The position of Fidesz - Hungarian Civic Union on the recent farmers' protests

Dátum: 2005-03-17 14:11:00, eredeti URL: http://archiv.fidesz.hu/index.php?Cikk=35403
KCMDB-be feltöltve: 2024-05-04 21:29:24.639323, Feltöltő: fidesz_hu_scraper_v2

History

September 2002: Consensual political agreement among the four parliamentary parties that the government would make all efforts to help the farmers in the process of EU accession.

December 2002: Following the closure of the accession talks in Copenhaguen, the government promised again to deliver the farmers the funding (EU subsidies plus national supplementary payments) they are entitled to.

February 2004: Agreement between the government and the farmers' organisations on certain concrete measures enhancing competitiveness.

Causes behind the protests

The government failed to live up to any of these commitments. The subsidies farmers are entitled to have not been paid yet, with some of the claims dating back to last year. The government is legally and politically bound, but has failed, to transfer the farmers the following payments:

 The 30-percent national subsidy for 2004, supplementing the 25-percent EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funds. This title has been paid long ago in other new member states like Poland or Slovakia.

 The Hungarian pre-financing of the 25-percent EU CAP funds (Simplified Area Payment Scheme) for 2004, which will be reimbursed by the EU for the Hungarian central budget later this year,

 Market intervention subsidies for cereals,

 Interest rate subsidies,

 The VAT unlawfully withheld by the tax authority, which also remains unpaid for other businesses and SMEs.

As opposed to government claims to the contrary, the above list is not one of extra demands, but subsidies the farmers are entitled to under law. Farmers in other new member states have already duly received their 25-percent share of the CAP subsidies and the 30-percent national contributions, whereas their colleagues in the older member states receive the full amount of CAP subsidies. Therefore, Hungarians suffer a double competition handicap. Last year, the growth of Hungarian agricultural import has exceeded that of the export fifteen times, making Hungary a net food importer.

Budget deficit and disbursement malfunction

The consequences of the failed economic policy of the socialist-free democrat government, the excessive budget deficit and state debt are reaching a range of groups in Hungarian society and it has now reached the farmers. Their situation is similar to that of the businesses which expect in vain the VAT reimbursement from the tax authority. The government seems to be delaying all payments in order to trim the deficit, in spite of the fact that the Hungarian budget may expect reimbursement of the CAP subsidies from the European Union later this year. The situation is aggravated by the apparent malfunctioning of the disbursement agency, set up hastily and with significant delay. Data fed by the farmers into the system have been mal-processed by the agency on multiple occasions, which served as a pretext for the government not to pay. Although the government is diverting responsibility towards the farmers for the disorder, a recent EU study (the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission) indicates that Hungarian farmers have the third best record, after Belgium and Ireland, as far as the quota of accepted applications for EU funds are concerned.

The government started a smear campaign against the farmers

Pretending as if the farmers were to blame themselves for not having correctly filled the application forms was not the only element of the government's smear campaign, which was aimed at alienating the rest of the society from the farmers. The government was communicating about an extra sum of HUF 200 billion demanded by the farmers, a claim that could only be satisifed, the prime minister said, by scrapping family benefits, increased taxes and doubled medicine costs. Hungarian farmers are also said to have never in history received as much funding as this year. At the same time, the government treated and continues to treat the farmers in an absolutely unacceptable, insulting and humiliating way. Minister Németh at one point called them "a bunch of power-thirsty people", whereas socialist party chairman István Hiller labelled the movement as the action of the extreme right, despite having acknowledged the legitimacy of their demands a few days before. Prime Minister Gyurcsány refused outright to talk to them, even though the incapacity of his agricultural minister has proven apparent.

However, the farmers did not demand any extra budget money, let alone an additional HUF 200 billion. If the government fully respected its legal obligations, that would still be HUF 70 billion short of the amount disbursed from the national budget in the last year of the Orbán-government (2002) for the farmers.

The agreement signed by the agricultural ministry and the farmers on 13 March has clearly demonstrated that the farmers' demands can indeed be satisified without any extra taxes or other cataclysms threatened with by the government. (It is also to be noted that the agreement was finally reached on the lines of the redistribution package proposed earlier by Fidesz.) What is spectacular, however, is that the prime minister continues the smear campaign despite the agreement. Having called the accord a "reasonable compromise" when it was signed, the prime minister is now talking about a "victory over the farmers" and uses derogatory language to describe their demands.

The recent campaign of the socialists against the farmers has apparently consisted of the very same divisive elements, aimed at playing off groups of Hungarian society against each other by generating populist fears, that characterised socialist strategy in the past years. Such was the campaign which threatened with the onslaught of 23 million Romanians as a result of the Orbán-Nastase agreement before the 2002 elections, as well as the one which predicted a flood of millions of ethnic Hungarians from the neighbouring countries before last December's referendum on double citizenship.

Budapest, 16 March 2005