Business owners from the hospitality industry in Hungary have been protesting over COVID-19 restrictions which they claim are crippling them.

Current measures imposed in November mean restaurants can only run a takeaway service and this has now been extended to run until March. 

It has led to some businesses to fear that they may have to shut for good.

"We've been closed for four months and we don't really know what to do with the subsidies the government is giving," Krisztian Baliko, a restaurant owner at a protest said.

Another complained: "I won't pay my bills because I don't have income. I don't have money for food. I can't work in the hospitality sector. They are killing us."

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The number of new COVID-19 infections in Hungary has been stable at between 1,000 to 1,500 cases per day.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has repeatedly said it won't be possible to lift restrictions until the number of confirmed cases goes down – which he says will happen when mass vaccination is well under way.

"As long as there are not enough vaccines, we have to understand that we have to adapt to the virus," Orban told Hungarian radio. "We should not give up the results that we have achieved in the last three months."

The prime minister's chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said: "Lifting these measures without vaccinations could lead to a further wave of the pandemic and even stricter restrictions."

In 2020 the restaurant industry shrunk by $1.4 billion in the country and the government has promised to "speed up" the payment of subsidies.

"We know that the players in this sector suffer serious losses. When we lift the restrictions – and we hope that we don't have to wait for long – we'll let the restaurants open first," Gulyas continued.

However, of the promised $68 million in aid, just a quarter has been delivered. Even for those who have received the payment, some have seen the government forcibly taking that money back, citing delayed tax payments, Aron Ecsenyi, organizer of recent protests, told CGTN.

"When they got the money the government promised them, then the government just stole the whole money as taxes, so they didn't get anything else. And as I hear, 90 percent of all businesses didn't get anything from the government after they declared the lockdown order," Ecsenyi said.

"[The government] told them to try to survive without money. That's what they got from the government," he added.

Protesters called for a day of civil disobedience on Monday, asking restaurants to stay open in defiance of government orders, as happened in some parts of Italy and Poland.

But in Budapest's busiest streets, restaurants remained closed during Monday's lunch hour, a sign that most businesses were not risking paying heavy fines, which the government just recently increased to a range between $4,000 and $7,000. The new penalties could also include forcing restaurants to close for six months to a year.

Meanwhile, the opposition party Momentum has presented the government with a plan for restaurants to reopen, saying hundreds of thousands more could lose their jobs if businesses like these remain closed.