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.

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.

The post Does the Mother Tongue Cost Too Much? appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

“We cannot simply look away from László Kövér’s politically irresponsible raid in Transylvania” – stated Hunor Kelemen, president of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians (DAHR) in July 2012, after the Fidesz politician had campaigned for the Hungarian Civic Party in Romania (political opponent of DAHR).

Eight years later, during the Parliament election campaign in November 2020, scrolling through the DAHR campaign videos on Facebook, it is not easy to decide whether it’s Fidesz or DAHR politicians we see campaigning.

As the election day was closing in, Facebook posts increasingly showcased members of the Hungarian government and the investments achieved with the help of the Hungarian government, while the issues connected to Bucharest were gradually pushed to the background.

How has the relationship between the two parties evolve from the initial „cold war” to these days, when it seems completely natural that phone messages from Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó are urging Hungarians to vote for DAHR?

How has it come to be normal by now that one of the foundations of the DAHR actively helps Hungarians from Romania register for the Hungarian parliamentary elections, and leading DAHR politicians publicly back up Fidesz in the campaign?

What does it mean that the NGOs in the backyard of the DAHR have received in recent years Hungarian public funds for largely the same amount as the Romanian governmental funding for the Hungarian minority of Romania?

The 1,2 million Hungarian minority living in Transylvania is by far the largest community living outside the borders of Hungary, with a complex institutional system.

This article offers an overview of the relationship of the largest political party of the community, DAHR with the Hungarian governing parties from 2010, the inauguration of the second Orbán  government, to December 2020, when the new Cîțu government was formed with the participation of the DAHR.

Why nobody consulted Markó?

“In 1999, Viktor Orbán – on his way to Tusványos – meets Béla Markó at the airport in Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș. During the approximately ten minutes long meeting Markó says that DAHR managed to change the law of education and although there is no possibility of a Hungarian university financed by the Romanian state, nothing stands in the way of founding a private university.

At a dinner in Tusványos, the topic of a private university with Hungarian funding comes up. Viktor Orbán goes home, then in August there comes the government decree about the foundation of the university, with a yearly funding frame of 2 billion forints. Markó is outraged by the news, why didn’t anybody ask him? The Fidesz raises its eyebrows and can’t figure out what’s going on” – recalls one of our sources.

Béla Markó confirmed, and also gave further details about this. Markó said that the idea of an elite postgradual university came up in 1998, during a discussion with Viktor Orbán, and he thought that was a good idea. They agreed that they will develop the idea in the future.

In 1999, there was indeed a meeting with Viktor Orbán on the Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș airport. They travelled together into the city, where Orbán had to meet Romanian PM Vasile Radu. „Yes, on the way from the airport, we talked about a private university that could be established with the help of the Hungarian government (this was different from the original idea of a small, elite postgradual university. We were talking about a broader educational spectrum) – explained Markó.

According to the former DAHR president, they had disagreements on two points: according to the Hungarian government, the university would have faculties in Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca and Csíkszereda/Miercurea Ciuc, and not also in Târgu Mureș/Marosvásárhely. The other debate was about the study programs: initially, they only offered complementary programs (programs that did not exist in Hungarian language at other state universities). “For me, this was a very important principle. At first, they kept themselves to this principle, but later they did not” – said Béla Markó.

There’s little we know why Béla Markó and Orbán’s relationship has deteriorated in time. A frequently mentioned story claims that the final break was caused by the fact that after the first turn of the 2002 Parliamentary elections in Hungary, when it wasn’t yet very clear who the winner was, Markó hurried to congratulate Medgyessy, the socialists’ candidate for prime minister.

Since Viktor Orbán considered the DAHR to be on his side, he thought it was betrayal.

“When I go out before the frontline and the enemy shoots at me, I’m prepared for that. But when they shoot at my back from my own camp, I cannot defend myself from it” – Orbán said once in Tusványos.

Another source recalls that Orbán stated once: no one had ever offended him as much as Béla Markó did. But he did not say then what this offence was.

„After elections, it is a custom to congratulate the winner. I said something like I congratulate the parties that were elected into the Parliament, especially MSZP, (the socialist party) that got the most votes. But I did not mention any names, and said that we should wait for the second round” – remembered Markó Béla. The former politician said that Fidesz tried to influence DAHR with various methods many times, including decisions regarding its cadre policy. „They soon found out that their wishes are not granted, and from that point, we had ups and downs in our relationship, despite the fact that we met the leaders of Fidesz often” – Markó said.

Why should you relate the same way to those who love you and those who don’t?

The then president of the DAHR formulated the principle of equal distance – or equal closeness – meaning that the DAHR must maintain good relations in both Bucharest and Budapest and with both rightist and lefties parties. However, this does not mean subordination, the DAHR takes all its decisions autonomously, in accordance with its own interests.

“Equal closeness is stupid. Why should you relate the same way to those who love you and those who don’t?” – thinks one of our sources, a politician of the DAHR, who also adds that it never happened after the fall of Fidesz in 2002 that Hungarian politicians from Slovakia or Serbia would visit Gyurcsány and not pay their respects in the Fidesz headquarters located in the Lendvay Street. Our source claims that Markó never made this gesture towards Orbán.

“I can’t remember a principle about visiting courteously everybody when we go to Hungary. We had discussions with the people we had business with, and it was natural we had more business with the government. But we maintained the relations with the opposition as well, this is not only natural, but also useful” – explained Markó Béla.

Whatever happened, following Senator Attila Verestóy who was the first to be blacklisted in the Fidesz, Béla Markó was also added to this list after 2002. So it became clear already during the socialist government that as long as Markó is the president of the DAHR, the relationship of the Alliance and the Fidesz would always be tensioned.

What does Markó think? Ask Hunor Kelemen!

Markó’s carefully singled out successor, Hunor Kelemen, whose image was minutiously constructed in the second part of the 2000s, did not have an easy job. The Fidesz saw him for a long time merely as a poor imitation of Markó.

In addition to their physical resemblance, this view also had its foundation in the fact that Kelemen very carefully tried in this period to always say exactly what the DAHR president said. “If you wanted to know what Markó thinks about one thing or another, you had to talk to Hunor Kelemen.” – a DAHR politician remarked ironically.

Another interviewee reported that Orbán “talked mockingly, contemptuously (about Hunor Kelemen) if his name came up. Zsolt Németh (a high ranking Fidesz politician with very good relationships in Transylvania) had to warn him that soon Kelemen could be the boss in Transylvania.” Kelemen only became interesting for the Fidesz and Viktor Orbán after his election, before that he had no relations with Orbán, and the Fidesz also didn’t seek contact.

The big change came in February 2011, at the DAHR congress in Oradea/Nagyvárad. Three candidates competed for the presidency of the DAHR: Hunor Kelemen with the most chances, the liberal-minded Péter Eckstein-Kovács and Zsolt Semjén’s protegee, Gergely Olosz.

Olosz, the total mistake

“Olosz was a total mistake. We told Viktor Orbán and Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén not to invest in Geri, because he is corrupt, incompetent, and stands no chance.” – recalled our source.

Semjén, who had know Gergely Olosz since childhood as he attended the Benedictine high school at Pannonhalma, rejected the warning of the Transylvanian politicians saying that his protegee was denigrated by the Sekler politicians of the DAHR, Sándor Tamás and Árpád Antal, and that in reality it was precisely the other way round, Tamás and Antal were corrupt.

This episode highlights one of Viktor Orbán’s weaknesses: he takes important decisions without really researching the problem, and he is inclined to blindly follow the advice of people in his entourage.

And it is a strange irony of fate that Gergely Olosz, sentenced for three years of prison with execution for traffic of influence, is now hiding in Hungary, and his protector, Zsolt Semjén, is a frequent guest of Sándor Tamás and Árpád Antal.

Nasty and offensive speech at the congress

Back to the congress in Oradea/Nagyvárad: Ildikó Pelczné Gáll, who brought the message of the Fidesz to the congress, quite openly threatened the participants preparing for the election of the DAHR  president. The vice-president of the Fidesz said that a political organisation can get tired too, just like the human organism: they may become sluggish and sickly. “You have reached this level today – she said. – If you vote for change today, we will offer you a helping hand in the future.”

We did not expect this speech to be so nasty and offensive – remarked one of our conversation partners – but there had been signs from Orbán’s environment that the Fidesz planned to make peace with the DAHR, if the organisation elected a president who was to Viktor Orbán’s liking.

One of the main duties of the newly elected President of the DAHR, Hunor Kelemen, was clear from the very beginning: he had to settle the relationship with Viktor Orbán.

After the congress, in an interview for the Hargita Népe newspaper, Zsolt Semjén stated very clearly the expectations of the Hungarian government: “The DAHR must change its principle of equal distance.” The Deputy Prime Minister responsible for national politics added: “the new start is open for everyone”.

