The recipe for averting the population crisis in aging Europe is ideologically clear for the Hungarian prime minister, the ultra-nationalist Viktor Orbán: more babies and fewer immigrants. His Italian counterpart, the far-right Giorgia Meloni, is the 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 clergy who support the traditional family model in order to encourage the birth rate, a cultural war that Orbán has been waging since his return to power in 2010 (he had previously ruled 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 which, according to him, unleashes problems of European citizens such as the desire to “have a family and raise children”, and focuses instead “on coal quotas and LGTBI quotas”. And he said that, for this reason, his party, Fidesz, and parties of a similar color in other countries, must win the European elections of 2024 “so that there are more Governments that focus their policies on families”. Orbán’s Executive rejects all immigration, the other resource to support the population and nourish the labor market.
Giorgia Meloni, the voice most expected by the hosts in Budapest, assured that there has been in Europe “an extreme anti-family climate” for decades. “We must defend the family, God and all those elements that make up our civilization, and we must not fall into the idea that anyone who talks about it is a retrograde,” said Meloni. The Italian leader ruled out immigration to compensate for the fall in the birth rate, although she admitted that “a legal immigration quota can make a positive contribution to our economies”.
According to Eurostat data relating to 2021, Italy is the third country in the EU with the lowest fertility rate (number of births per woman of childbearing age); its rate was 1.25, higher than those of Spain (1.19) and Malta (1.13). The champion remains France (1.84).
Meloni – who has a daughter – praised the Hungarian birth program, based on economic incentives, which has produced some results. Thus, the fertility rate in Hungary was 1.23 children per woman in 2011 and has been growing until reaching 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 – wants to achieve by 2030. Hungary has been losing inhabitants for more than forty years: now it has 9.7 million compared to 10, 7 million in 1980.
To reverse this situation, the Orbán 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 between a man and a woman”, the framework in which all aid is registered. Thus, for example, married couples receive loans of up to 30,000 euros that they do not have to pay back if they have three or more children, and if they have two, they pay back 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 these aids benefit middle- or upper-class married heterosexual couples, and are beyond the reach of humble families – without access to bank loans -, single parents and the gypsy minority. Observers see it as unrealistic to expect more births to correct Hungary’s population deficit on its own. 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.
