the explanation why there were no identification declarations found on the site.

In our opinion, electoral fraud cannot be completely ruled out, as technically it is possible. However, it is unlikely that a larger-scale electoral fraud was committed using this method.

Were the ballot papers really dumped among the debris for everyone to see?

The press reports said that the bag containing the ballot papers was found by a busy road that leads from Târgu Mureș to the neighbouring Livezeni village. This gives the impression that the ballot papers virtually lay before everyone’s eyes.

We have visited the site several times, and in our experience, this requires some qualification: the road to Livezeni is really busy, but mostly cars use it. It is possible to stop and park in front of the cemetery across the street (and probably the people who go to the cemetery stop here most often).

Although there is a narrow sidewalk, pedestrians are rare on this stretch of road. It is also important to note that there is a side road that leads to the construction debris dump, located at about 45-50 meters from the main road.

The bag in question was lying at about 2-3 meters from this side road, next to several other bags (full of construction debris). It might have been possible to notice from the road that there were documents in the bag, but this would have required a very careful examination of the site.

In light of this, it is highly difficult to imagine the scenario that a person walking around in the neighbourhood accidentally found the bag.

Who found the ballots?

As revealed above, the bag containing the ballots was placed in a busy yet outlying spot where the likelihood of unsuspecting passers-by accidentally finding it was very small.

It’s also important to note that the ballots could have been easily destroyed, so that no one would ever find them. For instance, the ballots could have been totally burnt.

Against this background, we assume that the aim was precisely to have someone discover the bag. Moreover, the one discovering the ballots was either an eyewitness on the spot where the bag was dumped or he threw the bag on the debris pile himself.

Whoever discovered it knew what he was doing. The contact details of the journalists and editorial offices in Mureș County are not confidential, however this kind of information is not readily available to anyone, as a certain kind of skilfulness in public affairs is required to acquire them.

The source sent the first photos to several journalists around Mureș County on the 30^th March at 20:46 by WhatsApp. Two minutes later, a journalist working with the local TV channel (who asked us not to mention his name, as she didn’t deal with public affairs stories) forwarded this very first WhatsApp message to the Grup Presa IPJ Ms group. This group has 97 members: journalists and the representatives of Mureș County Police Headquarters.

The WhatsApp number that the first message had initially been sent from was alive at the beginning. Cristian Teodorescu, the first journalist who arrived on site and to whom the source sent the pictures directly revealed that he had exchanged messages with the source at the beginning for around 10-15 minutes while he had been looking for the bag on the site. The last exchange of messages took place at 21:17, then the source could no longer be reached – Teodorescu said.

We also called the number in vain; we got the message that the number is no longer in use / the number cannot be reached. We also searched for the number in various databases, to no effect.

When taking the photos, the source also took care that journalists looking for the bag would not be groping in the dark. The cemetery is clearly visible in the first photo, so the exact location can be easily found by someone who more or less knows the area, and can also be identified very quickly on Google Maps.

The source was cautious as he sent the photos to the press by WhatsApp. This app automatically removes the metadata from the photos, which might have taken us one step closer to solving the mystery.

Who scattered the ballots around from the bag?

It can be seen that the photos attached to the first message were taken in sunlight. As on the 30^th March the sun set at 19:53, we assume that the photos had not been taken right before being sent but at least an hour before or even earlier. It’s also striking that most of the ballot papers were in the bag, perhaps with two ballot papers or envelopes lying next to the bag.

To our knowledge, Cristian Teodorescu, the punctul.ro journalist was the first who got on site; he reported that this footage was recorded at 22:30. The recording clearly shows that the ballots were no longer in the bag here, but scattered around on the ground.

Teodorescu declared to Átlátszó Erdély that he had gone on site together with a close friend whom he had taken along to witness that he had not touched the bag. There was no one else on the site but them; they also left after 10-15 minutes. “I also realised later on that the first photos and the de facto situation (i.e. the scattered ballots) were different.” – he told us. For that matter, punctul.ro published the first report on it the following morning at 4:00, sharing it on Facebook at 7:00 AM.

How did the Hungarian opposition learn about the dumped ballots?

About half an hour after the photos got to the journalists of Mureș County, at 21:20 we also received photos of the bag lying on the dump from a source close to the Hungarian opposition. As far as we could tell, these were the same photos that had also been sent to punctul.ro: the direction of the lights as well as the position of the photographer and the bag were the same.

Tamás Bodoky, the editor-in-chief of atlatszo.hu, also received the photos from a Hungarian opposition background source shortly after, at 21:48. The photos might also have been sent to others.

The Hungarian opposition learning about the photos so quickly is interesting because, to our knowledge, the journalists of Mureș County, mostly of Romanian nationality, do not have a lot of connections among the Hungarian opposition parties and politicians.

How did Boróka Parászka get in the picture and how did the affair become a “leftist provocation”?

The Târgu Mureș Radio staff member and well-known publicist, went on site the next morning after learning about what had happened in the press (she claimed she hadn’t received the WhatsApp message). Parászka does not live far from the site (her house is 1.5 km as the crow flies from the cemetery, 2 km on the road). The publicist reported that the police had already been there when she arrived, and the investigators spoke Hungarian. Everyone was ID’ed but the reporter was not allowed close to the bag.

