Soskut had never seen anything like it – not since the regime change of 1989. An angry crowd had forced its way into a local primary school that was hosting a town hall meeting. “Did you sleep well last night?” shouted Marta Pluhar, a retired teacher at the head of the protest. “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes!” Facing her, ashen-faced and confused, was the man who had occupied the pinnacle of local politics for more than 20 years – Mayor Ferenc Konig. TV cameras captured the moment he lost control, calling off the meeting because, he said, he could no longer guarantee the attendees’ safety. Moments later, he would summon a police escort and flee the scene to chants of “traitor!” and “resign!”

Just days earlier, the enterprising mayor had appeared before the cameras in the relative calm of a TV studio in Budapest, half an hour’s drive away. Dressed in suit and open-necked shirt, Konig confidently talked up his plans for Soskut. The commuter village of 3,500 people – its name is pronounced “shoshkoot” – had secured a 33-million-euro investment for a plant that would recycle the batteries from electric vehicles, or EVs. The site would be operated by a Slovenian firm, Andrada, complementing the village’s previous contribution to the battery supply chain: a factory that produced electrolytes, operated by South Korea’s Dongwha.

Since joining the EU more than 20 years ago, Hungary has emerged as a major European vehicle manufacturing hub. Germany’s Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volkswagen-owned Audi assemble their cars here, and China’s BYD has plans to do the same. All have been lured by a combination of tax breaks, state subsidies, a comparatively cheap and skilled workforce, and easy access to Western European markets. The automobile sector now employs some 150,000 people and is one of the largest in the Hungarian economy by turnover. In the latest phase of the industry’s expansion, backed by the autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban, battery factories have popped up across Hungary to support the shift to making electric vehicles, as envisaged in the EU’s “green transition”.

Battery production is regarded as a NIMBY industry worldwide – no one wants a factory in their backyard. The plants have a reputation for polluting the water and air with harmful chemicals in violation of environmental and occupational safety standards. In Hungary moreover, many of the plants have been built right next to residential areas, sparking furious protests in the government strongholds that have also received some of the biggest investments in the motor industry. The political backlash has mostly been contained, however. Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city, saw unprecedented protests against a new battery factory but nonetheless re-elected a pro-government mayor. In the Budapest satellite town of God, pronounced as “goed”, the governing party would wrest back control of the council after losing a local election over a Samsung “giga-factory”. Soskut remains, for now, a rare exception, where popular resentment over a planned battery factory has propelled local activists to power.

The Samsung giga-factory in God is the flagship site in Hungary’s growing EV battery sector. Photo: Adam Magyar

In the race to replace the combustion engine with lithium-ion batteries, global supply chains have roped in countries with weak democratic credentials, setting the stage for abuses and excesses. Child labourers toil in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Serbia’s strongman leader defies street protests to court multinational companies looking to exploit lithium deposits. Meanwhile, Viktor Orban wants to use the EU’s “green transition” to fulfill a promise to make Hungary great again. His star has never burned brighter on the international stage. He can claim to have a hotline to the world’s most powerful heads of state – China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and US President Donald Trump – while his brand of national-conservatism inspires resurgent right-wing movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Next year however, the victims of the green transition in his country have a chance to get rid of him. In April’s general election, Orban faces his biggest challenger in 15 years. An opposition centre-right party formed by Peter Magyar, a former Orban associate, is riding high in the polls, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. 

On visits to the communities affected by the EV battery factories, Magyar has tried to tap into the anger over the industry, by demanding stricter regulation. “Until the elections, Peter Magyar will say exactly this: local democracy is very important, and multinational companies are buying our water and air while we get nothing,” said Peter Zsolt, director of research at the Centre for Fair Political Analysis, an independent think-tank based in Budapest. However, Zsolt said, a post-Orban government was unlikely to uproot the industry and would, at most, only seek to shrink its footprint.

