2023-12-20 21:00:00
Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán presents himself as a friend of China and is now attracting major investments. It leads to grumbling in Europe, but also within his own supporters. ‘Pollution is serious. In some villages in China everyone gets cancer.’
Because of the almost Dutch flatness of the Hungarian Plain, you can see them from afar: a series of gigantic concrete piles, mountains of sand and building materials, through which yellow excavators drive. The poles form the skeleton of what will become the largest electric car battery factory in Europe. The Chinese company Catl, the world leader in lithium-ion batteries, started building them in the fall of 2022.
The mayor of the town next door, Mikepércs – around 5,000 inhabitants – only found out regarding this when he read it in the newspaper himself. “That was when construction had already started,” says mayor Zoltan Timár, annoyed in his office. Next to him is a birthday card from Viktor Orbán addressed to himself; Timár is a member of his party Fidesz.
As far as the Chinese factory is concerned, Timár is not at all in line with his prime minister. For Orbán, the construction of this giant factory in Hungary is a victory. As early as 2011, he announced his ‘opening to the East’: a strategy to attract investments from countries such as China.
Orbán is courting China
Orbán maintains good relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping, committed to the Belt and Road Initiative, welcomed the first European campus of China’s Fudan University in Budapest and is also diplomatically committed to China within the European Union – as in 2017, when Hungary was the only country to refuse to sign a joint EU letter denouncing the torture of detained lawyers in China.
For a long time, all this courting of China translated into little concrete action: Hungarian economic cooperation with China was somewhat more significant than in the rest of the region, but nevertheless disappointing – especially compared to the constant talk from Orbán’s government members regarding the ‘close economic relations’ that the country would maintain with China.
But what seemed like wishful thinking for a long time now appears to be reality: in the past two years, Chinese companies have announced around 10 billion in investments in Hungary – mainly companies that produce batteries for electric cars. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó seems to be announcing a new Chinese investment project almost every month lately. The battery factory that is now being built at Mikepércs is, at 7.3 billion, one of the largest foreign investments in the country ever.
Requires a huge amount of water
The China-friendly climate in Hungary seems to have been decisive for this: the Orbán government is making it easy for these companies to establish themselves in the country in all kinds of ways. Combine that with the proximity to the European market, Hungary’s membership of the European Union and the fact that a number of major German car manufacturers have factories in Hungary: Mercedes has already announced that it will be the first customer of the giant factory in Mikepércs. In view of the EU’s intention to phase out the production of cars with combustion engines by 2035, Prime Minister Orbán of Hungary hopes to create a true ‘hub’ for the production of batteries for electric vehicles (EV batteries) within the European market to make.
But Mayor Timár has a completely different view of the situation – and the fact that he openly expresses this is rare for a member of Orbán’s party. He supports the residents of Mikepércs, who are very concerned regarding the impact of such a factory on their living environment. The Hungarian Plain is already struggling with drought and ‘desertification’ (decreasing vegetation) – caused by less rainfall, heat waves and drying groundwater. And a factory like this needs enormous amounts of water. For comparison: a battery factory of the South Korean Samsung, near the Hungarian town of Göd, with a capacity of half the Catl factory, guzzles as much water as a city with 100,000 inhabitants drinks.
Emotions in Mikepércs and the nearby city of Debrecen have run high in the past year, says resident Icus Oroszné. Together with a few other women, Oroszné founded the protest group Mothers for Mikepércs and regularly organizes demonstrations once morest the factory. She is angry – and so are many of her neighbors. Meetings with experts, local authorities and Catl representatives did not reassure them. Residents’ concerns are not only regarding the water supply, but also largely regarding pollution: the fear that toxic wastes will leak into the natural environment.
Toxins in the water
“When I heard that the factory would be built here, I initially shrugged,” says Oroszné, sitting on her couch in Mikepércs. Her t-shirt has a picture of a factory with ‘STOP’ written underneath, and behind her there are pictures of her children. “But later I started reading up on the internet. I came across more and more disturbing news reports regarding the Samsung factory in Göd,” she says.
