Published: 5.2.2023
The government has recently announced, to loud rapturous fanfare, that teachers’ salaries will be raised by ten per cent – that’s right, by only ten per cent – but the „biggest pay settlement since the change of regime” is still to come in the sector because the Brussels money is not coming.
You really don’t know whether to laugh out loud at this wording or to pop the knife out in your pocket. Even by Fidesz standards, governmental arrogance and bluster in this form have not been seen pouring out of the powers that be very often in the last decade, although there has been plenty of governmental arrogance and bluster on all levels.
Fidesz claims that teachers’ bloodcurdlingly low salaries will be gradually increased over the next few years, so that by 2025 (yes, only by 2025) the average teacher’s salary will reach 80 per cent of the average graduate salary. This is also quite thick-skinned from a government, with its fourth two-thirds majority and emergency decrees, to raise teachers’ salaries not to twice the average graduate salary, or at least to the level of the average graduate salary, but to only 80 per cent (!). Of course, that too only if – at least according to the official propaganda – Brussels would be so kind as to finally give us the funds Hungary is owed.
They are trying to sell this to us in a world where anything can be turned into a nationally significant investment with a stroke of the government’s pen, and where the government can pour billions of public money into anything it likes without any control whatsoever: be it a mobile phone operator, a stadium, a small railway or a low-standard parrot commando. The money is there, but only for what matters to the powerful. There would be enough for teachers’ salaries, but that is not a priority for the ‘national’ government.
The latter was already perfectly evident from the fact that the government’s original national plan, which it first submitted to Brussels in order to draw down recovery funds, did not contain a single word about a pay rise for teachers or a career model. It was, in fact, put into the document under pressure from advocacy organisations and opposition MEPs, which means that what is now being claimed as Brussels money, if it had been up to them, would not actually exist. (So much for who really wanted and wants to prevent the teachers from getting a pay rise; that is just another sly Fidesz lie.)
But it gets even uglier than that because the government says that they can only implement a real pay rise when the frozen Brussels money finally arrives – and that’s not true either. Fidesz is actually fooling the teachers with this narrative, and it only proves how it really feels about Hungarian teachers. Let me explain briefly:
EU funds for education (apart from the Horizon and Erasmus+ budgets) can basically be drawn from two places: the much-vaunted and currently still frozen so-called Recovery Fund, and the so-called Human Resource Development Operational Programme of the seven-year EU budget. The former can basically finance the purchase of equipment, and the development of teaching materials and teaching aids, while the latter provides the money for the teachers’ career model, i.e. the pay rise.
Moreover, it is a fact that the operational programmes currently frozen under the conditionality mechanism due to the government’s crimes essentially concern energy, transport and urban development funds, while the money for teachers’ pay is in the Human Resource Development Operational Programme, which is not affected by the freeze.
In concrete terms, it is therefore not true that the pay increases cannot be paid until the reform of the judicial system and the full implementation of the rule of law milestones, i.e. the expected release of EU funds. In fact, under the agreement with the EU, the necessary payments can be made from this fund, the invoices for which will indeed be paid by the European Commission after the conclusion of the rule of law dispute, but there is no declared risk of compensation for these payments, as the freeze does not affect these funds.
In other words, the government could without further ado advance the promised pay rise in the secure knowledge that the back funding of this amount is assured. This would not be unprecedented either, as the government has already spent a significant part of the frozen recovery fund, around 20 per cent of it: for example, HUF 8 billion was allocated to Lőrinc Mészáros’ power supply company.
So the government could, if it wanted to, settle the bill and pay the promised wage increase now; or even do more. The money is available; it will certainly not be lost, it just needs a simple government decision. It’s not up to Brussels, not up to the opposition, not up to the weather, it’s up to the government in full power.
Even they themselves admitted as much at a recent government briefing, where, in response to a question, they acknowledged that EU money for teachers’ pay would not be affected by the freezes. They said the only reason they had not acted was that „we are being cautious.” Good one. Not cautious, but cynical and arrogant. But what can we expect from a government that claims to be nationalist and says that money spent on education is not an investment but a ‘cost’? Abraham Lincoln once said: „You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” One day, even Fidesz’s reign, built on lies, will end. Sooner or later, it will. And many of the people currently in power will crumble in shame.
dr. István Ujhelyi
Member of the European Parliament
Founder of the Community of Chance
05/02/2023