Stormy public meetings, successive demonstrations: Debrecen, Hungary’s second city, is worried regarding seeing yet another factory grow on its soil. Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been successfully courting automotive players for years thanks to tax rebates and kept wages very low, is not used to such resistance.
The German luxury brands Audi and Mercedes have already taken up residence there and are currently converting their assembly lines to electric. Their compatriot BMW is also settling there with an investment of two billion euros.
A surprise project at 7.3 billion euros
The land is ideal for the Chinese battery production giant CATL which announced in August 2022 a surprise project of 7.3 billion euros, at the gates of Debrecen. This mega-factory, which should come out of the ground within three years, is impressive: with an annual capacity of 100 gigawatt hours (GWh), it will be able to supply lithium-ion batteries for one to two million electric cars per year. , far ahead of other European sites.
Problem: the mastodon is very greedy in energy and water, denounce the environmental activists. They also fear spills of toxic substances into the ground and groundwater.
Contacted by AFP, the CATL group said it was “open to questions and comments from the local community”, assuring its efforts for “sustainable development” of Debrecen.
In a drought ravaged area
Last Saturday, several hundred people gathered once more in this bastion of Viktor Orban to demand a stoppage of work.
“People weren’t properly informed regarding the project, they weren’t asked for their opinion,” complains Gabor Bogos, a 42-year-old computer engineer. “We need clean water, clean air, no batteries,” says Julia Perge, 56, co-organizer of the event.
Environmental fears were heightened by the drought of summer 2022, which dried up a nearby lake in this vast area of agricultural plains which is particularly hot in summer. The government, regretting “the spread of false news”, for its part put forward “very strict standards”.
Hungary, electric battery champion
Other files are causing protest in Hungary without however threatening Viktor Orban’s plans, in particular the extension of a South Korean Samsung site to God, north of Budapest.
In total, more than 20 projects are in the pipeline, one of the symbols of “Orbanomics”, a strategy put in place following the leader’s return to power in 2010. Objective for 2030: to make Hungary the second largest battery manufacturer in EU electric vehicles behind Germany, while production is now dominated by Asia.
Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto prides himself on having been able to attract investment despite “enormous competition”, thanks to Budapest’s policy of openness to the east and its rapprochement with Beijing. “This is THE industrial sector of the future”, bringing hope in times of economic gloom and galloping inflation, he pleads, in unison for once with Brussels. The Commission wants to increase the European market share to 25% by the end of the decade, compared to 3% in 2020.
But with which workers?
But it is still necessary to find the arms to run the factory, we react in Debrecen, where we are worried to see workers coming from Asia to fill the 9000 positions, for lack of manpower. sufficient local. Hungary, in full employment, is cruelly lacking in workers.
“We are promised that the construction of industrial sites will convince young people to stay” in a country marked by the brain drain, “but this is false”, deplores Dora Gyorffy, professor at the University of Economics of Corvinus in Budapest. “It’s just an environmental disaster,” asserts the expert.
