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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why should we deal with agriculture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are one million less consumer. But how come?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are agricultural and rural development subsidies spent on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can farmers find out about what is fundable?

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

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

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

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

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

What do farmers need to be eligible for subsidies?

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

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

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

This is how you apply for public money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much public money should a farm receive?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fewer and fewer farmers get more and more money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what does APIA disclose then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organic farming and showcase greening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bigger the area, the smaller the subsidy should be

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

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

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

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

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

The farmers’ trust is the hardest to cultivate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Why should we care about who is responsible for a back country road built on a huge landslip? Is it newsworthy that the mayor of a village of 1,000 inhabitants “forgot” to mention in his wealth declaration that he had hundreds of thousands of euros in revenue from EU-subsidized land cheaply rented from the local council? Who is interested in the two women from a 500-people village who aspired to become local councilors, but couldn’t because the male majority rigged the pre-election to make their running impossible?

Usually, none of these stories will make the headlines in a national news outlet. Yet, these stories are very important for small communities: these are the kind of daily problems many people living in rural areas face and talk about. Why shouldn’t they be relevant for urban audiences based in regional or national urban centers?

The importance of responsible and detailed coverage of local topics increased, because in large parts of rural Romania there are no local media: if there are local news outlets, they usually do nothing more than copy-paste press releases. Local reporting has been replaced by local Facebook groups filled with user generated content of various quality, which is not a surprise: small communities still need to share information and to debate pressing issues.

Investigative Reporting for the Hungarian Community

Investigating hyperlocal topics is not only an obligation: it can have unexpected gains, as Átlátszó Erdély (Transparent Transylvania) recently found out. Átlátszó Erdély is the only independent, nonprofit newsroom in Romania doing investigative journalism in the public interest, focusing on the 1,2 million Hungarian community living in Transylvania.

Founded in December 2014, Átlátszó Erdély works to facilitate public debate through investigative journalism and fact-based stories about issues concerning the Transylvanian community. Átlátszó Erdély is monitoring the way public money is spent, advocating for transparency, as well as freedom of expression.

Reporting in the Hungarian community in Romania is more difficult because this community tends to be more conservative and less open to progressive ideas such as open government, accountability and media freedom. Investigative journalism does not have a long tradition in the region.

There is distrust in the Romanian state institutions, and decisions within the community institutions are usually taken informally, with little room for public scrutiny. People tend to distrust those who are openly criticizing the establishment. Many believe that unity and solidarity is the only way this community can survive in Romania, and critical voices are in fact agents of the majority looking to divide, and thus, weaken the community.

Orbán’s Influence on Hungarian Language Media from Romania

Older generations tend to watch Hungarian TV stations — both the public broadcaster and commercial television — with an editorial agenda fully controlled by the Hungarian government. The local media landscape is dominated by a large media conglomerate consisting of local and regional newspapers, on-line media, as well as local radios, financed by the Hungarian government. A smaller part of the media is supported financially by the largest Hungarian party from Romania, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR), a party that is a close partner of the Hungarian government.

As most media outlets are financed as part of PR strategies of political actors, self-censorship amongst journalists is the norm rather than the exception. The influence of the Hungarian government is high, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is very popular. His party, Fidesz , secured 98% of the votes in the Hungarian community during the last Hungarian parliamentary elections. As the Hungarian government is regarded as a model for the Hungarian political establishment in Transylvania, ‘illiberal’ practices are becoming the norm.

People are very receptive to the propaganda of the Hungarian government: this is the reason why for many Hungarians living in Transylvania, the term “liberal” lost its original meaning and became the synonym for whatever contradicts the official narrative of Viktor Orbán. In this context, “liberal” means something “wrong”, “against the community” and “influence of foreign forces”.

The “Liberals” are Covering the Countryside

Átlátszó Erdély with its critical coverage quickly earned the “liberal” label. This perception is a problem because part of the readership dismisses/does not trust information published by Átlátszó Erdély. As the vast majority of the community is conservative, our readership growth is limited. Moreover, our reporting work is more difficult because some of the people we try to talk to do not trust us.