DAHR politicians go to Hungary very often

We know little about what happened behind closed doors, but we do know that the number of trips to Hungary of the DAHR politicians continuously increased after 2011. Átlátszó Erdély obtained information on the trips abroad of DAHR politicians via freedom of information requests, although the DAHR offered no names or details. The data reveal that in 2009 – the last year of the socialist/Bajnai government – the DAHR officials had 11 trips abroad, and ten of these was to Hungary.

In 2010, in the year when the Fidesz came to power again, the number of trips increased to 38 (most of them also to Hungary). In 2011, the first year of Hunor Kelemen’s presidency, they reported 49 trips. This means that officials of the DAHR travelled to Hungary almost every week.

The number of trips abroad increased every year. 2017 is the last year that we have data from, in that year DAHR politicians reported 130 trips abroad. In the vast majority of the cases, the destination was Hungary, and the trip lasted for 2 or 3 days, or even a week. And although the data do not show whom they visited, it is most likely that their did not spend this time with the Hungarian opposition parties.

Despite more conciliatory press declarations and frequent meetings, the war between the DAHR and the Fidesz was still very much on in 2011. In April 2011, the Hungarian diplomats left the room at a DAHR Council of Representatives meeting, when MP Péter Lakatos mockingly criticised the Orbán government.

The bleeding of the DAHR

A much more serious offence than this incident for the DAHR was that in May 2011 the Hungarian government withdrew the handling of the educational support grants from the Iskola Alapítvány (School Foundation) founded by the DAHR.

The main reason why this measure affected the DAHR was not so much the financial gains from this programme, but the loss of all up-to-date data on Hungarian families from Romania, our sources explained. These data were invaluable for the political marketing of the DAHR in election campaigns. Let’s not forget, these were pre-GDPR times.

At the same time, the Progress Foundation, another foundation close to the DAHR, was also informed that it was no longer authorised to handle the administration of the Hungarian certificates (a program run by the Hungarian government that allowed Hungarians to have preferential treatment when traveling to Hungary). The closing down of these offices affected the DAHR because they worked in the same office with the territorial organizations of the DAHR, therefore they could pay for part of their operating costs and some of their employees from Hungarian government money.

In July 2011, in the EU camp from Izvorul Mureșului/Marosfő, Hunor Kelemen said: “we need Budapest’s advice, but we don’t need one thing: the Hungarian capital to tell us what is good for the Hungarians from Transylvania.”

A carefully orchestrated rendezvous at Tusványos

According to our knowledge, the first private meeting between Hunor Kelemen and Viktor Orbán took place a few weeks after the EU camp, on 23 July, at Băile Tușnad/Tusnádfürdő. We know little about this meeting, apart from one detail. The organizers left nothing to chance: to ensure that nobody disturbs them, they organised a different programme for the other politicians who attended the Tusványos summer university (among others, László Tőkés, Csaba Sógor and Péter Eckstein-Kovács) in the other end of the town.

The meeting wasn’t public, the news that it took place appeared in the daily newspaper Evenimentul Zilei. “I feel that the deadlock with the Hungarian government was broken (…) in the following period we can keep on amending this relationship, because both parties expressed their openness and will to cooperate (…)”, – stated Kelemen.

In parallel, the opposition of the DAHR was organising itself. On 15 September 2011, they registered the Hungarian People’s Party of Transylvania (HPPT) in Bucharest. “In this period before the registration of the party we received no support from the Fidesz. Orbán said, if they want to do this, let them. Let’s see what they are capable of, let’s support them, but not a lot.” – a politician of the opposition who took part in the collection of signatures and the registration process told Átlátszó Erdély.

It is true, however, that the Democracy Centres operated by the Hungarian National Council of Transylvania (HNCT), whose main activity was to assist with simplified naturalisation, also functioned as territorial organisations of the HPPT.

Just like the offices of Progress Foundation, the Democracy Centre, the HPPT and the HNCT all used the same offices and partly employed the same team. This practice is documented here.

We also revealed how Hungarian state companies supported the newly founded NGOs of HPPT politicians with approximately 1 million euros during the local government elections in June 2012 and the Parliament elections in December 2012.

Let them run and see what comes out of it

“While it was clear that the DAHR was cut off from the funds, it wasn’t clear in what way and with how much money the Hungarian government would support the HPPT” – political scientist Tibor Toró explained.

Another source claimed that the money was transferred with delay, and although Fidesz campaign guru Gábor Kubatov trained them, they received no political support from Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister never campaigned for them.

“2012 was an experiment: is it possible to shatter the political monopoly of the DAHR? Not even Viktor Orbán himself could be sure that it would work, so he didn’t engage fully into it. It was much rather a thing like let them run, and see what comes out of it” – said Tibor Toró.

While HPPT hoped for 30-40% of the Hungarian votes, the results of the 2012 local government election helped clarify the power relations: the newly registered HPPT received 44,000 (0.45%) of the votes, and the other opposition party, the HCP 36,000 (0.37%). It was clear that neither of the two parties could really threaten the DAHR, which had 490,000 votes.

In July 2012, Viktor Orbán had meetings with the presidents of all three parties. “[Viktor Orbán] does not want to tell us in Transylvania what to do. He gave us no advice about the parliamentary elections in the autumn.” – the President of the DAHR declared.

Orbán does not want to get in conflict with DAHR voters

Orbán made a somewhat more balanced declaration at Tusványos that year: “we have strategic relations [with László Tőkés and the HPPT], and I wish them success, but I do not mean to get in conflict with the 80 percent of Hungarians who voted for the DAHR.”

The parliamentary elections held in December 2012 yielded a result similar to that of the local government elections: the chamber of deputies candidates of the DAHR received 380,000 votes (5.13%), the senate candidates 388,000 (5.23%). The chamber of deputies candidates of the HPPT gathered 48,000 votes (0.64%), and the senate candidates had 58,000 votes (0.79%).

“During the European Parliamentary elections in 2007, we saw that while the candidates of the DAHR won 283,000 votes, the independent László Tőkés got 176,000 votes. It was clear that there was a strong dissatisfaction with the DAHR, so the question was whether the votes for Tőkés could be moved over to the parties opposing the DAHR. The message of later elections is that this doesn’t work.” – a politician source assessed the situation.

Somehow “the shirt needs to be rebuttoned”

“It’s a hazard to keep the DAHR a few decimals below or above the 5% parliamentary threshold, you must not take this risk anymore” – declared Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén to the public media after the elections. The politician also said that the Hungarian political parties from Transylvania had to overcome their personal offences in the future and needed to cooperate in order to have a parliament representation.

“There are personal conflicts, but these are not personal questions but a set of actual or perceived offences caused by different political views” – said Semjén, who also thought that these conflicts had to be overcome, everybody must examine themselves, and somehow “the shirt needs to be rebuttoned”.

Several meetings took place in 2013. There were some carefully optimistic declarations, but Hunor Kelemen still said in an interview to Erdélyi Riport in December 2013:

“We cannot speak about a compromise. We can say that our relationship has improved, has changed. And a great part of this is due to the fact that they see, they know, they feel that the DAHR is unavoidable in Transylvania. (…) In the past three and a half years the DAHR and the foundations close to the DAHR received no support whatsoever from the Fidesz-KDNP government. We did not ask for, and did not receive any. This has not changed even when our relationship with Orbán improved and we often met in 2013.

A milestone in the evolution of the Fidesz-DAHR relationship was the interview with Zsolt Semjén in the beginning of 2014, in which he said: one should avoid the situation that, because of a 85-92 percent of DAHR support, the Hungarians from Transylvania would not vote for the Fidesz during the elections in Hungary.

István Székely, executive vice-president of the DAHR, took this thought further, saying: “if I reverse this sentence, then the DAHR’s most important interest in this relationship becomes obvious: 95-96 percent of Hungarians from Transylvania are Fidesz voters . It is our interest that anyone should be able to support the DAHR and the Fidesz at the same time, and the bad relationship between Fidesz and the DAHR should not be an obstacle for how people vote.

The EP election campaign has brought the change

The DAHR offered a helping hand already in the registration process for the 2014 parliamentary elections. During the campaign, the second-row politicians of the DAHR – among them Sándor Tamás and Csaba Borboly, presidents of the territorial organizations of Covasna and Harghita counties, respectively – openly sided with the Fidesz.

“We consider that it is important that everybody used their voting rights, because it is our duty as citizens. I, for one, vote for this government, because their results are tangible. My expectation for this government is that it continues its strong politics in Hungarian communities outside Hungary.” – said Csaba Borboly.

On 6 April, expecting the results of the election in which the Fidesz again secured two thirds of the votes, 30-35 Hungarian politicians from Romania congratulated the winners. Amongst these, DAHR politicians like Hunor Kelemen, Árpád Antal, Sándor Tamás and István Székely. However, it is important to note that DAHR politicians had also waited for election results with the Fidesz before, the only novelty was in fact Hunor Kelemen’s attendance.