A photo of Boróka Parászka was taken on the spot, which greatly contributed to the strengthening of the left-wing provocation narrative according to which Boróka Parászka might have had something to do with the burned ballot papers.

The photo was first published on the Facebook page of László Szőke, the development director and public commentator of the Szeklerland press trust, financed by the Hungarian government. The picture had been taken from a more remote location, from a nearby field.

We contacted László Szőke, and he merely told us that the photo had been taken by a “local force”. We were unable to track down this photographer; we have no information about other photos of this event having been published.

Another recurring element of the “leftist provocation” narrative is that Transtelex “pre-wrote” this material, as there was a technical error in dating it when it was taken over to Telex’s editorial system, as the date had jumped back to a random day. According to the Transtelex official statement, the article could not possibly have been “prefabricated” on the 1^st February as the order of the parties on the ballot papers was drawn on the 26^th February, and the layout of the ballot papers was approved by the electoral committee on the 4^th March.

Translation: Auguszta Szász

This article is part of our project aiming to monitor the 2022 parliamentary elections in Hungary. The project was funded in part by a grant from Investigative Journalism Europe (IJ4EU) and a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author[s] and do not necessarily reflect those of the funders.

The post All we know and assume about the dumped mail ballots appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

After several months of tuning, the DAHR and the HNCT have switched to full campaign mode this week. Looking at the Facebook activities of the politicians of the two organizations, we have the feeling that these Transylvanian officials are fighting for their own mandates in a “sharp” election campaign – although only the ballots are being collected for the Hungarian parliamentary elections.

The collected ballots will be sent either to the consulates in Cluj-Napoca and Miercurea Ciuc or to a constituency in Hungary. However, it is hard to double-check: envelopes are received in most cases completely informally, voters rarely receive an acknowledgment of receipt, and there is usually no confirmation that their vote has been cast in the ballot box.

Assistance is not illegal – however, it’s unclear what it covers

This “assistance” is allowed by the Hungarian electoral law. However, it does not specify what is included in the assistance and to what extent it infringes the secrecy of vote.

As the role of the DAHR and the HNCT is not transparent, it raises suspicions of electoral abuse. How can you see a fair, impartial mediator in the organisations funded by the current Hungarian government, which have been campaigning for Fidesz in recent months, and whose leaders are not hiding their political options for a single minute?

It is important to emphasize that we currently have no evidence of electoral fraud, either in the Eurotrans Foundation offices or in the network of Democracy Centres. The suspicious cases that have come to our attention during the vote so far are not necessarily linked to any of the organisations, and rather appear as isolated incidents of overzealousness.

At the same time, in addition to the DAHR and the HNCT, several other organisations, even individuals, collect mail ballots. It is not uncommon in some villages for envelopes to be submitted at the parish or brought to the consulate by a neighbour. In Háromszék, for instance, the Bertis shop chain has gotten involved in collecting: the mail ballots can be left at the cash desk.

Some dozens of ballots were received by the Democracy Centres

The only change since the parliamentary elections four years ago is that less voters ask for mail packages to be sent to the Eurotrans and the Democracy Centres.

“This year, a few dozen more arrived at our offices upon the voters’ request, and most of them were sent out. Of course, they also gave us contact information so we could let them know. Currently, a total of two such ballot packages are still waiting for their owners in our offices.” – answered Krisztina Sándor, executive official of the HNCT to our question. Eurotrans only responded that no packages were sent to their addresses.

The consulates communicate particularly little

While everyone in Transylvania is collecting mail ballots zealously and voters are often specifically asked not to take the envelopes to the consulates, the consulates in Cluj-Napoca and Miercurea Ciuc communicate particularly little on Facebook. At the time of our article, there are 1-2 paid campaigns running with elections information.

Information that mail ballots may be cast in person at consulates is displayed on the Facebook pages, but not prominently. You need to carefully scroll down and read the posts to find it. This is strange because the safest way to vote is to take votes in person to the ballot boxes at the consulates.

The Consulate General of Miercurea Ciuc has spent about 14,400 lei (2,900 EUR) on Facebook ads since the end of December last year. Election-related ads only started running in February. The Consulate General in Cluj-Napoca advertised for nearly 11,800 lei (2,385 EUR) in the same period, and advertising campaigns also started in February.

The press department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade responded briefly to our questions sent to the consulates. That’s all we’ve learned about Facebook communication:

“Our delegations draw the attention of the electorate to all the possibilities at hand that they have, so that their mails arrive at the National Electoral Office on time thanks the information published on the available platforms and by sharing it.”

Now, it’s the Transylvanian Hungarians’ turn to say thanks

Unlike the Consulates General, the two organisations facilitating the simplified naturalisation – the Eurotrans Foundation closely related to the DAHR and the network of Democracy Centres (Demokrácia Központok) operated by the HNCT – have been campaigning since last autumn. Initially, the Transylvanian Hungarians were encouraged to register and update their data, then after the registration deadline, i.e. 9 March 2022 and the arrival of the envelopes, they started collecting mail ballots.

