Thread by @Daractenus

With about 60 days left before Hungarians head to the polls, I figured it is the perfect time to revisit Orban's achievements by comparing Hungary to Romania, just to show how inefficient Orban's authoritarianism is even when compared to a far from perfect democratic state.

Despite having half of Romania's population, in 2003, shortly after Orban's first term, Hungary had a GDP of $85 bil. while Romania's stood at $57 bil. Today, after 15 uninterrupted years of Orban, Hungary's GDP is about $240 billion, while Romania's stands at about double that.

In 2010, just as Orban started his second reign, the country stood as the 53rd least corrupt country in the world, while Romania was ranked as 75th. In 2025, after too many years of Orban to count, Hungary succeeded in being ranked as significantly more corrupt than Romania.

Something Romanians used to gratly admire Hungary for was its highway system, which in 2010 stood at about 1200km, about 5 times bigger than Romania's. Today, Romania's highway system is now roughly as big as Hungary's and is set to overtake it in the near future.

Pre-Orban Hungary could at least pride itself in having a minimum wage about twice that of Romania, or even more than twice at various points in time. In 2026, thanks to Orban's absolute economic genius, the average gross wage in Romania is slightly bigger than that of Hungary.

Utterly obsessed fertility rates, Orban's highly effective measures barely managed to raise Hungary's fertility rate to an unimpressive 1.5. Romania, whose political class doesn't seem to care one bit about the matter and did nothing about it, stands at 1.7.

With his friends and family now owning virtually every media outlet in the country, Orban's Hungary ranks slightly below Malawi, Liberia and Sierra Leone in terms of freedom of the press. Meanwhile, the 2025 ranking puts Romania roughly on par with Italy and above the US.

With the "evil EU" as his mortal enemy, Orban's Hungary happens to be the 3rd biggest recipient of EU funds when accounting for all funds ever received since joining, while the contributions Hungary made so far to the EU budged being virtually insignificant.

In the early 2000s, it was rather common for Romanians living near the Hungarian border to cross into Hungary to work or shop. By 2025, the pattern had completely reversed, with an ever growing number of Hungarians from border areas coming to Romania to work or shop.

The one area where Viktor Orban's sovereign economic genius has kept Hungary ahead of Romania, and even slightly widened the lead, is the debt-to-GDP ratio, with Hungary also seemingly on track to surpass Romania in nominal debt, despite Romania's recent borrowing spree.

While demonizing immigrants and fancying himself as the Messiah of "white Christians", Orban's Hungary currently has about 150k foreign citizens residing in the country, at a total population of around 10 million, roughly the same number Romania has at twice the population.

Last year, just as Moody’s downgraded Budapest to junk status classifying it as unsuitable for investments, in a totally unrelated story, after over 15 uninterrupted years in power, Viktor Orbán finally got to adding zebras at the private zoo of his humble summer residence.