At the TV studio in Budapest, Mayor Konig sought to allay concerns about the factory’s environmental impact. He brought out a battery cell, supposedly to demonstrate its non-toxicity. But the prop malfunctioned: the cell left a trail of dark powder on the studio table. In full view of the cameras, the mayor began sweeping the residue into his pocket. “I felt embarrassed for him,” said Tibor Roller, a Soskut resident who had been watching the mayor on TV. Roller is in his early fifties, self-assured with glasses and close-cropped greying hair. An engineer by training, he visits chemical factories for work and knows a thing or two about the hazards of battery production. He was particularly troubled by the mayor’s suggestion that there was no point opposing the plant because the decision to site it in Soskut had come from “the highest level”. Konig was an independent on paper but had long enjoyed the backing of Orban’s Fidesz party, which has governed Hungary for the last 15 years. Roller began attending protests against the factory. 

At one of the demonstrations, he was talking to a local business-owner who insisted there was no way the veteran mayor could be unseated. “Ok, I thought, hold my beer,” Roller told me. He joined the Soskut Civil Circle, a grassroots movement formed after the mayor’s disastrous appearance at the primary school. In the local elections in June last year, the movement pulled off a major upset, running a volunteer-driven campaign that knocked the mayor off his perch. The new mayor, nominated by the movement, is blocking Andrada from building its factory on the site. The Slovenian firm did not respond to my request for comment.

Meanwhile, Roller has gained a seat on the village council, dominated by the Soskut Civil Circle. His fellow council-members include Marta Pluhar, the former teacher who had confronted Konig at the primary school. Back then, she had warned him and his fellow councillors that she would not want to be in their place. “To be honest, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but I’m glad that I did it,” she said.

Ferenc Konig, pictured at left, sweeps battery cell residue off the table during a TV studio appearance. Photo: TV screengrab

Pluhar has the energetic, no-nonsense manner of a classroom veteran. She used to urge her children to be diligent students. Education, she would tell them, was their best defence against manipulation by the powerful. Her family can trace a link to Soskut’s glorious past. The village supplied the limestone for many Budapest landmarks from the 19th century, including the carved lions of the Szechenyi Chain Bridge; locals say they can pinpoint the spot where it was quarried. Towards the end of that century, in the “golden age” of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the village also provided the limestone for the parliament building. The rock was hauled to the capital, according to Pluhar family tradition, by an ancestor using a horse-drawn carriage. Marta Pluhar said she had never imagined she would become a politician, not even when the battery industry first came to Soskut. That was in 2020, when it emerged that Dongwha was going to build an electrolyte factory on the outskirts. “I was indignant,” recalls Pluhar. “My ancestors worked the land here, they strived and prospered. Where did these complete strangers get the courage to cross this out with the stroke of a pen and set up such factories in my village?”

Despite local opposition, the Dongwha plant was built as planned. The protests against it were confined to social media as Soskut was under Covid lockdowns for much of the time. The villagers found it easier to mobilise at the reports that another plant was coming to town. “I couldn’t imagine this happening in a country that’s supposed to be a democracy,” Pluhar said. “They didn’t even ask us. It’s the height of impudence, as if all that matters is money and people’s opinions don’t count.”

Every July, Viktor Orban travels to the spa town of Baile Tusnad in neighbouring Romania to set out his worldview. The town was historically part of Hungary and its Hungarian-speaking residents have been staunch supporters of the prime minister since his government allowed the Hungarian diaspora in neighbouring countries to apply for citizenship. It was in Baile Tusnad that Orban first declared his intention to remake Hungary as an “illiberal democracy”, and it was here in 2022 that he detailed his vision for Hungary’s future glory. The path ahead, he said, lay in exploiting technological advances – specifically in meeting the growing demand for EVs by building huge factories to serve the battery supply chain. Soon, he said, “we will be the world’s third-largest battery manufacturer… and we will be the fifth-largest exporter [of batteries] in the world.”

