Never before has the boss of a foreign company operating in Hungary spoken so openly. In March, Hans K. Reisch, heir and owner of the Austrian branch of the SPAR supermarket chain, denounced the Hungarian authorities' "harassment" of his subsidiary, which operates over 600 stores in the Central European country. In an interview with the German retail trade magazine Lebensmittel Zeitung, he claimed that an unnamed close associate of Prime Minister Viktor Orban was also trying to "appropriate [his] company."

"We were told in a rather daring way that if the state had a stake in our company, things would go more smoothly," he said in the Austrian daily Die Presse, denouncing the 4.5% tax on supermarket sales raised in 2022 by Viktor Orban's nationalist government in the name of the fight against superprofits, and which surprisingly only targets non-Hungarian supermarket chains. Multiple administrative measures were also put into place to control prices and inventories that made its subsidiary, which posted a loss of over €46 million in 2023, "economically unviable."

In return, the Hungarian government came under heavy attack. "SPAR prefers to spread untruths rather than take measures to restore its competitiveness," for example, criticized Hungarian Economy Minister Marton Nagy, while Orban filed a personal defamation suit against all Hungarian media that dared to repeat Reisch's statements. This rare act on the part of the Hungarian prime minister has so far brought him no luck: He has been unsuccessful in almost all the proceedings brought against him.

Cautiously, Reisch now prefers to remain silent but SPAR continues its fight before the European Commission, asking it to open an infringement procedure. "We've been investing in this country for three decades, and now we're being forced into the red," said a spokesperson to Le Monde, assuring us that his company "doesn't want to leave" a country where it employs around 14,000 people. According to SPAR, the humiliating treatment by the authorities has become even worse since Reisch's remarks. "We were once again subjected to untimely administrative checks just before Easter when we've already had to pay millions of euros in fines in recent years."

The case of the Austrian supermarket chain is not isolated in Hungary. For the past two years, discontent has been growing among Germans and Austrians, respectively the first and second largest foreign investors in this country of 10 million residents, whose economy is largely dependent on multinationals. Philipp Haussmann, vice president of the German association of companies active in Eastern Europe, complained to Le Monde: "There's a system designed to benefit companies that are well-connected" with the authorities. The head of a Stuttgart-based textbook publishing house makes no secret of his bitterness toward Orban's very particular brand of protectionism.

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