Orbán set an example with five children, but the nation did not follow: Declining childbearing and the failures of family policy

In a longer article, the Wall Street Journal deals with the government measures taken to encourage childbearing in Hungary and Norway. According to the conclusion of the article, we are part of a general European trend, which domestic measures could only temporarily influence; two years ago, the number of births decreased again in our country.

In the developed world, especially in Europe, the birth rate has been declining for decades, which governments are trying to reverse with various family support measures, but these have little success. According to UN forecasts, Europe’s population could decline by around 40 million by 2050 if current trends continue. Hungary has taken particularly intensive steps to increase the fertility rate, but the demographic situation is still worrying.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, himself a father of five, has made increasing the number of births a central element of family policy since his return in 2010. Hungary spends more than 5% of its GDP on family support programs, which include low-cost housing loans and lifetime income tax exemptions for mothers with more than four children. Orbán’s population policy measures are often praised in conservative circles, for example at the Demographic Summit in Budapest, where international politicians such as Tucker Carlson or JD Vance also expressed their appreciation.

Despite these measures, Hungary’s fertility rate increased to 1.6 by 2021, but began to decline again in the last two years. In the first eight months of 2023, only 51,500 children were born, which is a 10% decrease compared to the same period of the previous year. Zsuzsa Szelényi, program director of the CEU Democracy Institute, said that Hungary’s population has been shrinking continuously since the 1980s, and there is always the fear that they will “disappear”. According to Szelényi, the family support policy of the Orbán government is part of the populist, nationalist direction, which considers maintaining the traditional family model as a national duty as an alternative to immigration to increase the population.

Tünde Főrész, head of the Mária Kopp Institute, who leads the Hungarian government’s demographic research, rejected criticism that the support systems exclude poorer or minority groups. According to him, family support programs, such as housing loans, can also be used to a greater extent in economically disadvantaged areas of the country.

However, many Hungarian women still refuse to have children. Orsolya Kocsis, a 28-year-old HR specialist, said that although having children would help her and her husband buy a bigger house in Budapest, she feels that it would be immoral to have children just to enjoy financial benefits. Anna Nagy, a 35-year-old former lawyer, also made a similar statement, saying that while family support programs have helped her, she does not consider herself responsible for solving the nation’s demographic problems.

Norway has supported parents for decades, mainly to make it easier to maintain a balance between work and family. Parents get nearly a year of fully paid paternity leave, which they can share between themselves, with more than three months reserved specifically for fathers. However, Norway’s fertility rate dropped to 1.4, similar to Hungary’s. The goal of the Norwegian government was not to increase the number of births, but to facilitate the return of women to work, but the results are still similar: women postpone having children until later, and more and more people remain childless or have only one child.

The original article was extracted and translated into Hungarian using AI.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/world/birthrate-children-fertility-europe-perks-family-04aa13a0