So we started thinking about breaking out from the bubble by covering local topics that can not easily be placed in the conservative-liberal dichotomy. For example, the story of a newly built road that slipped clearly affects everyone, regardless of his or her political views. It is a clear proof of the incompetence of the authorities.

A well-known local journalist who joined our team had a significant impact on our change of focus. Egyed Ufó Zoltán is living in a small village in the Hungarian-majority Szeklerland, and regularly receives tips from the community. Our team started to invest more time to talk to our sources and to build long-term relationships with them. By checking the tips they provided, we found that many of them lead to stories relevant for the community.

Stepping out of the “liberal” readership and reaching the involved communities with our investigations was also a challenge. As there is no local media that would pick up our stories, we decided to find the local or regional community Facebook groups and share the materials directly there.

We found that posting on Facebook groups, and then chatting with the readers from these groups was the best way to reach and engage those who are directly involved. To our surprise, these stories have a high number of readers: usually the entire community reads and shares the story.

By covering such local issues, we found that the public perception of Átlátszó Erdély was gradually starting to change. Instead of the dismissive comments, we started receiving an increasing number of supportive messages. A typical example would be: “I still don’t agree with you on many things, yet I also see that your work on this topic is valuable to the community.”

Another indicator that shows a positive change is the number of tips for possible stories, suggestions and advice we receive. On average, we have 1–2 messages per day from our readers. Some of the readers even offer to volunteer to seek expert advice, or to search for further information about a possible story.

Many times there is tangible impact as well: for example, the mayor of Tordaszentlászló — the one who “forgot” to mention in his wealth declaration that he had hundreds of thousands of euros in revenue from EU-subsidised land rentals — lost the local elections, at least partly because Átlátszó Erdély published the story about his unlawful income.

This article was originally published on the blog of Center for Media, Data and Society

The post How to Bridge Divides in Small Local Communities? Some Lessons We Learned at Átlátszó Erdély appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

At the beginning of July 2019, István Rais W. left the position of editor-in-chief of the Bihari Napló – the Hungarian daily newspaper of Bihor county, Romania – after more than twenty years, a uniquely long time in both Hungarian and Romanian press. The daily newspaper Bihari Napló is edited and published in Oradea / Nagyvárad, a city with a large Hungarian community located only eight kilometers away from the border with Hungary.

Rais formally resigned, but not from his own initiative, as we learnt from our sources requesting anonymity from the editorial staff. The publisher of the newspaper did not signal any dissatisfaction with his work: last year, Rais was elected product manager of the year at the company that publishes the daily paper.

Bihari Napló, together with several other news outlets in the Western part of Romania is published by Inform Media Press SRL, a company registered in Romania. However, important decisions are made at its parent company, the Inform Média Lapkiadó Kft. based in Debrecen, Hungary, close to the Romanian border. The majority ownership of Inform Média Lapkiadó was acquired by the Central European Press and Media Foundation (CEPMF) established by the Hungarian government. The Government of Hungary decided on the acquisition of key Hungarian media companies on the 5th of December, 2018.

The new editor-in-chief signed on by the publisher is Lehel Kristály,

a journalist from Szeklerland (central region of Romania where ethnic Hungarians form a majority), who settled in Budapest in recent years. According to our sources, Kristály does not want to give up entirely his life in Budapest and does not want to intervene in the daily content of the Bihari Napló, but asked the staff not to publish any political articles without his approval.

Since 2018, Kristály is also the press officer of the biggest annual political event of the Hungarian community in Transylvania, namely the Bálványos Summer University and Student Camp (aka Tusványos after its location in the middle of Szeklerland, Tusnádfürdő). Throughout its 30 years of existence, the weeklong event was always supported by Fidesz, the highlight of the camp being the annual speech of Viktor Orbán, prime-minister of Hungary.

