The European Commission appears to have taken the right step, as it has reportedly proposed to the Hungarian government that a significant part of the Recovery and Resilience Fund should be used to pay teachers” salaries and instead cut back on tourism development funding, among other things.

Along with other organisations, Clean Air Action Group has been calling for significant reallocations in EU funding and in the Hungarian budget for decades: much more money should have been spent on human resources development already, and this could have been done by eliminating environmentally harmful subsidies.

“In 2016, our organisation submitted such a proposal together with 21 other organisations, but the Ministry of Finance only replied that it was not its role to comment on NGO proposals. We believe that many of the current problems could have been prevented if the government had taken these proposals seriously. For example, ignoring professional arguments has led to a situation where EU funding has significantly worsened the situation in public education, rather than improving it. However, it seems that the European Commission has now become much more open to our proposals”, said András Lukács, President of the Clean Air Action Group.

The Clean Air Action Group already wrote in its opinion on the Partnership Agreement, which is the basis for the use of EU funds, that tourism development “means that partly the EU and Hungarian taxpayers would finance investments that are environmentally and economically unsustainable, far exceeding the tolerance of the area, often with enormous natural devastation. The short-term profit of these investments will go to private actors, while the burden of the necessary public services, environmental damage and, in the longer term, facilities that prove unsustainable will fall on the community.”

“In our opinion on the Economic Development and Innovation Operational Programme, we also argued that the financing of tourism is well known as a key driver of clientalism in Hungary. A significant amount of EU money has already been spent to support the construction of new hotels, which has led to undesirable competition: while new hotels have been built with EU money, many existing hotels have gone bankrupt, one of the main reasons being that they could not compete with new hotels built with public money. And teachers’ salaries can and should be increased even if Hungary does not yet have access to new EU funds. The necessary funds could be provided by eliminating harmful or unnecessary state subsidies,” said Zoltán Pogátsa, board member of the Clean Air Action Group.

The reallocation of EU funds for teachers’ salaries will therefore serve economic development, environmental protection and the fight against corruption. The Clean Air Action Group hopes that the Hungarian budget will also move in this direction.