Global Integrity Report: Hungary - 2010

This peer-reviewed country report includes:

Integrity Indicators Scorecard: Scores, scoring criteria, commentary, references, and peer review perspectives for more than 300 Integrity Indicators.

Reporter's Notebook: An on-the-ground look at corruption and integrity from a leading local journalist.

Corruption Timeline: Ten years of political context to today's corruption and integrity issues.

HIGHLIghts

Hungary’s overall performance has not changed significantly since Global Integrity’s last assessment of the country in 2008. Hungary continues to do well in certain areas, such as having relatively strong civil society and ombudsman institutions, while demonstrating weaknesses in other areas that should be cause for concern. The latter includes ongoing problems with media restrictions, particularly the passage of a controversial media law in January 2011 that has the potentially chilling effect of increasing self-censorship among reporters. In addition, while whistle-blowing legislation exists, “there is no government institution appointed to implement it.” Conflicts of interest regulations for members of the civil service and executive branch are ineffective, while Hungary suffers from serious problems with transparency around political financing; several discrepancies have been discovered between political parties’ reported and actual income and spending. The audit agency has become more politicized, particularly with the ruling party's decision to appoint a politician as its new head.

From the Reporter's Notebook: The law puts a cap of 386 million forints (US$1.9 million) per party per campaign not including in-kind donations, or 1 million forints (US$5,000) per candidate. But the limit doesn’t mesh with modern campaign economics. The cap effectively forces parties to falsify their spending and income results, reducing transparency and accountability and encouraging corrupt financing practices. Anonymous sources quoted by the media have described financing channels such as rigged tenders, kickbacks on real estate deals, fraudulent contracts, false invoicing, and bribes.