István Rais W. gives up only the editorial control of the daily paper. The fact that he remains in charge of the distribution suggests that the publisher might want to change only the editorial stance of the Bihari Napló: the paper fully supported the RMDSZ (DAHR – Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania) and its local leaders. István Fodor, the director of the Inform Média Lapkiadó did not respond to our inquiry so our supposition about changing the paper‘s political direction remains unconfirmed.

We reached out to István Rais W., too, but the resigned editor-in-chief invoked his confidentiality agreement and did not want to comment on the case. Lehel Kristály also refused our request by mentioning his obligation to ask for permission from CEPMF to make a statement, a permission that he did not receive.

Budapesti kontroll alá került a legnagyobb erdélyi magyar megyei lap – Átlátszó Erdély

A napi tartalomba nem szól bele, de politikai témájú anyagot ne tegyenek közzé engedélye nélkül: ez a Bihari Napló új főszerkesztőjének, Kristály Lehelnek a kérése. Egyedülállóan hosszú idő, több mint 20 év után távozott a Bihari Napló főszerkesztői tisztségéből Rais W. István.

Several decades, multiple expectations, one editor-in-chief

Our internal sources told us that none of the owners interfered with the content of the newspaper during those two years while the publishing company was owned by Austrian businessman Heinrich Pecina (notorious for shutting down the biggest left-leaning Hungarian daily newspaper, Népszabadság), shortly by the oligarch Lőrinc Mészáros, then by the CEMPF. This non-interference surprised the employees of other Hungarian media companies with the same ownership.

While the former owners of Bihari Napló did have – over time even contradictory – expectations regarding the editorial stance of the paper, Rais still managed to retain his position as editor-in-chief since 1998, which is unique in the history of the Transylvanian media. In the ‘90s, István Rais W. tried himself in politics, too: he was elected several times as a member of the municipal council of Oradea on the list of RMDSZ, the political representation of the Hungarian community.

In the ‘90s, the newspaper was owned by its journalists and distributors, and partly by the journalists’ own Fehér Dezső Foundation. Journalists regarded this ownership structure as a guarantee of their independence, especially because outsiders could not buy shares in the paper. As we learnt, one of the insiders, a distributor started buying his colleagues’ shares in 2000, until he accumulated more than 50% of the shares, when it became clear for the others that his action was financed by Sándor Kiss, a local businessman and politician of the RMDSZ / DAHR.

Kiss bought up the Romanian local newspaper, Jurnalul Bihorean with the same method, and sold both for double the price in less than a year to an Austrian investor who bought several local media outlets on both sides of the Hungarian-Romanian border. Initially the company was called Inform Media, then rebranded as Russmedia, then renamed Inform Media in 2016, after Heinrich Pecina bought it.

(Sándor Kiss, one of the richest local businessmen, established himself in 2000 as a powerful leader of Bihor county and the county organization of RMDSZ / DAHR. According to the indictment of the National Anticorruption Directorate published in 2015, he designed and in 2003 operated a fraudulent scheme of public procurement through which he drained a few hundred thousand euros from the county’s budget in the following years. In June 2018, Kiss was sentenced to eight years imprisonment, but at the end of the year the Court of Appeal decided to restart the trial due to procedural shortcomings. In 2012, Kiss was no longer elected as the head or deputy head of the Bihor County Council. He left the leadership of RMDSZ / DAHR county organization only in 2016, well after the start of his corruption trial.)

Russmedia as a publishing company had completely different expectations and made a radical change in the content and outlook of Bihari Napló, but did not replace the editor-in-chief, although – according to our information – this was among its first measures at every other publication acquired in that period. The new, more tabloid-like concept of the paper focused on short news and large images, pushed the formerly leading political content somewhat to the periphery, banished the traditionally time-consuming genres, and favoured short articles instead of more thorough pieces. Many people could not live with the new style, the editorial staff has shrunk to a fraction through dismissals and layoffs. László Szűcs, former editor-in-chief of Bihari Napló, vividly captured this era at the end of it on Erport.ro, a political and cultural news site.