Orban’s vision for Hungary dovetails with the EU’s geopolitical goals. China makes seven out of ten EVs worldwide and commands an even bigger lead in battery production, hosting nearly 85 per cent of the world’s capacity. The EU is focused on countering China’s overwhelming dominance of the global market. It has laid out plans to boost its domestic battery production capacity more than six-fold between 2023 and 2030, according to a report by the European parliament. Twenty per cent of this capacity is meant to be located in Hungary, a country that accounts for two per cent of the EU’s population and territory.

Imported cars await distribution at a port in Zeebrugge, Belgium. The EU has imposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to build up its own EV sector. Photo: EPA/OLIVIER MATTHYS

Hungary’s battery industry has been developing in spite of many disadvantages rather than because of any innate advantages, according to Dora Gyorffy, a professor of international political economy at the Corvinus University of Budapest and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. “It is completely absurd to aim for Hungary to become the world’s third or fourth-largest battery manufacturer, it makes no sense whatsoever,” she said.

She argues that the country lacks many essentials for large-scale battery production. It does not have a technological base – battery industry R&D has been neglected. There is a shortage of resources natural and human – namely cheap electricity, plentiful water and lots of readily available workers. Much of Hungary’s energy mix draws upon costly imports, and the new factories are set to increase electricity consumption by almost a third within the next five years. The country’s ageing water network struggles to supply households amid droughts, and reports of burst pipes are common. There is also a lack of surplus labour. In fact, more and more people are being recruited from Asian countries as guest workers, in an apparent contradiction of the nativist, xenophobic rhetoric espoused by Orban. Many of the new arrivals end up working in battery factories.

The government tends to dismiss critics of its industrial policy by saying that they do not wish for Hungary’s success and may even be seeking to undermine it. The official rationale for building the battery plants is, of course, tied up with the central function of vehicle manufacturing in the Hungarian economy. Factories operated by international firms account for 96 per cent of the revenue in the sector and make up a third of the country’s manufacturing exports. They also have a significant wage-boosting effect in the regions where they are sited.

Soskut Civil Circle activists Marta Pluhar, seated second from left, and Patrik Marcinkovics, third from left, attend a council meeting earlier this year. Photo: Adam Magyar

Moreover, the European automobile industry is going through a turbulent period. Over the last couple of years, major motor manufacturers and suppliers – including Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, Bosch and Michelin – have been announcing closures and layoffs at sites across Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and the UK. The hard times have been blamed on high costs, sagging demand, Chinese competition, and the relatively slow uptake of electric vehicles. In Orban’s view, the new battery plants are needed to keep the assembly lines busy in the Mercedes, Audi and BMW factories. “For the first time in a long time, we are the global leaders rather than the followers of a technological revolution,” he said last year. “And in doing so, we are also saving the car factories. Many car factories in the Western world are being closed and relocated. This must be avoided in Hungary.”

Most of the government’s critics concede that Hungary should host some EV battery plants to protect its car industry, but they attack the scale of the ambition. Gyorffy said the Orban government was echoing the heavy-handed industrial policy pursued by the communist regime of the 1950s, which sought to turn Hungary into a country of “iron and steel” despite a lack of natural resources. The common denominator in both cases, she argued, was a lack of checks and balances. “One person’s conviction [is all that] counts, and no one asked that person whether this was really a good idea,” Gyorffy said. “The EU turned a blind eye to this because it suits them to have manufacturing and environmental pollution here, on the periphery.”

What’s in it for the battery manufacturers? For one, the government has been enticing them. So far, Budapest has helped battery firms with more than 4 billion euros in public funds, through direct state aid and through the development of supporting infrastructure such as road, sewage and water networks. It has also ensured that the firms face minimal regulatory hurdles. The Samsung battery factory in God is a notable example. It has been penalised more than ten times for breaching environmental and occupational safety regulations. Most of the fines have been in the low thousands or tens of thousands of euros at most – a mere slap on the wrist given the plant’s annual turnover, recorded at 4.4 billion euros in 2024. Samsung’s environmental permit was briefly suspended last year, but the factory continued to operate while it re-applied for the permit. Additional violations have been recorded at battery plants in Batonyterenye, Ivancsa, Komarom and Szigetszentmiklos, and several workers have been killed in industrial accidents.