The breakthrough came in May 2014: Viktor Orbán and Hunor Kelemen campaigning together during the EP election campaign. On these elections “the DAHR and the Fidesz-KDNP mutually support each other (…) the Fidesz, the KDNP and the DAHR work for a strong European People’s Party fraction in the next five years. This can only happen if both the Fidesz and the DAHR have good results, and this needs that Hungarian people go to vote.” – declared Viktor Orbán in the park of the Roman Catholic Episcopal Palace in Satu Mare.

László Tőkés, MEP for seven years back, got a new mandate on the Fidesz list, and not on any Transylvanian one.

Presidential elections with cartoons and weather forecast

While two years previously, Viktor Orbán saw it as a kind of experiment that the representatives of the HPPT also ran on the elections as opponents of the DAHR, his opinion seemed to have radically changed by the 2014 presidential elections, despite the fact that this election had no weight compared to the parliamentary elections.

The HPPT proposed that Zsolt Szilágyi, Vice-President of the party, would also run for the election; at a meeting, the Prime Minister answered this proposition with a strange example about cartoons and weather forecasts, a HPPT politician informed.

“Guys, if you ask me, this is like the cartoons and the weather forecast. Neither of them is interesting, everybody wants to see the news, but if you don’t want to be late for the news, you have to watch the cartoons too. The weather forecast might probably interest a little more people than the cartoons.” – our source quoted Viktor Orbán.

“We were supposed to read it as guys, don’t run. We read it like it’s all the same for Orbán whether we run or not.” – our source reported.

However, this decision was a mistake: Viktor Orbán wished good luck for the DAHR president, which clearly proved that the Fidesz was not happy about Zsolt Szilágyi’s running for office against Hunor Kelemen. Not even Zsolt Németh, the traditional friend of HPPT took part in the campaign.

However, the presidential elections did not alter the power relations: Hunor Kelemen received 3.47% with 329,000 votes, and Zsolt Szilágyi 0.56% with 53,000 votes.

Nobody’s cut off completely

Although it looks like Viktor Orbán has lost interest in the HPPT ever since, there’s no sign that any of the yearly 250 million HUF (about 700,000 EUR) support for the HNCT for the simplified naturalisation programme, or the funds for different projects of the HPPT and its entourage would significantly decrease.

“Nobody’s cut off completely: in the last minute everyone receives a small gesture, some money, and this way they keep everyone inside the system.” – a political science expert source explained how the system works. In his opinion, the reason behind this is that it is cheaper to keep an unsuccessful project on a ventilator – and if needed, give it some job – than completely eliminate it.

Meanwhile, things happened in Bucharest as well: on 13 December 2014, the DAHR Council of Representatives decided that the DAHR should leave the third Ponta government. These were the last eight months of the DAHR as a governing party during our examined period.

A short theoretical overview

We need to make a short theoretical digression in order to understand how the position of the DAHR changed after it was forced in opposition, and in parallel the amount of Hungarian funds sent to Transylvania significantly increased.

A useful concept in this respect is the Hungarian ethnic pillarisation in Transylvania: this means that the minority community creates institutions of its own, in parallel with the social institutions of the majority, which makes the members of the minority community able to live their daily lives without interacting with majority institutions except on rare occasions.

The institutions working within the Hungarian community of Transylvania can be seen as a kind of asymmetric pillarisation. Not symmetric, because the Hungarian institution network of Transylvania is embedded within the Romanian society, which however is not another pillar, but the mainstream.

The DAHR is one of the key operators of the Hungarian institution network in Transylvania.

Tamás Kiss’s theory explained on several occasions helps to understand how the DAHR, after it became an opposition party in 2015, was used by the Fidesz.

For this, we need to introduce a new concept, the asymmetric minority accommodation. This means that in Romania there is no legal guarantee for ethnic power division, the division of resources between the majority and the minorities – in this case, the Hungarian community. This needs to be re-negotiated from case to case with the majority owners of the power.

Kiss thinks that the legitimacy of the DAHR within the community must be determined by its capacity to allocate resources, that is, how much resources it can negotiate for its own institutions and Hungarian-inhabited territories.

When the national politics of Hungary outbids the Romanian state

Before the first part of the 2010s, the amount of the funds coming from Hungary was relatively small, therefore the DAHR was primarily concerned with obtaining resources from Bucharest, which were much higher. It also managed to successfully monopolise these resources, meaning that the money from Bucharest always came via the DAHR. But after 2015, the DAHR was no longer a factor in the government, and the anti-corruption drive made it impossible for the party to go on with its strategies in Bucharest based on individual interests and negotiations.

In parallel with this, the financial support coming from Hungary started to grow exponentially after 2016. They were no longer complementary, but generated and modified institutional processes. The Hungarian national politics “outbid” the Romanian state. According to Kiss’s interpretation, this is the context in which the DAHR-Fidesz relationship must be seen.

I must add to this that, to the best of my knowledge, there is no record about the exact amount of the sources that the Romanian state secures for Hungarian-inhabited territories, and how much of that money is due to the DAHR’s governmental activities. In the absence of such a record, it is difficult to assess whether the biggest resources come from the Hungarian or the Romanian state.

The end of the DAHR monopoly

It is for certain that the position of the DAHR fundamentally changed with their weakening presence in Bucharest and the spreading of the Hungarian national politics: it was forced into a competition of loyalty. What does it mean?

While in the negotiations with the Romanian government the DAHR and its leadership was always in a monopoly situation (the Romanian parties almost never tried to directly address the Hungarian community, going around the DAHR), the Hungarian national politics has a different way of working.

In the Hungarian System of National Cooperation (SNC), the control happens through overlapping authorities and functions, and this is also valid for national politics. This field is formed by half a dozen leading politicians in addition to the prime minister, and 15-20 institutions of national politics, where the actors build networks in Hungarian communities outside Hungary seemingly independently and in competition with each other.

The decisive criterion in this competition is not the measurable efficiency, but loyalty. The result is that the actors not only follow Viktor Orbán’s wishes, but often try to “anticipate” it and want to accomplish something that the Prime Minister didn’t actually ask for.

In this context the earlier monopoly position of the DAHR has vanished. There are reports that in the time of the Socialist governments Béla Markó had access to decision lists and could change them as he wished. Now the top leadership of the DAHR is just one of the actors competing for the graces of the Hungarian government and trying to prove its loyalty.

“Be aware of everything, decide almost nothing”

Our sources claim that although Hunor Kelemen can suggest projects for financial support, but has no say in who gets the money and how much. Politicians of the DAHR are often directly related to one or another of the patronage networks built by some member of the Hungarian government, independently from the DAHR leadership. This is a further limitation of the influence of top DAHR politicians.

Although Hunor Kelemen managed to consolidate his position, the DAHR under his leadership no longer resembles the highly centralised organization which it used to be in Béla Markó’s time. Markó insisted to make his own decisions about the tiniest details, as many anecdotes show.

One of these goes that the DAHR press releases had to be sent over to him, he printed and proofread them before being released. Another story is that, allegedly, he personally decided not to have ketchup and mustard in a cafe at a congress, for fear the attendees would stain their suits.

Kelemen let go of the peripheries and built a much less centralised DAHR. “I want to be aware of everything, but decide almost nothing” – he often says. It was unthinkable in Markó’s time that a territorial organization should get into the naturalisation process, or that a local DAHR politician should put forward their opinion on autonomy or Romanian-Hungarian cohabitation which the top leaders of the DAHR cannot share. However, this has become natural by now, our sources claim.

The DAHR is controlled with never-before-seen amounts of media funding

The weakening positions of the DAHR were also caused by the never-before-seen amount of media investments of the Hungarian government. If our overview is complete, then the Transylvanian Media Space Association (Erdélyi Médiatér Egyesület) with Szilárd Demeter behind it received 5.25 billion HUF (around 15 million EUR) funding since December 2017 and bought the overwhelming majority of Hungarian media from Transylvania.

[irp posts=”26651″ name=”Media funding record in Transylvania: a network of businesses, covered in mist”]

Although two years ago many were afraid that the strictly centralised Fidesz-propaganda would appear in Transylvania together with the money as well, there are no perceivable traces of it just yet. Our sources say that the important part is not what they write about, but much more what they don’t: the publications published by this media outlet cannot contain any views critical towards the Hungarian government.

Although examples have existed for materials critical of the DAHR, the latest election campaigns have eliminated those too. “This conglomerate has one function only: it controls the DAHR” – said one of the sources, who claims that the DAHR would be in trouble if this media outlet suddenly switched to a critical voice during an election campaign. Another source, a politician of the opposition, explained the logic of Fidesz behind this overall purchase: “we buy it ourselves so that no one else can buy it.”