The new owner standardized the layout of its print papers regardless of the different languages and regions, and very slowly gave place to longer articles, too. The paper’s ever-increasing support for the local RMDSZ / DAHR organization did not change after Russmedia sold it to Heinrich Pecina, nor in those seven months since the CEPMF has bought it. Probably because the Bihari Napló was only a part of a bigger regional media package traded frequently after 2015. The print run was around 9500 in the first quarter of 2019 according to BRAT (Romanian Joint Industry Committee for Print and Internet), thus reaching the largest Hungarian readership in a single county in Transylvania.

Silence is not an option anymore

As Örs Szeghalmi told us, he was the most vocal journalist of the paper who publicly criticized its evident political support given from 2010 onwards to the Bihor county organization of RMDSZ / DAHR. Szeghalmi had been working at Bihari Napló since 1995, led the political column between 2004 and 2014 until he was downgraded to a reporter status because on his own Facebook profile he criticized the practice of the newspaper that regularly dedicated two or three pages in the Easter and Christmas editions to the holiday wishes of the local leaders and mayors of RMDSZ / DAHR.

One of István Rais’ last measures as the editor-in-chief was to cancel the contract of Örs Szeghalmi in June 2019. The formal reason was internal reshuffling, but Szeghalmi views it as the last step of the process of the last 15 years when he became increasingly marginalized, restrained from political topics, then removed from the impressum. He admitted that he hung to his job even after a pay cut due to the absence of an alternative in local press and because of his personal convenience, even though he considered the professional standards of the newspaper unacceptable.

Insider sources told us that his colleagues and the management of the paper viewed negatively the fact that Szeghalmi neglected his job duties, and before the more severe sanctions, he received verbal and written warnings. According to them, his dismissal is unrelated to the change of ownership or the resignation of István Rais W. who lead the paper for more than twenty years.

What the financial report shows us

From 2016, the turnover of Inform Media Press SRL has increased dramatically from 470,000 EUR to 2,6 million (2018). The likely explanation for this growth is that the company developed its printing and distribution network. During this period, however, the company is permanently on a loss: last year it produced a loss of 108,000 EUR, its debts amounting to 1 million EUR.

While the company had 87 employees in 2016 and 183 in 2017, in 2018 the number of employees is zero in the publicly available database of the Romanian Ministry of Finance.

The post Budapest takes control of the biggest Hungarian county newspaper published in Romania appeared first on Átlátszó Erdély.

Tavaly is elárasztották Erdélyt a magyarországi közpénzek. Mutatjuk a legnagyobb nyerteseket

Átlátszó Erdély Kövess minket vagy írj nekünk! A 2017-es rekordot túlszárnyalva 47 milliárd forintot ítélt meg erdélyi szervezetek számára 2018-ban a Bethlen Gábor Alap. A Sapientia-EMTE, az Iskola Alapítvány, az egyházak és a fociklubok kaptak milliárdos nagyságrendű támogatásokat. A 2017-es 46,6 milliárdnál (146 millió euró) valamivel többet, 47 milliárd forintot ítélt meg tavaly a Bethlen Gábor Alap erdélyi szervezeteknek.

Without an official aggregate, we can only have an educated guess

Because the Hungarian government does not have a public, easily searchable database containing every grant and sponsorship awarded to organizations abroad, we gathered some of the data ourselves. Because our data is likely not to be complete, we can only make an educated guess of the financial support received by these organizations.
In 2018, the most consistent financial support totaling 13,7 billion forints (43 million EUR) went to the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Sapientia-EMTE). The university will spend most of this money on development of its campuses, as well as equipment.
The Hungarian Teacher’s Association of Romania (Romániai Magyar Pedagógus Szövetség) won a number of grants totaling 5 billion forints (15 million EUR). Its most important program aims the development of kindergartens: the organization received a total of 4,2 million forints for this purpose. About 500 million forints will be spent on real estate development and equipment.
The School Foundation (Iskola Alapítvány) founded by the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians from Romania (RMDSZ) received grants totaling 2,4 billion forints (7,5 million EUR) for buying real estate in Nagyvárad (Oradea) and Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca). The buildings will be transformed into multifunctional cultural centers. The total cost of the program is about 4 billion forints.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Oradea Mare was awarded 2,3 billion forints (7,2 million EUR) for the renovation works of the Episcopal palace in Oradea.