In its advertisements, the Eurotrans Foundation does not even try to give the impression that it is facilitating the elections as an independent organization. The vast majority of ads suggest that it is in the best interest of the Transylvanian Hungarians that the current government continue its work. Several campaign materials mention the subsidies from Hungary, noting that it is now the Transylvanian Hungarians’ turn to help the Hungarian government.

While Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártó and other members of the Hungarian government appear in the advertisements several times, the opposition appears only in a negative context, if ever.

In the last three months, the Eurotrans Foundation has published 247 advertisements worth a total of 23,700 lei (4,770 EUR). About half of this amount, 10,700 lei (2160 EUR), has been spent on 119 ads in the last 30 days. However, the total cost of the campaign was certainly much more than that: making films and other creative materials could not be cheap either.

The Democracy Centres’ campaigns are modest compared to Eurotrans

The presence of the DAHR’s opposition, the Democracy Centres operated by the Hungarian National Council in Transylvania, on Facebook is much more modest. They have spent 3,650 lei (740 euros) on advertising in the last three months, including their campaign to help refugees in Ukraine and several smaller projects.

The Democracy Centers clearly have less resources than Eurotrans. While the latter organisation advertises with short films of impeccable quality, the motion pictures of the Democracy Centres were taken over from the news, most of their advertising materials are simple graphics, and members of the Hungarian government do not appear here either.

Even though online presence is important, mail ballots are not collected on Facebook. Most of the work is done by staff of the Eurotrans Foundation and the Democracy Centres in the regional offices of the two organizations. If we take a closer look at these offices, we can see why the Eurotrans Foundation and the DAHR appear in many advertisements as one and the same entity.

In the very same office with the parties

Although the DAHR and the Eurotrans Foundation are two distinct legal persons, they cover essentially the same organisation. The Eurotrans Foundation was established by the DAHR, its chairman being Zoltán Nagy, the chief of staff is Kelemen Hunor, President of the DAHR. The Eurotrans office network largely coincides with the addresses of the DAHR’s local offices.

In other words, the local employees of Eurotrans and the DAHR work in one and the same office and premises all over Transylvania. The question is how civic and political activity can be separated during a campaign. The situation is similar with the network of Democracy Centres operated by the Hungarian National Council in Transylvania: these offices are at the same time the headquarters of the regional organisations of the Hungarian People’s Party in Transylvania.

The extent to which these organisations converge is well illustrated by the mass text that Átlátszó Erdély laid hands on sent out on 28 March by a Cluj County DAHR politician. In this, he urges colleagues to “take the task seriously”, as only 40% of the votes that had been collected four years ago was collected. “Don’t give it to the minister, don’t take it to the consulate! They must get to the county DAHR!” – read the message.

A day later, on 29 March, another text was sent, this time praising them: “Thanks for your work! As of today, we’ve reached 60 percent. (…) On the last day, our task is to get all votes of the county. (…) Let’s go for it!”

The text message is real, but there is no quota to be reached

Upon our question, Géza Antal, executive president of the Cluj County DAHR confirmed that they had indeed sent such texts to the elected officials and the internal management staff.

We also asked whether there was a quota that the county DAHR needs to achieve in terms of the number of mail ballots to be collected. According to Antal, there is no quota that anyone would have set for the Cluj County organisation of the DAHR.

The competition is not just seen in mobilization. The DAHR and HNCT often pose with envelopes collected by their staff or when they throw in the ballots at consulates.

There is no quota but there are targets

We asked the Eurotrans and the HNCT about the quotas. The Eurotrans’ answer: ‘There is no target number. In 2018, we helped nearly 100,000 people get their mail ballots back and compiled the letter package. Without exception, these letter packages were successfully delivered to the Consulates General or to the Hungarian constituencies along the border. People need this help; this number is expected to be even higher this year.’

“There is no such target number set by an external party, it is not possible to standardize this work, because there are many possibilities to return the ballots. We use targets to organise our own work because it is more efficient, but they only help and impact on the internal processes.” – said the HNCT.

The two office networks operate thanks to HUF 250-400 million grants every year

Both the Eurotrans Foundation and the Democracy Centres operate with the support of the Hungarian government, more precisely the Prime Minister’s Office. We requested their contracts and settlements with data requests. The Prime Minister’s Office partially complied with our request: it did not send the documents but gave us the opportunity to flip through them and take notes.

Since 2017, the Eurotrans Foundation has received subsidies between 250 million – 400 million HUF (680 thousand to 1 million EUR) annually from the Prime Minister’s Office and the Gábor Bethlen Fund. The foundation had 71 employees in 2020, spending most of the subsidies for wages. In 2020, for example, they forecast to spend 212 million HUF (578,000 EUR) for this purpose, and 120 million HUF (320,000 EUR) was set aside in their budgets for material expenses.

The HNCT Association receives roughly similar amounts as subsidies: since 2017, the subsidies received from the Prime Minister’s Office have ranged between 250 to 400 million HUF (680 thousand to 1 million EUR). It is important to note that both organizations have been assisting in the compilation of naturalisation applications since the beginning of the simplified naturalisation process (2012). According to the last published balance sheet, the HNCT Association had 53 staff. Their financial plans show that wages accounted for the largest share of the costs: in 2020, 179 million HUF (486,000 EUR) was earmarked for this purpose, and material expenses amounted to 62 million HUF (168,000 EUR).

