Hungary is now under a liberal government, and the outgoing patriotic government has taken stock of its achievements, Viktor Orbán, the former prime minister, said in a video posted on social media on Wednesday.
Orbán said his government’s achievements included that Hungary’s economic growth was second in the European Union, and its “work-based economic policy has created one million jobs since 2010.”
He noted tax exemptions to families raising children and the PIT exemptions for mothers of more than one children. He also listed the PIT exemption for young people under 25, student and workers’ loans, and the fixed-interest 3 percent mortgage as achievements of his government, as well as the utility price cut scheme and the 13th and 14th month pension.
Orbán said that the minimum wage had grown 4.5-fold and the average wage fourfold since 2010. The average wage of doctors is now around 2 million forints (EUR 5,600) and that of teachers nearly one million, he added.
Orbán proud on airport purchase, foreign and gold reserves
He said that the previous government had doubled state assets. “We bought back the [Liszt International] airport and energy companies from foreigners, and increased Hungary’s gold reserves from 3 tonnes to more than 100 tonnes. The foreign-exchange reserves are the highest in history,” he said.
“Hungary is the safest European country today, and there are no migrants in its territory. This is the liberal government’s starting point,” he said.
Our track record speaks for itself. From today, Hungary is led by a liberal government. Let us hope they do not squander what our patriotic forces have built over the past 16 years. 🇭🇺 pic.twitter.com/PhwvxqRisJ
— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) May 13, 2026
“Our track record speaks for itself. From today, Hungary is led by a liberal government. Let us hope they do not squander what our patriotic forces have built over the past 16 years,” Orbán said in an English-language post on X.
If you missed:
Anita Orbán announces major foreign policy shift, discussing EU funds, migration, EU demands, Hungarian troops in Ukraine
Tisza set to upend Hungarian economy: price caps, windfall taxes, VAT cuts, free competition, the Hungarian euro and Russian oil
He’s not in jail yet? Hungarians are impatient. Get on with the prosecution. It can’t happen soon enough.
To counter the proliferation of myths and conspiracy theories, presented here is the actual economic development of Hungary (2011- 2026).
Initially, Hungary’s economic competitiveness remained remarkably robust. In the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking, Hungary consistently held a stable position in the middle tier of EU states until 2019, bolstered by solid infrastructure, a well-educated workforce, and low production costs. However, since 2020, its standing has deteriorated. From an overall rank of 42 in 2019, Hungary slipped to 54 in 2024—its weakest performance in the last decade. The declines were particularly severe in the categories of “Government Efficiency” (dropping from 37 to 51) and “Business Efficiency” (dropping from 48 to 67). Both areas are suspected of being heavily influenced by political centralization and increasing state intervention (Scheiring, 2020).
A look at real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reveals that between 2013 and 2019, Hungary’s economy grew by an average of approximately 4 percent annually—outperforming the EU average. This growth was driven primarily by EU funding, consumer-oriented fiscal policies, and expansive credit lending (Fundacja Przyjazny Kraj, 2026). Since 2022, however, a distinct slowdown has become apparent. The energy price crisis, high inflation, and the withholding of EU funds have abruptly halted this momentum. In 2023, Hungary recorded a negative real GDP growth of –0.8 percent; in 2025, growth stood at +0.5 percent, while Poland (+3.6 percent) and the Czech Republic (+2.6 percent) performed significantly better. In a regional comparison, Hungary has recently exhibited the weakest growth momentum. While Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania have—despite economic fluctuations resulting from the pandemic, the energy crisis, and geopolitical tensions—demonstrated generally more stable growth trajectories over recent years, Hungary has lost significant momentum since 2022.
Hungary’s fiscal development since the mid-2010s has been characterized by a dual tension. On the one hand, the government long succeeded in bolstering political stability, consumption, and investment through an active role for the state. On the other hand, this model was heavily sustained by external and temporary supports—namely, high levels of foreign direct investment, substantial EU funds, and favorable financing conditions. It was precisely these factors that, for years, masked structural deficiencies within the economy. However, since the pandemic, the inflationary shock, and the freezing of significant EU funds, these weaknesses have come to light much more openly. Hungarian fiscal policy has increasingly become the focal point of “Orbanomics”: characterized by high executive control, politicized resource allocation, and a focus on short-term steering capabilities at the expense of long-term credibility (Spotdata, 2026; Kaiser, 2026).