The battery factory in Göd has now been fined more than twelve times, according to the Hungarian research platform Transparent. Several of those fines related to matters such as improper storage of hazardous substances. Toxic substances were also found in water sources around Göd, the same research platform reported last year. However, the company can easily pay the Hungarian fines – they pale in comparison to the turnover the factory generates. “It quickly became clear to me that the company doesn’t care regarding the local residents there,” says Oroszné. “And we don’t want to end up in the same situation here with Catl. Pollution is serious. Think of villages in China where everyone gets cancer. I have three children, we built this house ourselves. We don’t want to leave here.”
Another sensitive point regarding the new battery factory is that it will be largely staffed by workers brought to Hungary from China. Hungary is struggling with shortages on the labor market, and in addition, these types of factories mainly need specially trained workers. “So the Orbán government is now forced to bring tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of migrant workers to Hungary to staff all these factories,” said Tamás Matura, an expert on Sino-Hungarian relations at Corvinus University in Budapest. “This is causing protest within Orbán’s own supporters: they have been hearing only very negative reports regarding migrants for a decade straight. Especially in the region in which the Catl factory is being built, which is considered the heartland of Fidesz. There people are most influenced by government media and hatred of migrants is therefore strongest. So you also see all kinds of Orbán supporters at those demonstrations – who are shouting angrily at local Fidesz politicians. The government itself has created all those emotions, but they are now turning once morest their plans.”
77 migrants with one bathroom
Icus Oroszné – not a fan of Viktor Orbán himself – agrees that protests once morest the Catl factory also attract many local supporters of Orbán and Fidesz. However, media under the influence of Orbán’s government claim that the demonstrators are not real locals, but have been hired by Orbán’s arch-enemy, billionaire George Soros.
What does not help with the negative image surrounding migrant workers is that the facilities for these workers are not always adequate, to say the least. Mayor Timár shows a number of photos on his phone: he swipes past a gigantic muddy bathroom, a series of enormous pots containing something soup-like and a photo of a large group of workers sitting on the ground eating on the street. It turned out that 77 Chinese migrant workers lived in a single-family home a little further away in Mikepércs. “Seventy-seven. And there was only one bathroom in that house!” Timar exclaims.
After the mayor publicly sided with the residents of Mikepércs, once morest his party, stories appeared in the local press for a while denigrating him. “I’m not making any statements regarding who was behind that,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “You just have to use your imagination.”
Stricter EU rules needed
He prefers to talk regarding how poorly EU rules are adhered to, in his opinion, when it comes to these types of factories. “There is so much money involved in this industry, the motivation to cut corners in terms of regulations is high. As far as I am concerned, this should all be much more strictly regulated and monitored from Brussels,” he says. “First of all, we need to know much more regarding the impact of these types of factories on the environment. Such a resolution to no longer produce cars with combustion engines by 2035 sounds good in theory, but if we start building massively polluting factories to achieve this, aren’t we simply shifting the problem? I find it really incomprehensible, the laxity with which this is happening now. As if we are enthusiastically launching some kind of miracle pill while the side effects have not yet been tested.”
Another concern in Hungary is regarding Orbán’s plan to fully focus on Chinese production of EV batteries, because the future of that industry is by no means certain. Europe’s dependence on Russian gas has made many EU member states think regarding their dependence on China – and led to the intention to build more of these types of factories themselves, in order to be less dependent on the now dominant Asian giants.
Moreover, technology is changing rapidly: while the lithium-ion batteries that companies such as Catl currently produce still have the upper hand, this might suddenly change once more. For example, Japanese Toyota announced last summer that it had made a breakthrough in the development of solid-state batteries, a different type of EV battery. “So it is very questionable whether it is smart to put all our eggs in this basket,” says Matura. “All that effort that Hungary put into China – it might all be for nothing.”
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