The ballots are mainly collected on trust

It is not clear whether those who leave the packages with the mail in ballots at the Eurotrans offices, or the Democracy Centres will receive an acknowledgment of receipt. How will they be notified that their packages have been sent or delivered to a consulate or the National Electoral Office?

“If they ask for an acknowledgment of receipt, they will of course receive it. But it is unusual because people trust the Foundation and its staff, and those who give us the ballot packages are confident that we will deliver them to the Consulates General on time. If the voters provides their phone number when handing over the package, we will notify them about the delivery via a text message.” – the communication office of the Eurotrans Foundation responded to our request.

Krisztina Sándor wrote to our question about the acknowledgments the following: “They will not receive any acknowledgment or confirmation that their vote has been sent to any consulate. Just as the post office does not provide it to those who put their vote in the mailbox.”

How is the secrecy of the ballot ensured?

What exactly are the instructions given to their co-workers who collect the mail ballots? In a situation where an elderly voter asks the staff for help in filling out the forms, how is the confidentiality of the ballot ensured? – we asked from the Eurotrans Foundation and the HNCT.

“Our staff will only assist in compiling the mail package and filling in the identification statement. We ask people to fill out the ballot themselves at home. We receive the mail ballot package with the sealed inner envelope containing the ballot.” – said the Eurotrans Fundation.

“Our staff can only help and help those who come to us to fill in the identification statement and put it in the envelopes. If there is a voter who has not yet filled out his ballot or “referendum” slip, we ask him to step aside in a separate room or corner set up for this purpose and effectively vote.

At the same time, the vast majority of voters only come to us to return of their mail ballots, so they come to us with the closed mail ballot packages. We also help many with methodological guidance: what goes into the smaller and what goes into the bigger envelope, because there had been lots of invalid ballots in previous years.” – answered Krisztina Sándor.

Don’t take it to the consulate general not even if its 180 m away from the Eurotrans office

It is striking that the official communication emphasizes everywhere that the envelopes should be taken to the Eurotrans Foundation as well as the Democracy Centres. There is little information about the voters being able to take the envelopes directly to the consulate in Cluj-Napoca and Miercurea Ciuc.

In Cluj-Napoca, for example, the Eurotrans Foundation office is located at 2 Iuliu Maniu Street, exactly 180 meters from the Consulate General. And even so, the Eurotrans Foundation asks everyone to bring the ballots to them, not to the Consulate General.

Personal delivery is important because the more hands a ballot passes through, from the voter to the National Electoral Office, the greater the theoretical chance of fraud.

“(…) In the online communication of the Eurotrans Foundation, the priority is to help those who are unsure to fill in the identification statement correctly and compile the ballot package, and we shall take the votes to the delegations by the specified deadline. Except for the residents of Miercurea Ciuc and Cluj-Napoca, it is less realistic for someone to travel hundreds of kilometres to cast their ballot in person. That is why they can contact our colleagues from Satu Mare, through Târgu Mureş to Hunedoara.” – answered the Eurotrans Foundation to our question.

“The vast majority of our clients do not turn to us in Cluj-Napoca or in Miercurea Ciuc, so personal delivery at consulates is not a realistic option for them. Therefore, we also use our limited advertising opportunities to inform that precise majority. We do not specifically recommend our Transylvanian voters to return their ballots by mail, mainly because the ballots must be received at the National Electoral Office in Budapest by the day of the elections. (…) We see delivery to consulates as a much safer method as we have mentioned it in several places, and we take the collected ballots from all our offices there ourselves.” – said Sándor Krisztina.

Translation: Auguszta Szász

Cover photo: an employee of the DAHR delivers ballots to the Consulate General in Cluj. Source: the Facebook page of the Cluj county DAHR

This article is part of our project aiming to monitor the 2022 parliamentary elections in Hungary. The project was funded in part by a grant from Investigative Journalism Europe (IJ4EU) and a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author[s] and do not necessarily reflect those of the funders.

The post From the DAHR to the grocer’s: everyone’s zealously collecting the mail ballots in Transylvania appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

The Hungarian government was almost always mentioned in a positive context in the Hungarian online press from Transylvania during the period leading up to elections in Hungary in early April. News regarding the opposition were either ignored or presented in a fully negative and discrediting language.

At the same time, topics which are embarrassing for the Hungarian government were almost completely absent from the Hungarian online press in Transylvania, and voices critical to the government are also very hard to find.

It comes as no surprise, in fact: the majority of the Hungarian press in Transylvania is funded by either the Hungarian government or it recent main ally in Transylvania, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians from Romania (DAHR).

In order to have a methodical look on how the Hungarian online press in Transylvania presents the election, we analysed around 700 articles – news, analyses, interviews and editorials – published in the Hungarian online press from Transylvania from the end of August 2021 to 11 February 2022, the official beginning of the election campaign in Hungary.

Search for keywords

Our data collection methods were simple: we searched for keywords relevant for the topic (e.g. “Márki-Zay Péter”, “Orbán Viktor”, “regisztráció” [registration]) in the search field of the most popular Hungarian online press products, and collected, structured and categorised the results by topics.

