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Over recent years, thousands of Germans, mostly retirees, have settled in Hungary, lured by cheap housing and low living costs.
The Japan Times reports that the right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban is anti-migrant, according to political analysts and the expats themselves.
“With the policies that have taken … with Angela Merkel’s 2015 refuge invasion, you could see the situation was getting worse and worse every year,” said Iwan, a construction foreman. “You somehow had the feeling that you were a second-class citizen – only existing to work and to pay.”
Former Chancellor Merkel opened Germany’s borders in 2015 to more than 1 million migrants, many of them Syrians, fleeing war and poverty. It won her plaudits abroad but proved controversial at home and eroded some of her political capital.
Iwan’s language echoes that of right-wing influencers and the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has scored a series of electoral successes, particularly in the poorer, less diverse east, with its assertion that Germany is overrun by immigrants and is no longer able to control the situation.
The German government has said migrants are vital to the workforce and the economy, though it has pledged to take a tougher line on irregular arrivals.
According to Hungarian official data, 22,100 Germans lived in Hungary in 2022. The number of arrivals peaked in 2021 when 4,036 came. About half of them are aged over 60
“For them. Hungary is a safe country,” according to Monika Varadi, a sociologist at Hungary’s HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies. “They can live here fairly cheaply, find housing and (they say) there are no migrants … They perceive the situation in Germany as a crisis.”
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Arrivals in Hungary are insignificant compared to the number of Hungarians who have gone in the opposite direction to study or work in Europe’s economic engine room, and overall emigration from Germany has not increased.
There is no evidence that Hungary is any safer than Germany. Crime rates are comparable, and polls show that Hungary, far from being a happier place, shares amongst the lowest levels of life satisfaction in Europe with Germany.
Older people often move to warmer places where their pensions stretch further.
However, anthropologist Kristof Szombati of Berlin’s Humboldt University said Hungary’s image promoted by its government and widely echoed in Europe’s far-right media of countering Western Europeans’ alleged pro-immigration liberation might be an added draw. He said, “There’s a gamut of forces that draw people to Hungary or push them away from Germany, and among those forces, people do mention that they don’t like immigration policies in Germany.”
The pandemic, war, and economic dislocation have all heightened people’s sense of uncertainty, fueling a desire to bolt for imagined safety, added Nikolas Lelle of German anti-racism think tank the Antonio Amadeu Foundation.