Money taps opened for the DAHR

Back to the timeline: while Hunor Kelemen still declared in December 2013 that the DAHR and the foundations close to DAHR did not receive any funding from the Fidesz-KDNP government, this has changed since 2015.

It was in February 2015 that one of the foundations of the DAHR, the Eurotrans Foundation, signed an agreement with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade which entitled it to take part in preparing the documents for the simplified naturalisation, a process that enables Hungarian nationals to obtain Hungarian citizenship in a simplified process. It receives a yearly 250 million HUF for this end (790,000 EUR on the rate of 31 December 2015. Henceforth, I will use the European Central Bank’s exchange rate for the last day of the given year to transform sums from HUF to EUR).

Eurotrans Foundation uses this money to operate a series of offices across Transylvania (addresses here). If we corroborate these addresses with the addresses of territorial organizations of the DAHR, we see that many overlap. It raises the suspicion that the maintenance expenses of the DAHR territorial offices are – at least partly – covered from this Hungarian money.

We have reached out to Zoltán Nagy, President of the Board of the Foundation, we did not get any answer to our questions about how they separate the activities of the Eurotrans Foundation and the territorial offices of the DAHR.

A new step in the Fidesz-DAHR relations was July 2016: it is quite a gesture that Hunor Kelemen was the only Transsylvanian leader that Viktor Orbán invited for dinner at a meeting in Tusnádfürdő with the leaders of Hungarian organisations in the Carpathian basin. László Tőkés, long-time ally of the Fidesz, was only invited to meet the PM the next morning, at a work breakfast.

The reason is that the relationship between Orbán and Tőkés had deteriorated in the meantime. At a book launch in May 2015, Tőkés called the national politics of the Hungarian government “impossible to follow” and “non-transparent”, while at a MÁÉRT [Hungarian Permanent Assembly where leaders of all Hungarian parties from the Carpathian basin get together] meeting he refused to take the stage and sign the closing declaration.

Uprooting all critical voices

At the end of 2016, another foundation of the DAHR, the Progress Alapítvány (Progress Foundation) responsible for publishing the organisation’s media projects, discontinued one of the smaller online media platforms with a decreasing number of users, the Erdélyi Riport. As a publisher, it also fired some of the leftist journalists of one of the most viewed portals of the Hungarian press in Transylvania, the maszol.ro.

Although the publisher claimed that they only took these measures for cost efficiency purposes, and there is no direct evidence that the Hungarian government asked the DAHR to silence the critical voices, a DAHR politician, one of our sources, explained:

“The Fidesz is an extremely centralised party. If a critical voice appears in any media close to the government, it carries a message. They think the DAHR also works this way. If some criticism is published on the maszol.ro, the Transindex or the Erdély TV (media outlets close to the DAHR), they call Hunor Kelemen and ask him what happened. And he asks: why, what happened? Imagine that the Hungarian government media publishes materials like the ones usually published in the Hungarian media in Transylvania. The Fidesz only knows that these outlets are operated on DAHR money, so it assumes that these materials somehow mirror the DAHR’s views, and the DAHR tries to send a message with these”.

The “streamlining” of media outlets close to DAHR did not stop here. In May 2017 the Transindex had to move its offices located in the attic of one of the buildings of the Iskola Foundation after it had published an article about the L’Alchimiste scandal (a chic restaurant in the center of Cluj/Kolozsvár owned by the wife of Nagy Zoltán. The restaurant was opened using public money). Later, in April 2019, the Erdély TV’s Fidesz-critical presenter, Attila Gáspárik, was fired without explanation.

The DAHR can use the economic development programme in its campaigns

According to declarations in March 2017, the economic development programme which had already been active in Hungarian-inhabited parts of Serbia (Voivodina) and Ukraine for some time, would start in Transylvania as well. After a discussion with Viktor Orbán in Budapest, Hunor Kelemen declared to Erdély TV:

“We talked about the Transylvanian programmes which are supported by the Hungarian government, and which will start in 2017 and 2018, including the economic development programme which had already been tried out in Voivodina and Ukraine and works excellently. It will start in Transylvania as well in 2017, first on a smaller territory, then from 2018 on everywhere from the Seklerland to the Partium.”

The programme is initiated by the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The first model programme was introduced in Mureș County in 2017, with a budget of 1 billion HUF (3.2 million EUR).

The economic development programme is another unfriendly gesture to the HPPT. To our knowledge, the basis of the programme is actually a plan of the opposition, the Mikó Imre Plan, which is based on a strategy of economic development elaborated by Transylvanian economists employed by the HNCT, and experts of the VÁTI urban planning and development company. They had been trying to present and sell the plan for the Hungarian government for years.

“We asked them to include us into the board of the Pro Economica Foundation which handles the funds, employ our experts in the assessment process, let us take part in the promotion campaign” – said one of our sources, a politician of the HPPT. None of their requests were heard.

However, the DAHR may use these development projects in its promotion materials during campaigns. Attila Balázs, Economic Director of the DAHR, and Levente Novák, Vice-President responsible for territorial organisations, are both members in the Board of Directors of the Foundation.

Hunor Kelemen encourages votes for Fidesz

While the Eurotrans Foundation with the HNCT were offering their help in the registration process preceding the Hungarian parliamentary elections, another premiere took place in September 2017: the DAHR President publicly supported the Fidesz.

“It is in our interest that Hungary should be led by a government which proved that Hungarians from Transylvania have an important place both in its national political visions and everyday practices” – he said.

The final breakup with Markó’s principle of equal distance happened in February 2018. Gyula Molnár, President of the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), and Gergely Karácsony, candidate of the HSP and the Párbeszéd for Prime Minister, invited Hunor Kelemen for a dinner after a public forum in Cluj/Kolozsvár.

“They asked me what we think they should do in Transylvania during the election campaign. I told them very frankly: nothing. This is a completely superfluous waste of time and energy, because I think: Hungarians from Transylvania know very clearly who to vote for” – Kelemen recalled the conversation.

Meanwhile, the Eurotrans Foundation eagerly helped the registration of Hungarians from Transylvania for the elections in Hungary: by the first days of February 2018 they mediated the recording of 35 thousand Hungarian citizens living in Romania on the electoral lists. More than that, the foundation also played a role in collecting the postal votes and sending them forward to the Hungarian foreign representations (the Democracy Centres had the same task).

While Csaba Borboly, President of the Harghita County Council, said that Hungarians from Transylvania had not only the right, but the duty to vote in the parliamentary elections in Hungary, the Pro Economica Foundation which handled the economic development programme signed financial support agreements with 521 persons for an amount of 1.5 billion HUF for equipment or breeding stock acquisition, or the cadastral registration of agricultural lands.

Twice as many postal votes for the Fidesz-KDNP

The Fidesz-KDNP won again at the parliamentary elections on 8 April 2018 with a two-thirds majority of the votes. The governing party received 96 % of all postal votes, a total of 225 thousand votes from outside the borders (we do not know the distribution by countries). This was nearly double of the number of votes in 2014, but while the 122 thousand votes in 2014 resulted in one or two mandates, this time they were not enough to get a mandate.

The 2018 referendum in Romania about the constitutional definition of the family somewhat altered the image that the DAHR – while becoming more and more cooperative with the Hungarian government – followed the rhetoric of this government in all its undertakings. Although many leading politicians of the DAHR supported the referendum about a constitutional definition of the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, and this was indeed congruous with the anti-gay rhetoric of the Fidesz-KDNP, Bálint Porcsalmi, Executive President of the DAHR, declared in an interview for maszol.ro before the referendum:

“I do not agree that marriage can only happen between a man and a woman. Although gay marriages are not permitted in Romania, but I am convinced that the opposite is also not something that should be condemned: in 15 member states of the EU people of the same sex can marry. I also do not agree with the opinion of my Senator colleagues that the new draft submitted now has a better content than the current constitutional regulation. Because it is no better: either legally, or spiritually. On the one hand, it maintains the restrictive, bad definition of the family, on the other hand it discriminates in the long run an important community, citizens who should have the same rights as the heterosexuals.”

In November 2018, Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared at Cluj Napoca the economic development programme which offered support to farmers and small enterprises in parts of Maros County would be extended to the Seklerland. The 2019 budget secured 50 billion HUF for economic development programmes, and the Seklerland programme would have a budget of 25 billion.

At the DAHR Congress in February 2019, Zsolt Semjén said that Viktor Orbán and Hunor Kelemen shared a trusted cooperation, which was forced by the Hungarian voters from Transylvania. He added: “Nothing can be accepted which weakens the DAHR”, because if the Alliance became weak, the strong representation of the Hungarian interests in the Transylvlanian local governments and the Parliament in Bucharest would come to an end.