A look at the trajectory of public debt reveals, first and foremost, that Hungary entered the recent years of crisis from a significantly less favorable starting position than the comparator countries under review. In 2013, Hungary’s gross public debt stood at 77 percent of GDP. By 2019, driven by a process of real fiscal consolidation, it had gradually declined to 65 percent. During the same period, the Czech Republic reduced its ratio from 44 to 30 percent, and Poland from 60 to 45 percent; in 2019, Romania’s figure stood at just 35 percent. Slovakia’s ratio was 48 percent. Even prior to the pandemic, Hungary was thus the most indebted state within this peer group. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this phase of consolidation to an abrupt end. In 2020, Hungary’s debt ratio surged to 78.7 percent—a level that not only significantly exceeded pre-crisis figures but also nearly reverted to the baseline observed in 2013. In the subsequent years, the ratio declined, stabilizing at just under 74 percent. Ten years after the start of the observation period, Hungary therefore still maintains a debt ratio that is approximately 30 percentage points higher than that of the Czech Republic, nearly 20 points higher than Poland’s, and just under 19 points higher than Romania’s. Even Slovakia—which also entered the pandemic with a high ratio—stands significantly lower in 2024, at 59.7 percent.
The pattern becomes even clearer when examining budget deficits. Even prior to the pandemic, Hungary was not moving toward a clear structural surplus; instead, it consistently recorded deficits—ranging from minus 2.6 percent of GDP in 2013 to minus 1.8 percent in 2016. Unlike the Czech Republic—which temporarily achieved surpluses of plus 0.7 percent in 2016 and an even higher plus 1.5 percent in 2017—or Poland—which improved to minus 0.2 percent in 2018—Hungary remained in deficit even during years of favorable economic conditions. Thus, even before the major shocks of the 2020s, it was evident that fiscal expansion in Hungary was not merely a crisis-management tool, but rather a recurring element of its economic policy strategy.
During the pre-crisis phase, Hungary’s financing costs placed it squarely in the middle of the regional pack. In 2017, the average annual interest rate stood at 1.57 percent, rising to just under 2 percent in 2020—a level comparable to that of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, lower than Poland’s range of 3.06 to 3.48 percent, and significantly lower than Romania’s range of 4.52 to 5.96 percent. However, starting in 2022, this picture shifted dramatically. Financing costs in Hungary surged to an average annual interest rate of 9.48 percent, climbing even higher to 12.69 percent in 2023—by far the highest figure among all the countries compared. In 2022, the Czech Republic saw its rate rise to 7.31 percent (and to 8.54 percent in 2023); Poland rose to 7.8 percent (and 9.36 percent in 2023); and Romania rose to 8.11 percent (and 9.03 percent in 2023); whereas Slovakia’s rate rose only to 2.52 percent (and 5.32 percent in 2023). Hungary thus became—for a period of at least three years—the high-interest outlier within its entire peer region. Although rates did decline again in 2024 to 9.02 percent and in 2025 to 8.14 percent, Hungary’s rate remained very high at 8.45 percent even in the first quarter of 2026. It is particularly telling that the country has thereby reverted to a level on par with Romania. These developments are of high relevance from a political-economic perspective. They imply not only that Hungary structurally exhibits a quality of financing similar to that of Romania; rather, they suggest that capital markets now assign Hungary a significantly higher risk premium than they did during the 2010s. This constitutes a full-blown crisis of confidence, in which a cycle comprising low trust, higher interest rates, weaker growth, and renewed erosion of trust has become entrenched. The Hungarian government has been unable to effectively break this cycle (Fundacja Przyjazny Kraj, 2026).
A pivotal turning point in recent fiscal policy has been the restricted access to EU funds. While Hungary benefited substantially from Cohesion and Structural Funds throughout the 2010s—with these transfers underpinning a significant portion of public investment as well as the very system of “Orbanomics”—substantial funds have remained blocked since 2022 due to conflicts regarding the rule of law. This marks the precise point of the decisive fiscal rupture: the previous model of state-centric investment and stabilization policy relied to a considerable extent on the fact that national political steering was rendered feasible in the first place only through the availability of European financial resources. Currently, funds totaling approximately 19 to 21 billion euros remain frozen—an amount equivalent to roughly two years’ worth of public investment, or approximately 10 percent of Hungary’s GDP. Moreover, over the past ten years, up to 90 percent of investment expenditures in Hungary have been financed by EU funds; without them, the country’s investment engine has stalled (Fundacja Przyjazny Kraj, 2026). Interest rates, substantial capital inflows, and EU funds have long masked those structural and fiscal weaknesses of Hungary that are now coming openly to light (Kaiser, 2026).
