Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost in the country if the global minimum tax were to be introduced, he said.

“We cannot afford it,” he said, adding that “the tax issue is not a global one, it falls under national jurisdiction”.

Every country must decide for itself what tax system it applies, he said. The reason voters like democracy is precisely that they get to pick a government which promises a certain tax policy, he added.

“If we were to give this up, we would give up the Hungarian people’s right to decide an important element of Hungary’s economic policy: tax policy,” he said.

“As a result, we do not think the global minimum tax is a good idea either for jobs or for democracy and we therefore do not approve its introduction in Hungary,” he added.

LMP Calls for Introduction of Global Minimum Tax

The opposition LMP’s co-leader called for the introduction of a global minimum tax and the taxation of foreign-owned large companies at a press conference on Saturday.

Responding to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s radio interview on Friday, Máté Kanász-Nagy said that taxation in Hungary almost exclusively favours large companies and multinationals. The government has “created a tax haven for global corporations” and that is why the prime minister called the global minimum tax a “job killing tax hike”, he added.

In this context, LMP made an amendment proposal to the corporate tax act, which would make the corporate tax fairer by introducing a second bracket.

​​​​​​​According to their plan, the current 9% tax would remain unchanged up to sales revenue of 500 million forints, and a 25% tax bracket would be introduced above that limit.

Photo: Vivien Benko Cher