In March 2019, the Fidesz was about to be suspended from the European People’s Party (EPP). However, Hunor Kelemen told the Romanian public television that the two MEPs of the DAHR would vote against the suspension.

During the EP election campaign which started in the meantime, Viktor Orbán took a two-day tour in Transylvania on the invitation of the DAHR. He inaugurated two establishments built from Hungarian support: the feed mixer in Sânpaul / Kerelőszentpál and the Ice Hockey Academy of Seklerland. He said that the Hungarians from Transylvania who want to strengthen the overall Hungarian representation in Brussels, must vote for the DAHR.

“Who thinks that the price of the grants must be paid is wrong”

On a press conference, Hunor Kelemen was asked about the Hungarian government grants for foundations close to the DAHR. He said that the DAHR never received any support from Hungary and whoever thought that the price of the grants must be paid somehow was wrong.

The carefully balanced formulations of the early years were officially over. In September 2019, Kelemen told at a Romanian-Hungarian youth meeting at Sfântu Gheorghe/Sepsiszentgyörgy that Viktor Orbán should not be criticised but copied. “Romanians should do the same for the Romanian communities living outside the borders what the Hungarian government does for Hungarians outside their borders. We can feel on our own skin what it is like when the Hungarian government stands up for us.” – the DAHR President said.

The election race is a “national treason”

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the local government elections were postponed in Romania from March to September 2020. Once again, the Fidesz brought the ammunition for the DAHR campaign. They announced a new stage of the economic development grants, inaugurated various projects paid by the Hungarian government, and Hungarian politicians sent several Facebook messages.

Zsolt Semjén said that the counter-candidates of the DAHR “had no chance”. Árpád Potápi went even further: he said that to nominate Hungarian candidates who had no chance of success on settlements where the Hungarians are not the absolute majority was “an act that comes against the interest of the Hungarian community”. Even on settlements where the Hungarian majority is over 80%, “the competition between Hungarians and Hungarians is not a good solution” – he said, “because it causes people to jump at each other”.

Despite the objection of the opposition parties, after the elections, on 12 October 2020, Potápi went further with his statement before the National Cohesion Committee of the Parliament: to set another candidate on the DAHR candidate in Bihor/Bihar and Satu Mare/Szatmár is national treason.

From government formation negotiations in Bucharest directly to Viktor Orbán’s office

Arguably the most telling way to end our timeline on the Fidesz-DAHR relations is the event of 19 December 2020, when right after the government formation negotiations in Bucharest – after reaching an agreement on the composition of the coalition but before clarifying the operative details – Kelemen left for Budapest for discussions with Orbán. Bertalan Havasi, Deputy State Secretary in charge of the Prime Minister’s Press Office, failed to communicate the nature of the urgency that justified the DAHR President’s hasty trip to Budapest.

How does the current grant system work?

“The socialist governments also favored their own of course, but there always was a more-or-less transparent board, the support policy had a well-defined form, a framework. The Fidesz gradually eliminated these forms, everything is decided based on informal relationships and agreements” – said one of our sources, a politician of the DAHR’s opposition.

Although in the first years of the second Fidesz government, in 2011-2013, the projects were still collected and coordinated by Transylvanian politicians – István Székely for the DAHR, and Balázs Gergely for the HPPT –, by now every decision is taken in Budapest.

Although our interview partners couldn’t give a precise answer to all our questions regarding the functioning of the grant system, they unanimously claim that the main source of the financing, the Bethlen Gábor Alap (Bethlen Gábor Fund) has become nothing else than a place for payouts. It provides the institutional framework for political and personal decisions negotiated with various entities, ensuring the formal agreements are signed, and the paperwork connected to the handling and financial reporting of the grants is dealt with.

They also agreed that the major projects with budgets amounting to billions of forints are decided by Viktor Orbán personally, the Gábor Bethlen Fund only executes the government decree. At present, two people from Transylvania can pitch major high-budget projects to the Prime Minister: Béla Kató, Bishop of the Reformed Diocese of Transylvania, and DAHR president Hunor Kelemen.

“And out of the two, it is Kató whose relationship with Viktor Orbán is of the kind that he can meet with the PM whenever he wants” – says one of our sources, a social sciences expert.

“There must be someone who takes them inside”

As we are told, the projects with a lower budget of between 500 million and 1 billion (1,5-3 million EUR) are decided by Zsolt Semjén, Deputy Prime Minister responsible for national politics. “However, there must be someone who takes them to Semjén, and they usually check those projects with Hunor Kelemen”. Minor projects can be chosen by Árpád Potápi, State Secretary for national politics of the Prime Minister’s Office.

The small projects are collected by Réka Brendus, Deputy Head of the Transylvanian Department of the State Secretariat for National Politics, and it is probably her who decides who gets the support and who doesn’t. “This circle is for almost anyone, if they are in good or neutral relationships with the government.” – our source reported.

If the Hungarian government initiates a project, they try to find partners across the borders depending on the available budget. A good example of this is the nursery school building programme, for the first stage of which Viktor Orbán set apart a sum of 8.9 billion HUF (28.8 million EUR) in the last days of December 2016.

One of our sources who has a close knowledge of the working of the Gábor Bethlen Fund said that this decision about an extremely high sum on one of the last workdays of the year came as a surprise to everyone.

But since the money had to be spent by the end of the year, they hastened to phone partners across the borders to submit applications so that they can sign agreements and transfer the money. However, there was no previous need assessment, therefore the places for the construction of nursery schools were chosen more or less randomly.

The DAHR as an investor, just like the churches

Today, the foundations close to the DAHR handle as much money coming from Hungarian funding, if not more, than the Romanian governmental support for the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, handled by the DAHR.

The Iskola Alapítvány (School Foundation), a foundation of the DAHR, is one of the institutions that has lately become even more important than the Eurotrans Foundation. This was founded by the DAHR in 2004 to handle the educational grants program coming from Hungary. Later it started a still operating flat rental programme for higher education teaching staff in Cluj, and it also offered a controversial loan for the restaurant of the president’s wife in the downtown of Cluj.

After 2017, the School Foundation has received significant amounts of Hungarian funds (on the chart below the grants are given in EUR).

It may be accidental, but it is an interesting detail nevertheless that the decision on the first support of 300 million HUF (970,000 EUR) came just at the time of the big money distribution in late December 2016 (this money was later wired back, as the ownership of the real estate they sought to buy was unclear).

A week later, in the first days of January 2017, it became public that the Progress Foundation discontinued the Erdélyi Riport because of financial reasons, and fired some of the journalists of maszol.ro, critical of the Hungarian government.

Our overviews show that apart from this 300 million grant from 2016, in the 2017-2020 time period, the School Foundation received some 6.6 billion HUF (19.9 million EUR) from the Gábor Bethlen Fund. With this funding, it became one of the top recipients of Hungarian funding in Romania, along with the Sapientia private university and the Reformed Diocese of Transylvania.

A part of this money is used to finance cultural and educational programmes such as the centenary programme series 1000 years in Transylvania, 100 years in Romania, or the afternoon educational programme functioning in 33 schools. Most of the money, however, is used for real estate investments.

Zoltán Nagy, who takes care of things

In 2018, the Foundation bought and demolished a building in the city centre of Cluj – the former Minerva typography – to build a cultural centre in its place. In the same year, it bought the Sonnenfeld palace in Oradea/Nagyvárad, also with the purpose to renovate it and turn it into a cultural centre.

In 2019, the Foundation acquired an art nouveau-style building in the centre of Miercurea Ciuc/Csíkszereda, and a turn-of-the-century villa in Tușnad-Băi/Tusnádfürdő. Both buildings need restoration works.

The President of the Board of both the Eurotrans and the Iskola Foundations is Zoltán Nagy (nicknamed BigZé), one of Hunor Kelemen’s long time team members. His current function is the Head of the DAHR President’s Cabinet. Actually: his right hand.

He is loyal, pragmatic, and “rough as needed in conflicts”: this is how his acquaintances characterise Zoltán Nagy. The former biologist and bat researcher works with the Iskola Foundation from the early 2000s, and after a short digression as state secretary he found the role that fits him best. Away from the limelight, he is very efficient in handling the things that Hunor Kelemen has no time and energy for.

Zoltán Nagy holds in his hands everything connected to the management of DAHR projects and the Hungarian government, and the administrative details of political negotiations. He is the driver of the DAHR President on his trips to Budapest, and he is also the contact person with the Hungarian state administration.

“He goes as many times and needed, he talks as many times as needed”

“On Orbán–Kelemen meetings, there is János Nagy (Orbán’s personal secretary – editor’s note) with his notebook, writing down what they agreed. János Nagy forwards the PM’s instructions to the legal department, and these become the government decrees. In parallel, Kelemen also tells his Head of Cabinet what they agreed, and Zoltán Nagy starts out. He goes as many times and needed, he talks as many times as needed, János Nagy also makes a phone call, if needed.” – detailed a DAHR politician.