“These companies simply don’t care about fines of a few thousand euros, and it is clear that the government does not want to cause them larger problems than that,” said Andrea Elteto, a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She said inspectors often found factories consistently failing to address violations that had already been flagged up.

European rules governing emissions from the EV battery industry were tightened with the 2024 release of the bloc’s updated regulations for the sector. However, national authorities have a grace period until July 2026 before they must start adopting the rules. Until then, they remain free to decide what constitutes an acceptable level of pollution from a battery factory. Hungary seems to have permitted emission levels far higher than international standards. Tests uncovered dangerously high levels of NMP, a harmful solvent widely used for battery production, in the air and groundwater around the Samsung giga-factory in God. High exposure to NMP is believed to affect foetal development, increasing the risk of miscarriages and birth defects. Official data acquired by a local NGO found that the giga-factory had released 81 tonnes of NMP in 2021 – a figure seventy-five times higher than an annual limit imposed by the government in 2024, after the scandalous data were revealed.

Zrinyi Street in God was once a desirable neighbourhood. Now, its spacious family homes border the giga-factory. Photo: Adam Magyar

Environmentalists believe Orban’s government has given the battery industry an easy ride. “In Germany, far stricter requirements are imposed on far smaller factories,” said Gergely Simon, a Budapest-based expert in chemical pollution at Greenpeace, the environmental group. Battery plants in Germany continually monitored their workers’ bodies for levels of NMP and other hazardous substances, he pointed out, while workers at Hungarian factories had been left dangerously exposed. “The safety systems aren’t working,” Simon said.

This year, the Hungarian authorities have been tightening some of the screws on the Samsung plant. In July, the factory was ordered to pay 250,000 euros – its largest fine yet – for failures in monitoring its workers’ exposure to carcinogenic chemicals. In October, the plant’s environmental permit was revoked, a stricter sanction than last year’s suspension. While the move could lead to the plant’s temporary closure, it continues to operate for now amid uncertainty over its legal status. Samsung did not respond to my request for comment.

The Hungarian government has dismissed claims that the sector is endangering the welfare of its workers. In a statement for this story, a spokesperson for the Ministry of National Economy – the body that oversees the regulators – said any penalties imposed on the industry were “intended to signal a need” for additional protective measures, and did not necessarily mean that exposure to hazardous substances had reached a harmful level. The spokesperson said the battery factories were “complying with the prescribed obligations” and there had been “a noticeable improvement in working conditions”.

While the government insists that health and pollution concerns are unfounded, its denials ring hollow for the many Hungarians who have ended up with a battery factory in their backyards. Ildiko Szincsak’s parents moved to Zrinyi Street, on the rural outskirts of God, in the late seventies. Back then, this quiet neighbourhood of large homes with gardens was a magnet for young families looking to escape the bustle of Budapest. Szincsak was born and grew up here, and she now shares the house with her elderly parents, her partner, and their two children. Many of the nearby homes are empty, as those with the means have moved out and no one has taken their place.

The Samsung giga-factory, a vast box-like structure, dominates the horizon. It looms over a deserted local playground, partially sealed behind acoustic barriers – a dystopian scene. “I could have let the kids play here because we don’t live far away, but I wouldn’t dare do that now,” Szincsak said bitterly, citing the noise from truck traffic and the plant itself.

