If you listen to Chinese President Xi Jinping and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, you might think that cheap electric cars and authoritarianism are joined at the hip. It’s up to rich democracies to prove them wrong.

Xi is visiting Hungary on the last day of his trip to Europe. In doing so, he’s returning a compliment Budapest has paid Beijing in recent years, copying China’s developmentalist model and disdain for democracy to build a burgeoning green technology supply chain in the heart of the European Union.

“On the path of Chinese-style modernization and development, we see Hungary as a traveling companion,” Xi wrote in an op-ed in Magyar Nemzet, the newspaper of the ruling Fidesz party.