“The Hungarian financial support only interests Hunor Kelemen to the extent that he takes the projects to Viktor Orbán. As soon as the decision is taken, everything is left for Zoltán Nagy: the details of a programme, how an investment goes is not of interest for the DAHR President, everything is solved by the Head of Cabinet and his team. He gives political ammunition, solves problems, and the financial reports are also in order” – says our source.

Nothing is known about the affairs of the Iskola Foundation

The Iskola Foundation is an institution completely separate from the DAHR. Although its yearly budget rivals that of the DAHR, the affairs that go on in there are unknown to anyone – even the board of the foundation, or the DAHR’s economic director. “He is humanly affected by having such a huge amount of money at his disposal.” – said a source who has known Zoltán Nagy for a long time.

According to his former colleagues, Zoltán Nagy does not complicate things unnecessarily: he allocates the job, then checks whether it’s done, he is not interested in other details. “He is a party soldier: he does his job, the price paid for it doesn’t matter. He solves problems, he’s not a philosopher” – our source characterises him.

An important ingredient of Zoltán Nagy’s success is that he and his wife, Hajnalka Nagy Debreczeni, managed to become indispensible for Hunor Kelemen and his family. The Head of Cabinet is Kelemen’s driver; his wife controls the entire editorial staff of the maszol.ro news website as their publisher, and in addition to that, she does the shopping or even babysits the children of the Kelemen family.

Kelemen Hunor has been “taken hostage”, some people say, meaning that the DAHR president can only be reached through the Head of Cabinet.

So is there a great project then?

Is there any kind of plan that the Hungarian government would like to achieve in Hungarian communities across the border, such as Transylvania?

The aim is the institutional and individual integration of the Hungarian-inhabited territories of the Carpathian basin, the building of a parallel society, and the preservation of the break between the majority and minority society. However, apart from this, there doesn’t seem to be any other written strategy, Tibor Toró explains.

The political scientist also adds that the Fidesz provides the framework and the money, and within this framework everybody is free to do what they want, to lobby as they want. The various interest groups compete with each other, and this suits the basic nature of the Hungarian society of Transylvania, that’s why they prefer Viktor Orbán.

Although there is no clear strategy as to what can be funded, it is still clear to everyone what is considered taboo: there are no Hungarian-Romanian joint programmes, ethnically mixed institutions, or programmes for sexual minorities. However, few people feel that these are limitations, because the conservative Hungarian society of Transylvania generally rejects these as it is.

Translation: Emese Czintos

The article was published as part of a crossborder cooperation project aiming to map the influence of the Orbán government in the Hungarian communities living in neighboring countries. The project was supported by Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU).

The post Marriage of convenience sweetened with millions – how Fidesz persuaded the largest Hungarian party in Transylvania appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

On March 14 2016, Department of Interethnic Relations (DIR) employees bring us huge cardboard boxes packed with at least half cubic meters of documents containing the requested materials and place them into the reading room situated at the back of the Victoria Palace for consultation purposes. These documents were the financial reports DAHR has been sending to DIR since 2009.

We are allowed into the reading room with the condition of leaving our phones and cameras behind. We take our place at the table next to the magnetic gate and start examining the documents respecting DIR’s rules.

But soon we loose our initial enthusiasm: as we skim through the material, we realize that these reports do not provide us with the full picture of how DAHR has been spending its yearly amount of 18-20 million lei (according to the daily exchange rate the amount equals to 4-4.5 million euros) public money. The amount Bucharest allocated to DAHR had to be used in the service of the Hungarian community of Transylvania, yet the DAHR website has never published any information about how the money was being spent.

We’ve sent in our first request of examining DAHR’s financial reports in January 2016. Back then it seemed that DIR would send us copies of all the requested documents. But later we were told that fulfilling our request was an impossible task as DIR lacked the necessary resources for carrying out such an overwhelming task.

After some heel-dragging we eventually gained access to the Government headquarters and were allowed in only for a single research day.

The series in Hungarian:

Pereljük az RMDSZ-t és a Communitas Alapítványt

Adatigényléssel kikértük az RMDSZ szerződéseit

Kovács Péter: marhaság, hogy ez az erdélyi magyarságnak járó támogatás

RMDSZ-beszámolók: mindig mindent rendben találtak a hatóságok?

RMDSZ-beszámolók: élnek, mint Marci a Hevesen

RMDSZ-beszámolók: hányszor kerülik meg a Földet kampányévben?

Mire költik az erdélyi magyarság pénzét? Publikáljuk az RMDSZ beszámolóit

Even though it was impossible to go through all the documents, this is what we discovered:

– besides the open call for applications, the Communitas Foundation also has a separate fund NGOs close to DAHR can apply for through a restricted, invitation-based application procedure;

– a significant amount of the budget is spent mostly on the maintanance of DAHR premises – overhead costs, maintanance costs and repairs;

– staff expenditure also takes up a significant share of the allocated budget support: since 2009, the number of DAHR employees almost doubled, their salaries in many cases exceeds the average pay;

– in the past years DAHR bought several mid- to high-end cars and also bought higher value properties, some of which are used as company housing.

Since 1994, all 19 officially recognized minority groups living in Romania benefit of financial support, destined for preserving their culture and traditions.

The money coming from the budget of the Government’s General Secretariat is allocated via the Department of Interethnic Relations (DIR), a body of the General Secretariat. The financial support goes to organizations representing minority groups, which in the case of the Hungarian minority, since 2009, is DAHR.

How this money is spent became the topic of many discussions and debates within the Hungarian minority. Initially, prior to the 27/1996 law that regulated the functioning of political parties coming into force, the money was managed by DAHR and distributed with the help of NGOs. As of 2003, DAHR named Communitas Foundation as the sole distributor of the funds received as budget support.

Even in the early 2000s, the distribution of funds ocurred based on criteria that lacked precise definition. This topic was spoken of for the first time on the Discussion Forum on Internet news website Transindex, then Krónika newspaper wrote a series of investigative reports about the Communitas funds. Given that the money was intended for supporting the Hungarian minority, it was sent to Communitas foundation and DAHR as a political entity also benefited of budget support.

As of 2009, DAHR gave up their share of party funding and took up the role of manager of the fund allocated to the Hungarian minority. From that moment on the role of the Communitas Foundation was to distribute the funds coming from DIR via DAHR, more precisely, to distribute a share of it based on open applications.

Our report focuses on the timeframe 2009-2015, because we lack all essential information on this period, given that nor DAHR, nor any media outlet in Transylvania has ever published details related to it.

For quite a while now an ongoing debate evolves around who the beneficiary of this money is, who owns it? Does it belong to the organization identified as the manager according to the governmental decision, or does it belong to the Hungarian community in Transylvania? The apparent nitpicking has much at stake. If indeed DAHR is entitled to this money – as its leadership claims –, then DAHR has the right distribute the money according to its own criteria. In that case, they have the obligation to report to the DIR, to the General Secretariat and to state intitutions having the authority to audit on public money spendings.

But if the government created these funds for the benefit of the Hungarian minority and DAHR is only the institution with legal personality managing it, then DAHR has the moral duty, if not the legal obligation to report to the Hungarian community about how that money is being spent.

An annex of a governmental decision states DAHR’s role clearly and we learn that the second interpretation is the right one. It is the annex of the 369/2009 governmental decision which for the first time names DAHR as the beneficiary and as the administrator of the budget support allocated to the Hungarian minority community.

But let us go back to the financial support granted by the General Secretariat: this money cannot be spent according to DAHR’s own will. The Government decisions and the protocols signed between DIR and the beneficiaries state clearly that the money is to be spent on maintainance, on headquarters’ repairing costs, on rent, on supporting media outlets and book publishing, on cultural events, on movable and immovable property and can also be used as own contribution for EU applications.

NGOs used to handing in financial statements on how Norwegian Funds or European Funds were spent will be surprised to know that the A3 form which contains DAHR ’s the detailed report of the annual 4-4.5 million euros, is basically a single page of A4 paper.

The final report with all the annexes is not thicker than an approximately 100 pages document which is enclosed in a folder and contains mostly the list of events supported by DAHR, together with the list of sponsored NGOs and publications taking up dozens of pages.

As we are going through the annexes of the A3 folders it is striking to see that DAHR reported on spendings amounting to several hundred thousand euros by providing minimal, outlined information and in some other cases reports consisted of merely one or two words.

When it comes to purchasing real estate, no sales agreement copies nor land registry documents are annexed to the A3 forms. In the case of a real estate purchased in Bucharest, we only found the following: „Real estate, Bucharest” and the amount payed, 904 thousand lei (approximately 200 thousand euros).

In case a real estate undergoes renovation works, there is no references made to what kind of works are being carried out, nor companies carrying out works are named.