The Futball Klub Csíkszereda football academy received 2,1 billion forints (6,6 million EUR) for the functioning costs and development of the academy. The Sepsi OSK football team was awarded another 2,1 billion forints – our investigation into the football projects financed with Hungarian public funds can be accessed here.
The Királyhágómellék Reformed Church District received 2,1 billion forints: out of this grant, 1,7 billion will be spent on a kindergarten program. The Reformed Church District in Transylvania was awarded grants in amount of 1,8 billion forints; 1 billion will be spent on kindergartens.
The The Roman Catholic Diocese of Satu Mare received 1,7 billion forints, most of this grant will be invested in the development of the diocese. The Studium Prospero Foundation received 1,4 billion forints to continue its program of building housing for doctors.

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20 years warranty, but reparations will be needed in a couple of years
During the works, the old tiles, which in many cases bore hand-written messages with historic value, were replaced with new ones, of dubious quality. We know by now that the tiles not only look like plastic, they are of poor quality; there are already cases where despite the producer’s warranty of more than 20 years, the new roofs needed reparations within a couple of years.
The mass produced tiles don’t have the same shape, appearance or mechanical characteristics as the tiles made in traditional tile mills. The evenly red colour of the modern tiles, a colour obtained through the addition of additives, stands in stark contrast with the traditional tiles used in the Transylvanian villages, damaging the street view.
But not the tiles were the only problem during restoration: eyewitnesses say that on the building sites, workers with improper qualifications worked without supervision. Their unprofessional work together with the use of modern construction materials caused irreparable damage to the A category monument buildings.
Hammer drill, chainsaw and concrete
In some cases, traditional plaster was taken down with power drills. They replaced traditional plaster with a harder, concrete-based mix, which in some places is already falling off the walls in large chunks.
Cement mixed with lime mortar was applied sloppily to the fortified walls, staining and often covering completely the original stone. Chainsaws were used to saw through the original timber beams, which were joined with modern factory timber. In some cases, modern engineering bricks of different dimensions were used to replace traditional bricks, posing potential structural problems for the future.
The old wooden beams were cut with chainsaw and replaced with new ones. In some cases, the new bricks that were used had different sizes than the original ones – this can lead to structure related problems. Archaeological surveys were either missed out completely or carried out quickly and inadequately.

A constant, professional supervision is very important during the works, because the work with a several hundred years old building often doesn’t go as planned – said one of our sources who supervised the restoration of a church as a volunteer, adding that small, but important decisions need to be made during the work.
Exactly what needs to be changed?
For instance, if the inside of the church is also restored, the centuries old furniture needs to be taken outside. But where should the workers take the benches? Will they be able to find a storage place or they leave them outside, barely covered?
In another case, the plan says that the flooring needs to be changed where it is damaged. But what does „damaged” mean, more precisely? After the floor is removed, an expert needs to be present at the site to assess which parts are attacked by fungi and need to be changed, and which don’t.
He added that the workers hired by the construction company were left on their own to work on the site. The construction manager contracted by the church, who, by the way, was not a restoration expert, visited the site only from time to time.
Even though professional renovation requires constant consultation between the architect, the constructor and the owner, the communication between the parties was quite disrupted and slow, if there was any at all. In this case, ensuring the quality of the works was up to local NGOs or to a dedicated architect.
The striking appearance of the tiles mentioned even by Prince Charles
The negligence is even more striking because in the region there are many restoration experts and also quality hand-made materials for the restoration of the fortified churches. But the lack of expertise of the contractors, bureaucracy and conflict of interests taken together lead to the situation where underqualified workers, with no training in restoration were employed and construction materials were bought from multinationals that maintain good relations with the church.

