Central Europe fears being caught up in the German automobile crisis

The announcement of BMW’s establishment was greeted with great fanfare in the summer of 2018. After a bitter fourteen-month struggle, the German manufacturer set its sights on Debrecen, the second Hungarian city, a thousand kilometers to the east from its Munich headquarters, to make an investment of 1 billion euros. Only a few voices of economists were raised to warn against the increasing dependence of the Hungarian economy on the German automobile industry, already present with Mercedes in Kecskemét and Audi in Gyor.

Six years later, these warnings still resonate, as BMW hits the brakes, like the entire automobile industry in difficulty in Europe in the face of strong Chinese competition and a difficult transition to electromobility. According to information from the Hungarian press, not denied by the company, its Debrecen site will ultimately produce not three but only two models of the 3 Neue Klasse series, the iX3…