The same occurs with cars: for instance we learn that in 2013 an advance of 38 thousand lei (8500 euros) was payed for a Skoda vehicle, but it is not clear whether the car has eventually been purchased or not.

In some cases we encounter striking inaccuracies: DAHR has given the incorrect address of at least one real estate purchased in 2009. At the mentioned address in Cluj we found a seed plot with a tiny wooden shelter on it. The purchased real estate can be found at a different number.

But let’s take a close look at a document handed in to the DIR: DAHR’s budget of revenue and expenditures. If we look at the DAHR income, we see that the biggest share of the yearly budget came from the support received from DIR. DAHR, based on the agreement signed with DIR cannot use the received budget support for election campaign purposes, those expenses have to be covered by funds coming from other sources. But what is striking is that membership fees and donations go up in election years (2012, 2014).

When it comes to expenditure, it seems that not only DAHR’s operation costs, but also, at least partly, some expenses of DAHR supported NGOs (through Communitas Foundation or any other funds) are being covered, be it fuel costs, consumables (office supplies and cleaning products), or travel and delegation costs.

We believe this is the only explanation of why these costs are so high. In 2012, 403 thousand lei (90 thousand euros) was spent on fieldwork expenses – and if we divide that with the amount established by the law (which in case of domestic travels is of 32.5 lei/day and in case of travels abroad, approximately 35 euros/day), then we have 12 thousand days of domestic travels or 2600 days spent abroad.

If we look at fuel expenses, we see the same pattern: the 650 thousand lei (145 thousand euros) for 2012 is the equivalent of approximately 110 thousand of liters of fuel (at a price of 6lei/liter), and this is enough to cover 1.4 million kilometers. This means that this amount of fuel is enough to circle the planet 36 times.

Between 2010-2012 the funds that can be used for organizing cultural events grew constantly: while in 2010 only 3.5 million lei (780 thousand euros) were destined for such purposes, in the electoral year of 2012 this amount doubled and reached 6.16 million lei (1.37 million euros). It is not clear what amount was spent on organizing DAHR events and what was spent on events organized by civil organizations. It is not clear either which were campaign related events, for which DAHR budgeted 3.5 million lei (780 thousand euros).

As of 2013 the budget structure changes. A series of items representing material expenses disappear, but a new list of expenses is introduced, namely the civil organizations that DAHR supports financially. We learn that the yearly budget of the Communitas Foundation bearing the role of organizing calls for applications for Hungarian civil organizations of Transylvania is of 5.8- 7.9 million lei (1.3-1-7 million euros). The open call for applications only takes up half of the funds, 3.7-4 million lei, the other half is destined for the invitation-based call for applications.

Examining the budget structure we find out that there is a separate fund of 1.2-1.3 million lei (300 thousand euros) destined for cultural events organized by DAHR. We can suppose that this fund covered the 2013 DAHR Congress held at Miercurea Ciuc/Csíkszereda and the 2015 one at Cluj/Kolozsvár. The financial report states that the cost of the former was 320 thousand lei (71 thousand euros). The latter was significantly more expensive: 458 thousand lei (100 thousand euros).

Support for media outlets and bookpublishing represents a separate item, even though Communitas Foundation also has a public allowance for these activities. What is again surprising is that the Károly Kós Academy (KKA) led by the the former DAHR president, Béla Markó has an allocated fund of 600 thousand lei (130-140 thousand euros). Another surprise is to discover a number of Hungarian civil organizations in Transylvania which benefit of a yearly normative support.

But now let us get back to the financial reports DAHR sent in to the Department of Interethnic Relations and the Government Secretariat. This report bears the name of A3 form together with the annexes attached to it.

The reports archived at DIR are basically folders consisting of approximately 100 pages, where the essential information on big payments takes up only a few pages. The rest of these documents consist of exhaustive lists of civil organizations that benefited of financial support. We did not request any copies of these lists.

As all the documents sent in by DAHR to the Government Secretariat, these A3 forms lack details and seem to be nothing more than a summary. Even as we skim through them, it’s striking to see that for small amounts up to 500-1000 lei a detailed description is given, huge payments are dealt with in just a couple of words.

What we’ve learnt from these reports is that the bulk of the financial support is spent on operation costs (repair and maintenance of the headquarters, staff expenditure, movable and immovable property).

Events make up a very extensive items list – but it is not clear which of them are DAHR events (be it Council of Alliance Representatives or Congress) and which are cultural events organized by civil organizations with Communitas Foundation support.

The list of salaries reveals that the number of employees has doubled since 2009. While the majority of employees are definitely not overpayed, leadership members receive a salary that is way above the monthly average salary and when it comes to service cars, leadership members ask for almost all the extras. Even though these cars are already quite expensive even with the standard equipment.

As we skim through the A3 reports, we see that the yearly maintanance and repair costs of the headquarters usually amounting to 3-4.5 million lei, in 2011 is significantly higher: in a single year DAHR spent 8.5 million lei (1.9 million euros) for these purposes.

This is quite unusual, as DAHR, despite having a couple of bigger headquarters where several dozens of employees work, this amount would not be that exaggerated, but the majority of DAHR’s headquarters do not have more than 1 or 2 rooms and there only a maximum of a couple of employees work, so in those cases it is almost impossible to have such huge overhead costs.

Besides the A3 form, every year DAHR sends in a wage grid put together as superficially as the rest of documents we had the chance to examine. The wage grid reports on a number of 168 employees for 2015, whereas Péter Kovács, the Executive Director of DAHR stated in a Facebook post that DAHR has 116 employees (when we created the infographics, we considered the data found in the documents sent in to the government.)

Moreover, it is not clear either wheather the salaries declared in the reports should be understood as gross or net payments and the 2015 wage grid reveals that the leadership positions do not reflect the current DAHR structure. There are two presidential positions named (probably from the days when László Borbély was Policy Vice President, but since then, the Secretary General became Executive Director, and his seven Executive Deputy Directors assisting him were not included on the list.

If we are to trust this report, we can see that since 2009 the number of rapporteurs has gone from 21 to 34, and the number of employees fulfilling the vaguely defined position of „computer operator” went up from 8 to 30.

We should also be aware that by today the number of those who are assisting DAHR in spreading its message is very high, especially if we consider the overall number of the Hungarian minority living in Transylvania. In 2015 five journalists and six editors were included in the wage grid.

The yearly amounts spent on cars are significant as we learn from the list of movable and immovable properties. According to our calculations, since 2009 DAHR bought 24 new cars using the allocated governmental support. According to Péter Kovács, DAHR owns 29 cars.

The vast majority of these cars are fairly equipped Dacia Logans – probably used by the employees. Those in management positions use Škoda Octavia, a medium category vehicle or the high-end category Volkswagen Passat or Škoda Superb.

Hunor Kelemen, the DAHR president received a Honda Accord in 2009, but lately he was seen using a Škoda Superb (though, according to our information, he still has the Honda as well.)

The most expensive vehicle is a VW Multivan, a minibus that the Hungarian PM, Viktor Orban also uses during his delegations. Even the stardard models are fairly expensive at a price of 37 thousand euros. DAHR paid 230 thousand lei (51 thousand euros), meaning they opted for almost all extras.

In the past years DAHR has also brought a series of expensive real estates, like the 3 room apartment located in Cluj, on Fagului street, bought for 800 thousand lei (180 thousand euros) and a real estate in Bucharest, purchased in 2014 for 900 thousand lei (200 thousand euros). In 2012 an advance of 100 thousand lei was payed for a third real estate – but its location is not clear from the reports, nor is it clear whether it has eventually been purchased or not.

One of the main arguments DAHR provides when asked about the reports on the received governmental funds is that the Romanian authorities are constantly controlling the organization and no problems were ever found. Nor the consulted documents nor the talks held with the representatives of DIR ever mention the controls carried out on how the funds were spent.

The report is a formality due to the fact that in the past 25 years DAHR was a member of the government coalition parties and the Department of Interethnic Relations was run by DAHR politicians: by Attila Markó, and later, until 2015, by Enikő Laczikó. The yearly protocols between DAHR and DIR are signed by government representatives who are DAHR members.

As we have found out, DIR checks the reports in terms of accountancy accuracy: what matters is that the numbers add up. No questions are ever asked about the purpose the money has been spent on.

„Besides the documents enclosed in the protocol, we have no other sources of information at our disposal” – Amet Aledin, the DIR Secretary of State told Átlátszó Erdély when asked about details of the financial reports.

„Since the department was created, it did not have a role as an auditor. The department was mainly responsible for wiring the financial support and the amount is not even included in the department’s budget” said Attila Markó, the former head of DIR to Átlátszó Erdély, adding that according to the legislation in force the department has the role of monitoring and no authority for auditing. This means that it’s only concern is that the money is spent in legally defined terms.