The project received much criticism. In a written statement, even Prince Charles pointed out that during the restoration of Saxon village churches stridently coloured, industrial tiles were used.
They are erasing an amazing piece of history

„After I worked for years to preserve every detail as it used to be, I cried when I saw that EU funds were used to erase an amazing piece of history” – said William Blacker, author of a cult book about the life of the Romanian provincial life.

Blacker lives in Romania since the fall of communism, and for many years, he was leading the Mihai Eminescu Trust (MET), which dedicated its activity to the preservation of architectural heritage.
Besides many other problems, the roofs of the fortified churches are the most striking „results” of the project. Apart from a few exceptions, the old tiles were replaced with new, industrial ones. Their even, flamboyant red colour is different from the roofs of the surrounding houses. For example, the roof of the Schönberg (Dealu Frumos) church is striking from a distance.

According to the researchers we spoke with, not all tiles had to be changed. In the village of Meschendorf (Brașov county) we saw that old tiles in very good condition were deposited near the church. Why the new tiles then?
Tondach takes it all
Interestingly, the new tiles were delivered almost exclusively by SC Tondach Romania SRL– despite the fact that the plans for each church was prepared by different architects.
Moreover, the church broke down the 18 church restoration project into smaller projects of only a few churches. The companies had to apply separately for each project, and then they worked separately, buying their own construction materials, including tiles.

The presence of Tondach tiles is even more intriguing when we factor in that in these counties there are several traditional tile manufactures, producing tiles that meet all quality and warranty requirements.
Coincidence or not, but Tondach’s CEO, Augustin Rusu is a friend of Friederich Gunesch, the office secretary of the Evangelical Church of Romania Consistory. Rusu maintains good relations with Dietrich Galter, the dean of the Sibiu parish. Moreover, Tondach is also a sponsor of the Evangelical Church: not long ago the company donated 1000 euros for printing flyers.
We called and emailed Aurel Rusu to receive answers to our questions, but he refused to answers saying that he does not know us personally.
„This is all made-up”
We talked to Gunesch in Sibiu in April – over a distance of couple of hundred meters, at a conference, specialists were taking turns to attack the way the church project was carried out. When we left the conference, Eugen Vaida, a tile specialist, showed us photos of workers deliberately throwing good quality tiles off the roof in order to be replaced with new ones.

„This is all made-up” – reacted Gunesch to Vaida’s accusations. The secretary said that the conference participants are too immersed into their fields of expertise and are unable to see the big picture. But the picture that Gunesch was describing is full of contradictions. „I can guarantee you that every third tile on the roof is damaged” – he said.
What can we do if this was the plan?
When we asked him why they changed all tiles when only one third of them was damaged, he blamed the architects who made the feasibility studies. „What can we do if the plan says that all tiles need to be replaced? – shrugged his shoulders, adding that following the approval of the plan, the beneficiary has no say whatsoever in the implementation process.
Gunesch added that only big manufacturers like Tondach have quality certification for the tiles. But after having contacted Siceram, a local tile factory we learned from the sales director that their products have a warranty of 40 years.

Are they exerting pressure on the architects?
One of our sources, who is familiar with the tile market and has experience in restoration works, said that it is not mere coincidence that in most of the cases Tondach tiles were used during the renovation works. „They – (multinational tile producers – editor’s note) exert pressure on the contractors as well as on the architects by using means I don’t even want to think about.” – he said.
We had no possibility to verify his statements, as the Evangelical Church refused to provide us the documentation of the project. We requested the whole project documentation including the financial reports given that the project was funded by public money – but they did not provide us with any documents.
Later, Gunesch offered to show us a part of the documents – the construction permits and the permits of the monument conservation committees. But we had no reason to look into them, because these documents didn’t include information we were interested in.

