Leader of the opposition Tisza Party Peter Magyar has made misleading claims about at least six key statistics concerning Hungary’s economy and level of development, the Nezopont Institute said on Thursday.
Magyar claims the Hungarian public debt hit a record high this year, yet, whereas in 2010 it exceeded 80 percent of GDP, it was 73.5 percent at the end of 2023, and it had been heading towards 65.3 percent before the Covid epidemic, but related spending pushed it up again, the think-tank said in a statement.
He also claimed that one million Hungarians live permanently abroad, yet the latest UN figures show the figure is 714,000, and already half a million were living abroad in 2010, while many emigrated after the second world war, the 1956 revolution and the post-1990 change in the political system, the statement added.
As against his assertion that real wages have fallen by 20 percent, in fact real wages grew by 2.5 percent in 2022, even with high inflation, followed by a 2.9 percent fall in 2023. But this year, the data so far indicate that the annual increase may be around 9 percent.
Food inflation, meanwhile, is 66 percent, according to the Tisza Party leader. The reality is that in August 2024 food prices were 2.4 percent higher than in the same period the previous year, and taking the full years 2022 and 2023, food prices went up by 27.8 percent and 23.8 percent, respectively.
Magyar also claimed the economy was stagnating. “Based on forecasts calculated according to current data, the economy is set to grow by 1.0-1.8 percent in 2024,” Nezopont said.
As to the contention that Hungary “is the poorest” EU member state, the EU statistical office shows that the proportion of people living at risk of poverty in Hungarian society is 19.7 percent, “which is lower than the EU average (21.4 percent), and so we belong to the top performing half of the Union,” Nezopont said.
