If the bill is passed into law, the public debt will need to be reduced in the region of 0.1 percentage point each year as long as Hungary’s growth is below 3 percent and inflation is lower than the central bank’s target of 3 percent, he added.

In the opposite scenario of higher growth and inflation, the current debtreduction rules will apply, he added. The proposed measure comes after the Fiscal Council noted that the government’s original 2016 budget draft failed to comply with a rule on limiting the nominal increase in state debt to half of the difference between projected inflation and real GDP growth.

Observance of the rule would have required a correction in the budget of 700 billion forints, it added. Another proposed change is to postpone the introduction of the flat corporate tax from the originally suggested date of January 1, 2016. Glattfelder said that the delay would not harm companies or make the tax system less predictable.

The date for introducing a flat-rate corporate tax would be deferred from January 1, 2016 to the start of 2020.

At present, Hungarian companies pay a 10% rate on a tax base up to 500 million forints and a 19% rate thereafter.

Under the new tax laws, major “strategic” public finance data will be classified for two years, Glattfelder said, insisting that access to the entire range of information could “compromise optimally low-cost financing and result in market influencing, as well as harming the state’s financial interests”.

More than 500 amendment proposals were filed to the 2016 budget, most of them by opposition parties. Lajos Kósa (Fidesz) proposed to add 1.5 billion forints (EUR 4.85m) to funding for national sports centres in connection with the World Aquatic Championships Budapest is hosting in 2017.

Cabinet chief János Lázár proposed spending 300 million forints more on the Hungarian National Gallery and 1 billion forints more on the Budapest Operetta and Musical Theatre.

He also suggested regrouping funding to benefit the Liget Budapest project, especially the Fine Arts Museum, Ethnology Museum and the Technical and Transport Museum. Péter Harrach (KDNP) would spend 300 million forints more on church-run health care institutions.

The entire Socialist parliamentary group was behind a proposal to allocate 285 billion forints for wage rises for social-service workers including teachers and health-care workers.

Another Socialist-sponsored bill would regroup 64 billion forints for wage hikes in higher education and funding for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Under this bill, another 250 billion forints would go towards welfare-related spending, including family allowances and disability and rehabilitation benefits.

A Jobbik bill would spend 3 billion forints on supporting in-vitro fertilisation programmes.

The small opposition LMP party proposed to increase support to higher education by 15 billion forints with an additional 10 billion forints for staff pay rises there.

Another 12 billion forints would go towards schools in disadvantaged regions and 2.3 billion forints to National Parks in compensation for the land-based subsidies they lost, according to the bill submitted by LMP.

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