HUNGARY: Hungarians will probably vote Yes in a controversial referendum on granting citizenship to overseas ethnic Hungarians, but the turnout may be too low for the result to be valid, two opinion polls show.
A survey by a leading research company, Median, showed that 29 per cent of 500 people polled would vote Yes, but only 49 per cent of eligible voters would turn out. A Capital Research poll, also of 500 people, showed a turnout of 47 per cent, of whom 55 per cent would vote Yes.
For the referendum, on December 5th, to be binding, more than one-quarter of the electorate has to vote either Yes or No.
The referendum, which could give citizenship to as many as five million people, has been occasioned by a body representing overseas Hungarians which gathered 200,000 signatures on a petition and is strongly supported by the right-of-centre Fidesz opposition.
Many ethnic Hungarians live abroad because the Trianon Treaty after the first World War gave two-thirds of Hungary's territory to neighbouring states like Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia.
The Socialist government fears problems from the roughly two million people living in Romania, Ukraine and Serbia and will start an intensive campaign to highlight the costs of granting them citizenship.
The government says that if 800,000 people move to Hungary - the number who carry certificates of nationality from earlier Fidesz legislation - it would cost the country 537 billion forints (€2.17 billion) annually, and the newcomers would compete for jobs with longtime residents.
Fidesz, which will launch its own advertising campaign, says the government is betraying the birthright of the Hungarian people and putting money before ethics.
Central Europe's biggest economies, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, have a realistic chance of squeezing their budget deficits into line in time to adopt the euro in 2010, according to a Reuters survey.
Slovakia should qualify a little sooner, in 2009, and the smaller economies of Slovenia, Lithuania and Estonia should lead the expansion of the euro bloc in 2007, according to the poll of 40 strategists at banks and research institutions around Europe.