What does “az adó 1 százaléka” mean in Hungary?

Every spring, Hungarian appeals ask you to támogasd az adód egy százalékával — “support us with one percent of your tax.” It is a real mechanism, not a figure of speech: taxpayers may direct 1% of their income tax to a registered civil organisation, and a second 1% to a church. It costs the donor nothing, since the money would otherwise go to the state.

Schools, theatres, animal shelters and sports clubs campaign hard for it, so az 1% is a season of Hungarian public life as much as a line on a tax form — millions of designations are filed each year. The appeal is a small grammar lesson too: adója egy százalékával stacks the possessive -ja onto the instrumental -val/-vel (“with”), and the imperative támogassa marks the sentence as addressed to Ön, not to te.