Minimal intervention, preserving historical values
In order to understand how the project was derailed, we need to see the phases of the planning process. As a first step, external experts – the Mihai Eminescu Trust and Jan Hülsemann, the leader of the much praised renovation works of the Biertan fortified church – outlined the architecture principles the renovation projects should follow: they reasoned for minimal intervention and preservation of historical values.
As a next step, the Church and the manager of the project, economist Valentin Păun wrote the the economic feasibility study. Then, a group of architects prepared separate feasibility studies for all 18 fort churches. They gave a detailed description of the work process, including the tiles that need replacement and named the type of new tiles that can be used to replace the old ones.
Has the Church intervened in the very last moment?
As a last step, the Church collected the feasibility studies done by the architects and send the application for approval together with the final plan. All architects who participated in the project said that their feasibility studies suggested the use of traditional restoration techniques together with the use of traditional products and also suggested contracting local craftsmen.
Based on what they said, there is only one explanation left: the Church intervened in the last moment, right before sending the application.

„The Church changed certain parts of the project without consulting with nor informing the architects. This is where the recommendation regarding the tiles might have been altered. Sometimes certain aesthetic considerations had a higher priority than emergency interventions” – said Silvia Demeter, the architect who lead the renovation works of the churches in Kleinschenk (Cincşor) and Kerz (Cârta).

Demeter also said that the architects received their salaries after two or three years, when the project ended. „This did not motivate the architects to be present on the site while the works were carried out” – she concluded.

The report written and leaked by Letiţia Cosnean, the architect responsible for the much criticized Meschendorf (Meşendorf) fortified church project can be seen as a counterargument to Gunesch’s accusations, according to whom architects working on the feasibility studies have to be blamed for all errors of the renovation.
„It is desirable to preserve the tarnish of the roof”
In July, 2011, not long after the Meschendorf church renovation started, Cosnean wrote a very critical report about what was going on there. The report refers to the tiles as well:

„It is desirable to preserve the tarnish of the roof. On this occasion I explained again that we specifically stressed the importance of a least invasive restoration (…) We prefer hand-made, irregular tiles with various shades. All these characteristics contribute to maintaining the style of the building.
Even if the warranty is less than 30 years, we prefer to hand-made tiles instead of modern, waterproof but industrial ones. We prefer combining new and old tiles (…)” – wrote Cosnean.

The report includes a list of local tile manufactures where the necessary new tiles can be bought from.

The architect reacted incredulously
Cosnean reacted incredulously when we told her that, according to Gunesch, the replacement of the tiles was carried out based on the recommendations of the architects. „We did not request the replacement of all the tiles, this is for sure, I suggested buying hand-made tiles” – said Cosnean.
We asked the contractor, the SC Instalatorul SRL who carried out the works on the fort churches in Kreuzdorf (Criţ) and Meschendorf (Mesendorf) about the kind of tiles they used. The reply was that they used old tiles exclusively and only when necessary ordered new tiles from the tile Bățanii Mari (Nagybacon) manufactures.

However, the Tondach brand name can be easily read on the pictures taken of the roofs of these churches. Photographs also support eye witness accounts according to which workers were throwing off thousands of old tiles from the roof of these churches.
Gunesch’s statement according to which following the approval of the project the beneficiary has no say in the execution, seems to be untrue. „It is not true, that the Church cannot intervene after having the contract signed with the contractor. This just simply cannot be true” – reacted Jan Hülsemann, the main architect of the Mihai Eminescu Trust.
The same thing everywhere
The Saxon fortified churches are just an example of how tens of millions of EU funds are being used under the false pretense of renovation. Instead Transylvanian churches, fortresses and monasteries are being destroyed. We can see the same everywhere: the old construction elements that are still in fair condition are replaced with new ones.
The Catholic monastery of Radna (Máriaradna) in Arad county was renovated for 10 million euros. The beautiful stairs made of stone were removed and replaced with a completely new one, made of concrete. The rocks of the old stairs were packed and – according to the workers – were sold in Austria.
Luke-Dale Harris, Zoltán Sipos
Translation: Etelka Tamás-Blaha
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