Congratulations, President Macron, but…

Sharing the results of his “Choose France” investment program in a Facebook post last night, French President Emmanuel Macron wrote that he created 182,900 new jobs through 6,910 investment projects in the last five years.

While these numbers definitely serve as a cause for celebration, and I’m glad to see France develop at a steady rate, I can’t help but compare these results with Hungary’s investment and job creation record over the last decade.

France has a population that’s approximately 7x bigger than Hungary’s, and an economy that’s around 15x the size of the Hungarian economy. If France created 182,900 jobs in the last five years, that translates into just over 26,000 in Hungary. We’ve had months when we created more jobs than that, let alone in five years…

Since 2010, when PM Orbán’s government took over from the previous, Socialist government, we’ve created over 1 million jobs, lifting the number of people employed in Hungary from 3.6 million in 2010 to just above 4.6 million today.

Meanwhile, France completed 6,910 investment projects in five years. That’s roughly 1,400 projects per year. Again, in order to compare this figure to data from Hungary, let’s divide these 1,400 projects by 7.

The result is 200 projects per year. How does this compare to Hungary’s annual investment rate? Last year — and keep in mind that 2021 began with recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — Hungary attracted a total of 422 investment projects with a total budget of EUR 5.9 billion.

Similarly, despite the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Hungary’s unemployment rate stands at 3.7 percent, the fifth-best figure in the European Union and around half the EU average.

PM Orbán’s fourth consecutive two-thirds victory is probably not the only thing in Hungary that can be seen from the moon; our job creation and FDI policies must be beautifully visible from up there as well.