Hungary in the register

Rules and sources

Disclosure threshold

Donors giving more than HUF 500,000 in the year are named (annual total per donor); before 2014 also foreign donors above HUF 100,000

Legal framework

Principal statute: Act XXXIII of 1989 on the operation and financial management of political parties (1989. évi XXXIII. törvény, 'Párttv.'), supplemented by Act LXXXVII of 2013 on the transparency of campaign costs for parliamentary elections. Since 2014 parties may accept donations only from natural persons holding Hungarian citizenship; anonymous, foreign and corporate (legal-person) donations are banned. By 31 May each year every party publishes its annual accounts in the Hivatalos Értesítő (the official gazette supplement to the Magyar Közlöny) and on its own website, naming each donor who gave more than HUF 500,000 in the year. The State Audit Office (Állami Számvevőszék, ÁSZ) audits publicly funded parties every two years and, within one year of each election, the use of the campaign support disbursed by the Hungarian State Treasury (Magyar Államkincstár). There is no lobby register: Act XLIX of 2006 was repealed in 2011.

Currency

HUF, converted to euro at the ECB annual average rate

Sources

• Hivatalos Értesítő – pártok éves pénzügyi kimutatásai (party annual financial statements)Parties, published in the Hivatalos Értesítő by Magyar Közlöny Lap- és Könyvkiadó · Statements for financial years 2005-2025 found in Hivatalos Értesítő issues published February-August 2009-2026 · 2,600 rows
• Magyar Közlöny – pártok éves pénzügyi beszámolói (party annual financial statements printed in the official gazette itself, 2005-2008)Parties, published in the Magyar Közlöny (part IV/VI, Közlemények/Hirdetmények) by Magyar Hivatalos Közlönykiadó · Statements for financial years 2001-2007 found in Magyar Közlöny issues published 2005-2008 · 265 rows

Caveats

• Source is the parties' own annual financial statements printed in the Hivatalos Értesítő (PDF); there is no official machine-readable dataset. Rows were extracted with pdftotext -layout and a heuristic parser; spot-checked against the PDFs but individual names/amounts can still be mis-parsed.
• Amounts are annual totals per donor (no transaction dates): 'date' is empty and 'year' is the financial year of the statement (published the following spring).
• Only donors above HUF 500,000 per year are named; smaller gifts appear only as aggregates in the party accounts data (donations_individuals).
• Since 1 January 2014 only Hungarian natural persons may donate to parties, so 2014+ donors without a legal-form suffix are classified as individual/HU. Statements for 2011-2013 also list companies and municipalities (classified by suffix, otherwise 'unknown'); for those years donations are not split between individuals and legal persons in the party accounts data.
• Statements are self-declared by parties and formats vary (forint vs thousand forint). Where a statement declares thousands but lists donors in forint (values >= 100,000), donor amounts were kept as forint.
• When a statement for the same party and year was republished or corrected, only the latest publication is used. Some party-years are missing because the statement was not found in the scanned issues (e.g. Demokratikus Koalíció 2017).
• Coverage: Magyar Közlöny issues published 2005-2008 (statements for financial years up to 2007, printed in the gazette itself) and Hivatalos Értesítő issues published February-August 2009-2026 were scanned. PENDING: the second scan with the broadened title detector (OLD_V = 2) is done for 240 of 1217 candidate issues (977 to go, about 60-90 minutes; it adds titles the first pass missed, e.g. Fidesz 2004/2005 in Magyar Közlöny 2006/43), and the Magyar Közlöny issues of 1998-2004 (March-July; financial years 1997-2003, which use the same statement form: e.g. Magyar Közlöny 2002/78 prints Függetlenek Listája 2001) are listed in the downloaded files/issues_index.json but not read yet (504 issues in total still to read). Run the import script again to resume. Statements published outside the scanned months, in issues larger than 40 MB that were not downloaded (6 issue parts, mostly budget and statistical annexes: mk_2006_020_2, mk_2007_028_2, mk_2007_028_3, mk_2007_049_2, mk_2007_070_2, mk_2008_099), or with an unusual layout (scanned images, donor lists without amounts) may be missing; some parties list donors in annexes that the parser may not capture. Statements for financial years before 2004 are not ingested yet (see PENDING above); the online archive of the gazette starts in 1998, so financial years before 1997 are out of reach.
• Financial years 2004-2012 (692 rows) come from the older statement layout: amounts are usually printed in thousand forints and were converted to forints; before 2014 companies, municipalities and municipal companies could donate and appear under their printed names (donor kind from the legal form, municipalities as public_body, otherwise 'unknown'); donors abroad are named from HUF 100,000. Names wrapped over two lines were re-joined; lines that could not be read as 'name + amount' were skipped.
• the public funding data comes from line 2 ('Központi költségvetésből származó támogatás', which in election years includes state campaign support) and line 3 (state support to the party's parliamentary group) of each statement; it is as reported by the party, not Treasury payment data.
• the downloaded files/pdf keeps only the pages of each gazette issue that contain party statements (original page content, re-assembled with pypdf) to keep the download small; the downloaded files/issues_index.json records the source URL and page numbers.
• Checked 2026-09-29, nothing published with donor names: (1) ÁSZ (State Audit Office) audit reports on party finances (e.g. https://www.asz.hu/dokumentumok/25010.pdf, 2021-2022 Párbeszéd; 23013.pdf; 16152.pdf) and on campaign money (https://www.asz.hu/dokumentumok/23027.pdf for 2022) are narrative and table reports without donor lists; the named donors above HUF 500,000 are only in the parties' own statements in the gazette, which are ingested here; (2) party foundations: the Batthyány Lajos Alapítvány and the other foundations publish the organisations they support, not their donors, and the ÁSZ audit of a foundation is narrative (https://www.asz.hu/legfrissebb-jelentesek/lezarult-a-batthyany-lajos-alapitvany-ellenorzese); (3) Treasury campaign-support pages (rules only); civic-tech sources (Átlátszó, K-Monitor, TI Hungary: articles, no datasets). No lobby register exists in Hungary.
• Campaign finance: the statements that nominating organisations and candidates printed in the gazette after the 2006 and 2010 elections (e.g. 'Az LMP beszámolója a 2010. évi országgyűlésiképviselő-választásra fordított pénzeszközök forrásairól', Hivatalos Értesítő 2010/52) give only category totals (donations received for the election, loans, own resources), and since 2014 campaign accounts are only audited by the ÁSZ; no named campaign donors are published, so none are ingested. Donations made for campaigns appear in the parties' annual statements when they exceed the threshold. Re-checked on the 2026 election: the campaign statements of 17 July 2026 (Hivatalos Értesítő 2026/31, e.g. Fidesz-KDNP: state support HUF 1,029,467,875 and 'választási célra kapott adományok' HUF 666,146,805 as one unnamed line; the per-candidate tables list only expenses) have the same form; the 2022 statements and the ÁSZ audit 23027 likewise.
• Verified in the second pass: the very large single donor rows of Megoldás Mozgalom (Gattyán György Zoltán: HUF 912,583,998 for 2022, 113,200,000 for 2023, 560,012,000 for 2024, 69,667,000 for 2025) are printed as such in the statements (e.g. Hivatalos Értesítő 2023/29 and 2025/27) and are not parsing errors.