We also addressed the Court of Auditors and asked for the 2009-2015 protocols of the controls carried out at DAHR and civil organizations close to DAHR.

We were told that the last control carried out at DAHR took place in 2009, when suggestions were made for the 2008 period, a time frame when DAHR benefitted of funds in accordance to the party law in force. The NGOs we mentioned earlier did not undergo any control for that period.

We wanted to know what the Court of Auditors found, as this is the only state institution with the authority to examine not only the legality of the public money spending, but also on whether the money is spent appropriately.

We came across another Court of Auditors report from 2009 which basically states the same what we are: the system for reporting is defined too vaguely, a more precise definition of how minority organizations should report on their budget support is needed, and a separate law is required for its regulation.

The Court of Auditors points out that there are no legally defined procedures on how the financing of these institutions should work, nor the maximum allowed accountable costs are set. The share of co-financing is not fixed nor are the salaries of the employees. The protocol also states that DIR should have elaborated a draft law.

As a result of the series of articles published by Átlátszó Erdély, DAHR and the Communitas Foundation started publishing their financial data in July 2016. We have not received any reply for our information requests sent in May 2016, and we opted for legal redress.

Zoltán Sipos

Translation: Etelka Tamás-Blaha

This story was supported by the Center for Independent Journalism as part of the project “Relaunching Journalism via Supporting Investigative Journalism and Providing Incubation Services of Digital Media” funded by the Open Society Foundations. The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of funders who have no involvement whatsoever in content produced through this project or any prior knowledge of content before its publication.

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„(Based on) this completely irrelevant sketch you cannot claim its author to be an informant. Everything points to the fact that he is not an informant and he will never become one. At least I am skeptical about it, but I am open to all arguments against it (…). It’s our duty to do everything in our powers to make this person an useful informant, one that he could become if he chose to.”

These sarcastic sentences were written by lieutenant colonel Roman Chercheş, the leader of the Counterintelligence Department of the Securitate in Mureș County, on the margins of a two-page report from November 12, 1987, in which György Frunda gave a detailed description of his trip to Western Europe.

Probably these frustrated lines describe best the ongoing cat and mouse game played by the Securitate and the young lawyer starting from 1979 until 1989.

One of the most prominent politicians of the Hungarian community

After the revolution, György Frunda had an impressive political career. As early as 1990, he became Member of Parliament on behalf of DAHR (the political party of the Hungarian community living in Romania).

Being a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1990-1992, he contributed to drafting the Romanian Constitution. In 1996 and 2000 he was the DAHR candidate in the presidential elections. In the ’90s his international career also took off: from 1993 to 2013, Frunda was member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), being a Vice-Chairperson of the European People’s Party Group.

The original piece in Hungarian:

Jelentett is meg nem is: itt van Frunda szekusdossziéja

In recent years, certain pieces of information have surfaced about Frunda’s collaboration with the communist secret services, the loathed Securitate. The former DAHR senator denied the allegations each time, saying that on the contrary, it was the Securitate that harassed him.

Based on Frunda’s Securitate files found at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), we can say that the relation between Frunda and the secret services was not a straightforward one: every „rapprochement” was followed by „enstrangement”, and even though the lawyer has never rejected collaboration categorically, he was being careful and gave only general, not very useful information to the secret services.

He outwitted the Securitate

According to the documents at our disposal, the lawyer, who lived in a relative luxury during the ’80s in the Transylvanian town of Tîrgu Mureş/Marosvásárhely, asked the help of the Securitate once, if not twice when he intended travelling abroad.

After his return, he outwitted the Securitate officer who expected a ‘compensation’ of him: if he wrote reports, the information he sent in did not meet the expectations of the secret services. Sometimes he even failed to show show up at the meetings.

Based on the documents at its disposal, CNSAS has already declared, three times in a row, in 2004, 2005 and 2006 that Frunda did not collaborate with the Securitate. In April 2015 his case came up again, as new files were added to his case.

On the 21st of April 2015, CNSAS stated again, that despite the new documents, Frunda does not classify as an informant as he hasn’t reported on activity opposing the system, and his reports were not limiting any human rights.

However, the files clearly reveal that Frunda is not telling the truth when he says that he was not a collaborator, but on the contrary it was him who was harassed. He couldn’t have been the victim of Securitate as he asked the help of the secret services, making them believe that he would eventually return the favor.

A promising lawyer passionate about travel

The reports we have at our disposal follow the life of György Frunda during the ’80s. At this time Frunda was in his thirties, an led a relatively comfortable life as a young, talented and very popular lawyer.

At the invitation of a musicologist friend from New York, Frunda travels to the United States between the 3rd and the 31st of October, 1979. Following his return, in November he writes detailed reports about his travel (in those times, people traveling to the West were obliged to write these reports).

Besides the reports, the Securitate send several informants ato follow him and verify the content of his reports in order to exclude any possible contradiction. They wanted to find out his opinion about the US and see whether his behavior has changed, and understand the extent to which he was influenced by the connections acquired overseas.

Rejects to sign a written commitment with the Securitate

On the 5th of December, 1979 a report suggests Frunda’s recruitment in order to collect information on the activities, behaviors and concerns of foreigners visiting Tîrgu Mureş. He is recruited on the 19th of December, 1979 with the code name „Emil”, but he rejects to sign a written commitment.

During 1980 „Emil” writes eight reports about the foreigners who visit Tîrgu Mureş. He gives information about his neighbor with plans of marrying a foreigner and also reports on a visit of an American citizen born in Tîrgu Mureş.

According to his officer, captain Voșloban, these reports are short and factual. When he had to evaluate a person’s attitude, Frunda makes neutral or positive remarks.

He doesn’t show up at meetings

But the Securitate is not satisfied with „Emil’s” performance. On the 15th of June, 1982 they plan on give up on him, because

„since August, 1980 it is impossible to contact him and he hasn’t shown up at the meetings that were previously agreed on by all parties”.

Less than one month later, starting with July 14th, 1982 the Securitate starts following him more closely. This time he is given the code name „Furnea”. He has informants sent to follow him, his phone calls are intercepted, his correspondence is opened, and the conversations he has in restaurants with foreign visitors are wire-tapped.

Things change in January, 1985 when the Securitate seeks to contact György Frunda again. During 1985, a series of mostly positive evaluations are written about Frunda, and at the end of the reports Securitate officers give instructions on contacting him again and finding out whether he could be recruited.

Two years later, in 1987, Frunda wants to travel abroad again, this time to Western Europe. He asks for the help of Captain Puskás of the Securitate to obtain a passport.

Apart from contacting Captain Puskás on June 25th, Frunda writes to the Securitate as well. He makes a list of the people who would be hosting him abroad and presents the planned route of his trip, adding that

„Due to my vocation, I consider it my duty to inform authorities of cases of law infringement in the country (…) I do not need to be an informant in order to be fair and report about the possible attitudes that are against the law in case I become aware of it” – Frunda writes.

Securitate recruits him again in 1987

He must have been allowed to travel, because a handwritten, two page report on his trip, written on November 12, 1987 can be found among his files. In this report he mentions the people he met, the people who hosted him, and also talks about who they were and where they were working.

On October 30th, 1987 Captain Ferenc Puskás suggests Frunda’s recruitement, again, bringing up the following argument:

„We need to look for informants working within the justice system and recruit people with cultural and artistic interests, usually having a good network, especially because most of them maintain contact with suspicious foreigners and conduct activities that are of interest to the authorities.”

The recruitment takes place on the 30th of October 1987, in György Frunda’s home.

„Everything went as we planned: Frunda was very pleased and happy about the help received from the Captain, he gave a detailed description of his travel, talked about peole he had met and what he had seen (there are two reports about these), proving again that he has an exceptional memory and has a talent for summarizing facts and events.

We suggested that he collaborated with us on everything that might be of interest to us and help us the same way as we have when he requested it. The candidate declared that he was willing to help us, but we shouldn’t ask anything that falls within the category of professional secrecy. He also declared that due to his profession, he is familiar with his duties of notifying the competent bodies in case he becomes aware of any information that might be considered a threat to state security”.

Fails to show up, again

One year after his recruitment, on the 20th of December, 1988 an evaluation about his behaviour states the following: „the informant has not provided any information since the date of his recruitment and has not shown up to the meeting with the handler”. Moreover, as the report points out, Frunda maintains relations with his acquaintances living abroad,

Consequently, Frunda must be called in and must be told that he has to make a decision. Given that he is not working on important issues, he can be requalified to becoming a support person, if he is willing to collaborate. If not, we will observe him and deal with him later on – the report concludes.

In an interview given to Átlátszó Erdély, György Frunda denied categorically his collaboration with the Securitate.

Zoltán Sipos
Translation: Etelka Tamás-Blaha
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