The websites analysed: Székelyhon, Krónika, Főtér, Erdon, Maszol, Transindex, Nethuszár, Szatmári Friss Újság, Háromszék, Szabadság, itthon.ma, erdely.ma, szekelyföld.ma, Erdélyi Napló, Székely Hírmondó.

The analysis focused on the most popular websites. However, we have no data on how many readers the articles had, or how many readers they reached in social media.

It is important to note that the number of the results was dependent on the search engines of the individual sites. We suspect that we might not have found all articles due to the faulty operation of the search engines on some sites, although we did try to use alternative search terms to add to the results.

Positive Light on Viktor Orbán, No Light on the Opposition

It can be said about the collected articles in general that they present the Hungarian government and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán most often in a positive, or less often in a neutral light. The opposition politicians are most often presented in a negative, less often in a neutral context, if they appear at all. It is clearly visible that the opposition of the Hungarian government gets very little space on Transylvanian online platforms.

At the same time, events that were uncomfortable for the Hungarian government were completely left out of the news. There is no coverage, for instance, about the corruption case of Pál Völner, state secretary in the Minister of Justice, also involving Árpád János Potápi, state secretary for national policies, who often visits Transylvania.

The Hungarian press from Transylvania, which has always been closely following the events in Hungary, also failed to cover last year’s record budget deficit and the resulting restrictions, just as the Pegasus spy software surveillance was completely omitted in the news.

Scandals related to Hungarian communities living outside Hungary are also hardly present

Scandals related to the Hungarian government parties are not in the news in Transylvania even if they concern the funding of Hungarian communities living outside Hungary or even if their main protagonist is an official of Transylvanian origin. We found no mention of the case which involved the Odorheiu-Secuiesc-born László Veress, Head of Cabinet of László Kövér, Speaker of the National Assembly of Hungary.

His family lives in a luxury villa bought by a foundation which supports Hungarians outside Hungary for 240 million HUF. However, another article on László Veress’s villa in the village of Tibod near Odorheiu Secuiesc resulted in an outraged article published in response.

Orbán the good, Márki-Zay the bad guy

Viktor Orbán appears in the majority of the articles in a positive or neutral light. Most news about him are positive and inspiring, he himself is presented as a strong-willed, self-possessed politician, who resists (western) trends but looks after the interests of the Hungarians.

Péter Márki-Zay, the opposition’s Prime Minister candidate, appears in just the opposite light: he is weak (Gyurcsány’s puppet), his campaign is funded by László Bige, the “red baron”, he makes statements perceived as negative by most of the voters (criticises the governmental decrease of utilities costs), has negative gestures (offends Hungarians living outside Hungary with his statements), or the opposition coalition is doing badly in the polls.

While Orbán’s speeches are quoted at length, the words of the opposition candidate are usually cited outside their context, and often accompanied by malicious or inappropriate comments. For example, Gyurcsány’s name is also often included in the article, regardless of the subject of Márki-Zay’s original statement.

The Sekler media trust keeps completely silent about the opposition

There is a spectacular difference in how the media outlets belonging to the two large media empires close to the Hungarian government – the Association for Transylvanian Media Space and the KESMA – treat the Hungarian opposition.

The three news portals Székelyhon, Krónika and Főtér, owned by the Association for Transylvanian Media Space which has been funded in the past couple of years with 20 million euros by the Hungarian government, rarely publish content related to the opposition.

For example, the results of the opposition pre-elections in October were only worth a short piece of news on Krónika, taken over from the Hungarian news agency MTI (although it is true that they did take over the MTI news quoting at length the opposition speeches at the 23 October commemorations given by the opposition parties).

Márki-Zay’s victory at the pre-elections failed to be newsworthy on one of the most popular news portals of the Hungarian press in Transylvania, the Székelyhon, and it wasn’t covered on Főtér portal either.

It must also be emphasized that this silence also means that negative news about the Hungarian opposition are also scarce on these platforms.

Sending messages to Márki-Zay

The only case that captured the editors’ interest was when the mayor of Odorheiu Secuiesc, Árpád Gálfi, put out Facebook vote whether he should meet with Péter Márki-Zay. This was a detailed piece of news on Székelyhon. Later a “leaked” letter of the Hungarian local government leaders to Márki-Zay in which they informed him that they did not wish to meet with him before the elections became the subject of news pieces both on Székelyhon and Főtér.

At the same time, an unusually large amount of news was published in Krónika about the meeting between Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin on 1 February: four MTI news and an analysis. Generally speaking, this platform has a relatively high coverage of the situation in Ukraine and the Hungarian government’s foreign policy compared to the average for Transylvania (although largely based on MTI news reports).

Erdon.ro has joined the mud-slinging full steam ahead

While all the platforms in the portfolio of the Association for Transylvanian Media Space seem to avoid any news related to the opposition, the erdon.ro, a page in the Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA) media trust, follows a radically different strategy. This page publishes as many as half a dozen news a day on Péter Márki-Zay and other politicions or supporters of the opposition.

Perhaps this amount can be better appreciated if we say that more than half (389) of the 700 news items we collected were published on erdon.ro. The vast majority of these unauthored pieces portray the opposition in a negative light, either on the basis of some out-of-context half-sentence or a Facebook post by a pro-government politician, expert or supporter.