The Samsung giga-factory dominates the horizon in God. Photo: Adam Magyar

Even though the children tend to stay indoors now, they cannot entirely escape the factory. The Szincsaks say the intermittent noise from the plant – a low microwave-like hum – is responsible for their daughter’s migraines, affecting her performance at school. I saw a doctor’s note at the house that confirmed that the girl’s health had been harmed by noise pollution. At night, the glare from the factory floods the homes. The locals say they no longer need to turn on the lights when they wake up to visit the toilet. They also talk of suspicious clusters of serious health issues among family members and neighbours – from cancer cases to insulin resistance and gum disease. None can prove, however, that these are linked to the factory.

The Szincsaks are desperate to move but are effectively trapped in Zrinyi Street because no one will buy their house. Two homes nearby did get sold to the local government under a compensation scheme to placate local residents amid a growing backlash. The Szincsaks say they were next in line for compensation, but the scheme was paused after the Covid pandemic. The family has since put the house on the market at a heavily reduced price, to no avail. lldiko Szincsak said she had sought help from an array of bodies – from municipality and county at the local level to the national investment agency and the ministries of interior and foreign affairs in Budapest, as well as from Samsung itself.

More than a year ago, she added, God’s pro-government mayor pledged to resolve her problem, and then stopped responding. I contacted him to verify this claim but he did not get back to me. Recently Szincsak said she had finally got through to the mayor, and the municipality had again indicated it would help. There had been many promises so far, she said, but little in the way of support.

Like Szincsak’s parents, Lajos Nemeth and his wife moved to Zrinyi Street in the late seventies, looking for peace and quiet. Although the Nemeths managed to move out as the heavy industry was moving in, they too cannot find a buyer for their old house and are now stuck with the burden of maintaining two properties. A well-spoken former executive for a German firm, Nemeth is bitter at what he regards as a betrayal by the political class. He said he approached the current minister of justice, Bence Tuzson, for assistance when the politician was running for election as the local MP.

According to Nemeth, Tuzson assured him that he would arrange compensation for his house if he won. The politician was duly elected and, Nemeth said, has not responded to a single request since. I contacted Tuzson for comment but did not get a response. “They don’t give a damn about us here,” Nemeth said. “They’re relying on the fact that the residents of this street are mostly over 60. Everyone will slowly die out and that will be that.”

An abandoned warehouse has been identified as the proposed site for the battery recycling plant in Soskut. It remains out of use, for now. Photo: Adam Magyar

Six years ago, popular anger over the Samsung giga-factory would shake up local politics in God. In 2019, the town elected a mayor opposed to Fidesz and critical of the battery factory’s environmental record. The government in Budapest retaliated by effectively re-zoning the factory, taking it out of God’s jurisdiction so that the municipality could no longer collect its tax revenues. In the subsequent election, God elected a mayor close to Fidesz, and the tax revenues were soon redirected to the town. As one local told me, it was a simple choice: if they had to live with the factory, they might as well get some money out of it.

God serves as a cautionary tale for the activists of the Soskut Civil Circle. I met one of them, Patrik Marcinkovics, after he was elected to the council. Recently married and in the midst of renovating the family home, he said he began having sleepless nights because he feared that Soskut would go the way of God, with locals forced to sell their houses at knock-down prices.

Last week, the council organised the annual Christmas fair. Parents drank mulled wine at the stalls while their children took turns with pony rides and a miniature train. Marcinkovics said the revitalisation of village life has been a welcome byproduct of the grassroots resistance to the battery industry. Over recent years, he said, Soskut had begun winding down its events calendar, offering fewer occasions for villagers to socialise, but the Christmas fairs under the new council were attracting large crowds. “There are many familiar faces, and we are happy to see each other.” The fight against the battery industry, he added, had “shaken up local public life a little.”

The activists-turned-councillors of Soskut remain confident that they can block the plans for the new battery recycling plant, while ensuring that the existing factory continues to operate under the strictest regulations. Marta Pluhar believes the village might one day even force the closure of the original plant. “Since the Russians left the country, I say that anything is possible,” she said. “We never thought they would leave, but leave they did.”

Adam Magyar is a Budapest-based journalist, working for Euronews. This story was produced as part of the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Editing by Neil Arun.