The trajectory of prices and inflation serves as a key metric for the effectiveness of economic policy. Few macroeconomic indicators exert such a direct influence on political support, public satisfaction, and the formation of economic expectations as the perceived stability of the cost of living (Federle et al., 2024; Lee et al., 2024; Diermeier/Niehues, 2025). The trend in harmonized consumer prices clearly demonstrates that all countries under review experienced a pronounced surge in inflation in the wake of the energy and supply-chain shocks beginning in 2020. However, Hungary stands out—both in terms of the magnitude and the persistence of these shocks.
Furthermore, in a regional comparison, Hungary relies significantly more heavily on direct market interventions—such as price caps and special sectoral taxes—to curb inflation and pursue both fiscal and political objectives. These measures form part of a broader strategy aimed at strengthening domestic players, thereby shifting competitive conditions to the detriment of foreign and less politically connected companies (FT, 2026). From an economic perspective, this creates a downward spiral in both macroeconomic and political-economic terms: while price caps, margin limits, and special taxes may offer short-term relief, they contribute to the distortion of price signals and the shifting of costs. Simultaneously, they heighten uncertainty for businesses and act as a deterrent to investment, particularly in non-export-oriented sectors.
These institutional factors further amplify macroeconomic transmission mechanisms. In an economy like Hungary’s, exchange rate fluctuations, imported inflation, and expansionary fiscal policies feed through to consumer prices and financing costs more rapidly. A portion of domestic price pressure can also be attributed to trends in unit labor costs. If labor costs in Hungary rise faster than underlying productivity, cost pressures intensify—particularly in less competitive, domestically oriented sectors. When these mechanisms intersect with politically shaped market structures, inflation can not only build up more rapidly but also become entrenched for longer periods.
While these economic and price-policy interventions contribute to stabilization in the short term, they exacerbate uncertainty and the instability of expectations over the long term. The combination of high core inflation and weak consumer sentiment suggests that, much like fiscal policy, inflation in Hungary also represents a crisis of confidence. This aligns with the common negative effects of “Orbanomics”: short-term political steering capacity accompanied by increasing market distortion, selective intervention, and declining institutional credibility, while simultaneously eroding the confidence of households and businesses (Spotdata, 2026).
This should suffice, for a start, to assess the economic reality in Hungary.
https://www.iwkoeln.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Studien/Report/PDF/2026/IW-Report_2026-Ungarn.pdf
Concur – Larry.
What we know, prior to the elections about Oban, the conduct of Fidesz, the greed, selfishness and exploitation of individual Hungarians in the millions and of our country, what continues, post Orbans HUMILIATING defeat / Fidesz being “thrown” out of office told by the people enough is enough of your ABUSE use of us for your own personal means first.
What’s to continue to be DISCLOSED of Orbans / Fidesz “taking” from us – Hungary – will be Mindboggling.
Courts- Legal process SHOULD be of extreme ACTIVITY with actions against the perpertrators Orban / Fidesz who for (20) twenty years @Bleed@ us individually as a country and our country – Hungary.
Orban / Fidesz – humiliated the name of our country through loss of Trust and Respect for the proud name of our country.
Orban / Fidesz no greater “creator” than the former Minister of Finance – Mihaly Varga the principal architect along with Orban who DELIVERED our Economy to resemble an Economic & Financial – MESS.
Orban / Mihaly Varga – the Fidesz Political Party after being VOTED out of Power – out of Office left 3 million Hungarians living in poverty – Appalling.
We seek Justice.
We DESERVE Justice and those from Victor Mihaly. Orban “down the ladder” that have used and abused us – STOLE from us, may they have there Day’s in court to answer for charges bought against them.
Very well written and explained. I have no idea what planet he must be on but perhaps Orbán was speaking from a personal standpoint, describing growth in his personal GDP: Greedy dictatorship profiteering. 🤬
Former PM Orbán praises exceptional Hungarian CORRUPTION growth under his leadership…. and if everything was so good why did he loose?!
“The fixed-interest 3 percent mortgage as achievements of his government, as well as the utility price cut scheme and the 13th and 14th month pension” 16 years and he points out two things he did just recently as items of his legacy Bye Victor BYE!