A few titles that give a sense of the content of these materials:

From mocking disability to the Death Star – Márki-Zay’s top 5 most controversial statements (video);

Zsolt Bayer: Márki-Zay has found the best way to fight the epidemic: spitting in a mask;

In desperation, a totally confused Márki-Zay would argue with anyone (videos).

Getting close to Fidesz has put the DAHR’s news portal in a schizophrenic situation

Maszol.ro is the other most visited Hungarian news portal in Transylvania besides szekelyhon.ro. Its publisher is the Progress Foundation, founded by the DAHR. It receives most of its budget from the DAHR, although its sponsors include the Hungarian state as well – the Bethlen Gábor Fund, the Hungarian state electricity company (Magyar Villamos Művek Zrt.) and state gambling company (Szerencsejáték Zrt.).

Traditionally, maszol.ro has tended to be a left-leaning media outlet, but this has somewhat changed since the DAHR has become the main ally of the Hungarian government in Transylvania. In the analysed period, the news published on maszol.ro present a mixed picture. Several articles were published about the pre-elections of the opposition, including one about a Facebook post by mayor of Odorheiu Secuiesc Árpád Gálfi about Péter Márki-Zay, with the title: Árpád Gálfi has got himself into an embarrassing diplomatic mishap. The paper also presented the position of Transylvanian intellectuals on the upcoming Hungarian elections.

At the same time, it has also been news worth publishing on maszol.ro that Viktor Orbán had a telephone conversation with Donald Trump or that Viktor Orbán had his third vaccine, and the portal quotes at length, on the basis of MTI news, Viktor Orbán’s campaign launch with the title: Viktor Orbán: The Left, whatever it’s like, “is part of the nation like ill fate is part of the Hymn” [the National Anthem of Hungary].

The vote of Hungarians from Transylvania is no longer controversial

Almost all media outlets in Transylvania publish information about the organisation of parliamentary elections. The registration campaign launched by the Eurotrans Foundation and the Hungarian National Council of Transylvania has had a great media coverage.

The campaign tour of Barna Pál Zsigmond, Ministerial Commissioner of Fidesz, former Consul General in Miercurea Ciuc, was featured in a number of news portals, just like Árpád Potápi’s and Katalin Szili’s visits.

All of these materials emphasize that Hungarians in Transylvania with a Hungarian citizenship are strongly encouraged to register for vote. News about the date of the elections was also published everywhere.

It is striking that none of these newspapers express any reservations or criticisms about the voting of Hungarians living outside the borders of Hungary. During previous parliamentary elections, this issue generated serious debate in the Transylvanian Hungarian press.

Copy-paste MTI news instead of their own questions

It can also be seen that in a press conference or interview, journalists do not ask questions that might be uncomfortable for the politician representing the Hungarian government or that might contradict the narrative of the Hungarian government. The materials do not try to put the statements in context, but only quote at length sentences which are clearly prefabricated political panels.

One explanation for this may be that the Hungarian press in Transylvania very often uses MTI news – and political considerations have long taken the place of independent news editing at the state news agency, as Direkt36 has uncovered.

It even happens that outlets don’t send their own reporter to a press conference even if they could easily participate. Instead, they prefer the convenient solution of taking over MTI’s coverage. It is also relatively rare for journalists to produce their own material – i.e. to work with multiple news sources, use data of public interest, or investigate certain topics themselves.

Transindex covered more opposition content, but it ceased to exist

Transindex.ro was the only portal that has been critical of the Hungarian government at times and has given more space to the opposition in Hungary. It was the only one to report on the members of Péter Márki-Zay’s shadow government and to devote a long section to the opposition’s programme. In Transylvania, Transindex was the only newspaper to interview Péter Márki-Zay.

However, Transindex ceased to exist after the DAHR-founded Communitas Foundation, the main funder of the Transindex project, announced in spring 2021 that it would no longer finance the portal. On 15 February 2022, the entire editorial team resigned, and a day later they announced the launch of a new project, Transtelex. This project is currently at the fundraising stage, it is not known when the new site will be launched. We wrote about the background of the situation at Transindex here.

Translation: Emese Czintos

Cover photo: Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán with Hunor Kelemen, president of the DAHR. Source: the Facebook page of DAHR president Hunor Kelemen

This article is part of our project aiming to monitor the 2022 parliamentary elections in Hungary. The project was funded in part by a grant from Investigative Journalism Europe (IJ4EU) and a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author[s] and do not necessarily reflect those of the funders.

The post Positive Light on Viktor Orbán, No Light on the Opposition appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

Last year, Gábor Bethlen Fund (the main fund the Hungarian government supporting Hungarian communities abroad) awarded funds amounting to HUF 32.3 billion (EUR 91.5 million at daily exchange rate) to Hungarian organizations outside Hungary. This amount is around a quarter of the HUF 129 billion (EUR 365 million) awarded in 2020.

Funds granted for Transylvania have decreased at approximately the same rate: while the sum allocated in 2020 amounted to HUF 46.7 billion (EUR 132 million), in 2021 the amount decreased to HUF 13.3 billion (EUR 37.6 million) according to our summary.

