The recipe to avert the population crisis in aging Europe is ideologically clear for the Hungarian Prime Minister, the ultranationalist Viktor Orbán: more babies and fewer immigrants. His Italian counterpart, the far-right Giorgia Meloni, agrees, guest of honor at the international demography congress that Orbán’s Hungary holds in Budapest every two years.
The symposium “The family is the key to security”, which began yesterday and ends tomorrow, brings together rulers, academics and ecclesiastics who support the traditional family model to promote birth rates, a cultural war that Orbán has waged since his return to power in 2010 (he had previously governed between 1998 and 2002).
“The time has come to replace the dominant discourse in the EU, which is dominated by a progressive and liberal elite,” accused Orbán, an elite that, according to him, neglects problems of European citizens such as the desire to “have a family and raise children”, and focuses instead “on carbon quotas and LGTBI quotas”. And he said that, for this reason, his party, Fidesz, and parties of similar color in other countries, must win the 2024 European elections “so that there are more governments that focus their policies on families.” Orbán’s Executive flatly rejects immigration, the other resource to shore up the population and nourish the labor market.
Giorgia Meloni, the voice most anticipated by the hosts in Budapest, assured that there has been “an extreme anti-family climate” in Europe for decades. “We must defend the family, God and all those elements that constitute our civilization, and we must not fall into the idea that anyone who talks about them is retrograde,” said Meloni. The Italian leader ruled out immigration to compensate for the drop in birth rates, although she admitted that “a legal immigration quota can make a positive contribution to our economies.”
According to Eurostat data for 2021, Italy is the third EU country with the lowest fertility rate (number of births per woman of childbearing age); Its rate was 1.25, still higher than those of Spain (1.19) and Malta (1.13). The champion is still France (1.84).
Meloni – who has a daughter – praised the Hungarian birth program, based on economic incentives, and which has produced some results. Thus, the fertility rate in Hungary was 1.23 children per woman in 2011 and has been growing until it reaches 1.61 in 2021, above the EU average (1.53). But it is far from the threshold of 2.1 necessary for demographic replacement, which Orbán – father of five children – wants to achieve in 2030. Hungary has been losing inhabitants for more than forty years: it now has 9.7 million compared to 10, 7 million in 1980.
To reverse this situation, Orbán’s Government has been practicing an intense birth policy since it amended the Constitution in 2011 thanks to the two-thirds supermajority that his party has in Parliament. The amendment indicates that Hungary “protects the institution of marriage as a union of a man and a woman”, a framework in which all aid falls. Thus, for example, couples receive loans of up to 30,000 euros that they do not have to repay if they have three or more children, and if they have two, they return only a third. In addition, mothers of four children are exempt from income tax. There are also credit facilities to buy multi-seater cars.
But, as critics warn, in practice this aid benefits married heterosexual couples from the middle or upper class, and is out of reach of humble families – without access to bank credit -, single parents and the gypsy minority. Observers see it as unrealistic to expect higher birth rates alone to correct Hungary’s population deficit. But for its prime minister this path also means, as seen at the congress in Budapest, being able to present himself as a herald of the traditional family in the field of the international populist right.