We can only speculate about the reasons for this significant decrease, as we are not aware of any official explanations, and the Gábor Bethlen Fund did not respond to our inquiries. One of the reasons for the drying up funding is without doubt Hungary’s record budget deficit of HUF 5100 billion.

The Transylvanian Media Association (Erdélyi Médiatér Egyesület) is the absolute record breaker

Looking through all funding decisions regarding Transylvania, it is clear that there is a much lower number of decisions granting amounts above billions of forints compared to previous years. The highest amount, HUF 2.2 billion (EUR 6.2 million) was awarded to the Transylvanian Media Association (Asociația pentru Spațiul Media Transilvan) which operates the Székelyhon media trust. We have written in more details about the media trust’s grant applications, reports containing contradictory audience figures and abandoned development projects here.

The Várbástya-Bastion Association of Timișoara was awarded HUF 1.1 billion (EUR 3.1 million) for real estate investment, property development and purchase of equipment. Sepsi OSK SA, the joint-stock company behind the Sepsi OSK football team, comes in third in this imaginary top list with HUF 792 million (€2.2 million).

The majority of the company’s shares are held by Hodut Rom Ltd., the Romanian subsidiary of Hódmezővásárhelyi Útépítő Ltd. The association behind the football team, Asociația Club Sportiv Sepsi OSK, is a minority shareholder in the company. (We wrote about football subsidies in Transylvania here.)

Sepsi Arena will be finished, the Sonnenfeld Palace restored

The support granted in November is in all likelihood the amount needed to finish and equip the new stadium of Sepsi OSK. The Sepsi Arena had been planned to be inaugurated in October 2021, but it was postponed to the spring of 2022 due to the pandemic.

The School Foundation (Fundația pentru Școală) funded by the DAHR was also awarded HUF 713 million (EUR 2 million) for property development. The foundation has several ongoing real estate investments in Oradea and Cluj-Napoca. The decision does not state what the funding was awarded for precisely; however, the foundation announced not long ago that they will start the restoration of the Sonnenfeld Palace in Oradea, bought in December 2018. We wrote more on the property investments of the Iskola Alapítvány here.

One more property investment funding to mention is the Transylvanian Traditions Foundation (Fundația Traditio Transylvanica), which received HUF 550 million (EUR 1.5 million) to renovate the Barcsay family’s former castle in Gilău. This project is also co-financed by an EU-grant of EUR 5 million.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Oradea was awarded a grant of HUF 392 million (EUR 1.1 million), most probably needed to continue the restoration of the Baroque episcopal palace.

Much lower amounts for big winners of previous years

Although the education and training funding (HUF 3 billion per year for Transylvania) and the national importance/regional program (of which the Transylvanian share is roughly HUF 2-300 million) started in 2002 remain unchanged, a number of programs from previous years are absent from the 2021 decisions. These include the twinning programs, the youth and scout programs, the Without Borders program and the diaspora grants.

Perhaps the decrease of funding is more visible if we look at the amounts of money received in 2021 by the big winners of 2020 in Transylvania. It should be mentioned at this point that the HUF 129 billion awarded in 2020 was a funding record: it was an outstanding year even compared to the yearly increasing funds of the preceding years.

In 2020, for instance, the Sapientia Foundation, operator of the Sapientia University, was awarded a total of HUF 8.5 billion (EUR 24 million), but it did not receive any money in 2021. The Reformed Diocese of Transylvania (EREK) received grants in a total of HUF 13 billion (EUR 37 million), but in 2021 it was only granted HUF 735 million (EUR 2 million) for a retirement home in Aiton village near Cluj-Napoca, and the restoration of the Teleki house in Târgu Mureș.

The School Foundation won a total of nearly 2 billion HUF (EUR 5.6 million) in 2020 for various applications – in comparison, the HUF 713 million was a conspicuous decrease last year. The football club of Miercurea Ciuc (Asociația Futball Klub Miercurea Ciuc) had a funding of HUF 2.7 billion (EUR 7.6 million) in 2020, which decreased to HUF 141 million (EUR 400 thousand) in 2021.

The Szeklerland press trust was the only one to get more money

The only beneficiary that received significantly more funding last year was the Transylvanian Media Association: their HUF 2.2 billion in 2021 is significantly more than the HUF 1.8 billion they received in 2020.

“The final amount of the grants usually jumps high at the end of the year, but this time it didn’t due to the huge budget deficit, as it has been announced as well. The deal is that no new big project will be launched, but they will provide the amounts needed to finish the ongoing projects because of the increase in construction prices” explained a political source with insight into the subsidy system.

We reached out to Zalán Rudolf Erdélyi, CEO of the Gábor Bethlen Fund, with a series of questions. We wanted to know the reasons for the significant decrease in grants.

What is the reason why, although far fewer large real estate investments were supported last year, the Transylvanian Media Association received a record amount of HUF 2.2 billion in grants?

Finally, what is the outlook for 2022: will the level of funding remain the same as last year or will it increase again? We have not received a reply to our inquiries.

How we did the calculations

Although several actors in the Hungarian state apparatus support organisations across the border, there is no up-to-date, easily searchable database of these grants. Among the various grant opportunities, the Gábor Bethlen Fund (BGA) stands out as the most prominent – this is the fund used by the government to finance the implementation of its national policy objectives.

The BGA Committee decides on the applications submitted. We have aggregated these decisions and the amounts presented in this article are based on these decisions. However, there is also another database on the BGA website which contains the payments made.

A difficulty we have encountered in our work was that in recent years the Commission has very often made later adjustments to the amount of a decision taken in a previous year.

As the BGA has not published any instructions on how to account for these later changes, and has not answered our questions either, we have decided to take the original decisions into account.

At the same time, decisions for a given year may not cover all payments. It is possible that some of the decisions for a given year are paid in a different year, so the decreasing number of decisions for beneficiary organizations may not result in a drastic decrease in terms of payments for 2022.

Translation: Auguszta Szász

Cover photo: Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán is taking selfies somewhere in Szeklerland in May 2019. Source: the Facebook page of DAHR president Hunor Kelemen

This article is part of our project aiming to monitor the 2022 parliamentary elections in Hungary. The project was funded in part by a grant from Investigative Journalism Europe (IJ4EU) and a grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author[s] and do not necessarily reflect those of the funders.

The post Crossborder Funding: Has Budapest Closed Down the Money Tap? appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

“Tough” and “brutal” is how Béla Markó recalls his battle on behalf of ethnic minorities like him to use their mother tongue in dealings with Romania’s public administration at the local level.

It was 2001 when ethnic Hungarians like Markó, then leader of the ethnic Hungarian DAHR party, and 18 other officially recognised minorities won the right to use their native languages in public administration in those regions where they account for more than 20 per cent of the population, overcoming fierce opposition from Romanian nationalists.

Yet two decades later, with Markó now 71 years old and retired from politics, a joint investigation by BIRN and Átlátszó Erdély has found that those language rights are rarely upheld, in part because the financial burden of implementing the law falls “exclusively” on often cash-strapped local authorities.

István Horváth, professor of sociology at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, northwestern Romania, said few minorities are ready to risk the red tape that comes with asserting their language rights.

“At present, many minority citizens prefer not to assert their language rights in public administration if this means a longer administrative procedure or if it jeopardises the success of their application,” Horváth told BIRN.

Court challenges

Ethnic Hungarians are the largest minority group in Romania, accounting for a little over six per cent of the total population of 19 million people, or some 1.2 million. Most of them live in Transylvania, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918. Other ethnic minorities, such as Roma, Ukrainians, Germans, and Serbs, are less numerous and scattered throughout Romania.

Under the law, the names of towns, villages and public institutions in areas where a certain ethnic minority represents at least 20 per cent of the population must be displayed in Romanian and the language of that minority.

In practice, this applies to 523 localities across the country, most of them places where ethnic Hungarians live in compact communities.

Hungarian-language signs are often vandalised or challenged in court.

In Miercurea Ciuc [Csíkszereda in Hungarian], eastern Transylvania, for example, the mayoralty recently announced it must put up new bilingual street signs because a Romanian national organisation had challenged the current signs in court for placing the Hungarian name above the Romanian. The change will cost some 20,000 euros from the local budget.

Deputy mayor Béla Bors said the law was unclear, but “we have to respect the decision of the court.”

Lack of funds, staff

Cases like Miercurea Ciuc are rare, for the very fact that most local authorities in Romania complain they cannot afford to implement the law on minority languages.

A 2021 study by the government-supported Department for Interethnic Relations, DRI, found that in many towns and villages where ethnic Hungarians represent more than 20 per cent of the population, the proceedings of the local council are not translated into Hungarian due to a lack of funds and staff.

The situation is even worse in Roma communities, where neither the decisions of the local council nor correspondence of the public administration are translated into Romani.

The only example where, on the whole, the law is respected is in eastern Transylvania, in the counties of Harghita and Covasna, where ethnic Hungarians, known locally as Szeklers, account for between 70 and 80 per cent of the population. There, the local administration is staffed mainly by ethnic Hungarians.

The problem is particularly acute in the justice system, where ethnic minorities are frequently denied the right, enshrined in law, to use their mother tongue in legal proceedings. Translation is often unavailable in courts. If it is available, it comes with a fee.

The DRI told BIRN it has no legal authority to punish violations of the law on minority languages. County prefectures should monitor the use of minority languages in public administration, but it is questionable how often they really do.

‘Significant’ costs

The cost of implementing the law has still to be clearly regulated, and it is “significant,” said István Horváth, the Cluj professor, citing data from a recent study he co-authored. “It is unfair that they [the costs] should be borne exclusively by local administrations,” he told Átlátszó Erdély.

Some Romanians are suspicious of greater language rights for Hungarians, fearing a push for autonomy for Transylvania. More widespread official use of Hungarian will discourage ethnic Hungarians from learning Romanian, they say.

Sociologist István Gergő Székely said such fears were unfounded. “It is unlikely that the wider and better-funded use of minority languages in local government will affect people’s learning of Romanian,” he said.

Romania, he said, should work on decentralisation and digitalise access to public services, meaning translation could be automatic.

Illustration: András Szén

This article was co-produced by BIRN Romania and Átlátszó Erdély and supported by the NewsSpectrum Fellowship through its programme to strengthen cooperation between majority and minority language press publications. This shortened English version was originally published on Balkan Insight.

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