Hungary’s birth policies: the radical antidote to managed decline

As in the days of Rousseau and the pseudo-Enlightenment, facilitator of the French Revolution, we live in a time of ascendant charlatanry. In politics, the arts, academe, all our emperors are naked. Realism and sanity have become gross offences. Yet there is in Europe one country – reviled and demonised by the gatekeepers of woke orthodoxy – that has successfully defied the lemming-like stampede towards auto-destruction that has overtaken most of the continent. In Hungary, neither the intellect nor the soul is dead, as in so much of the rest of Europe.

Even at the mechanical level of fiscal innovation, Hungary has adopted distinctive solutions, as testified by a flat rate of income tax at 15 per cent and a corporate tax rate of 9 per cent that is the lowest in Europe. Granted, VAT is high at 27 per cent and last year the government, in response to the disruptive effects of the war in Ukraine, imposed a number of windfall taxes. But, overall, the fiscal landscape in Hungary exhibits a creativity and openness to experimentation that is alien to Britain.

The fault is not that this country has failed to adopt the specific prescriptions that drive Hungarian fiscal policy – every society has its own economic DNA and they might not translate effectively to the UK – but that there has been no proper debate, such as led to the adoption of counter-intuitive taxation measures in Budapest, at Westminster. Liz Truss jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and startled everyone, before being locked in the toy box by the globalist consensus, the technocrats on tramlines who manage our decline.

But Hungary’s claim to distinction is not simply to have dared to introduce fiscal measures at which more hidebound governments balked, but to have employed fiscal instruments as part of a much more radical and inspirational plan to save its national culture and identity.

After Angela Merkel, who is now about as fashionable a political icon as Nicola Sturgeon, had invited a million foreign young men into Europe to enrich its culture at venues such as Cologne railway station on New Year’s Eve, Hungary found itself in 2015 facing an invasion – though it was reproached by the Brussels thought police for employing that terminology – by 160,000 illegal immigrants, with unlimited numbers likely to follow.

What did the Hungarian government do, apart from rushing troops to defend the border? It did the one thing that Brussels most fears and deplores: it consulted its population by referendum on the immigration issue. Specifically, it asked the people of Hungary if they were willing to accept the quotas of immigrants imposed on them by the EU at the behest of Merkel. The Hungarian electorate voted 3,253,290 (98.32 per cent) to reject immigrant quotas, with 55,598 (1.68 per cent) in favour.

We’ll take that as a No, then, would be the response of most numerate people to that result; but that was not the reaction of the EU apparatchiks. They objected that, to be legally binding, the turnout had to reach 50 per cent, whereas only 42.7 per cent of eligible voters had participated (because the opinion polls had shown such massive rejection of quotas that many voters had not troubled to turn out). In Brussels’ view, the Ayes had it – all 55,598 of them – and Viktor Orbán had no mandate to exclude illegal immigrants.

The Hungarian parliament took a more numerate view and passed the necessary legislation while the government set about securing the border. That was an impossible task, sneered the Brussels mouthpieces, just as their opposite numbers in America laughed at Trump’s fence. Judge by the outcome: in 2015 Hungary had more than 177,000 asylum seekers; in 2021 that figure was reduced to 40. Immigration control is purely a matter of political will, as the jellyfish government of the UK demonstrates daily.

But Hungary did not simply regain control of its borders, at the price of relentless EU persecution ever since, it addressed the issue that has furnished the pretext for liberal immigration policies elsewhere in the developed world: declining population. Hungary had a serious demographic problem, so Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government experimented with various fiscal inducements for Hungarians to procreate.

At first those efforts were unsuccessful: increasing a national birthrate in a materialist age where artificial contraception has promoted a culture of infertility in developed countries is a protracted struggle, like turning a tanker around over ten miles. Undeterred, the government became much bolder in its approach. Progressively, the Fidesz government introduced massive incentives for citizens not only to breed, but to do so responsibly within the stable context of marriage, which in Hungary can only be between a man and a woman (Hungarian politicians, unlike British, seem to have no difficulty in identifying what a woman is).

Hungary grants women who give birth to and raise four or more children a lifetime exemption from income tax. A low-interest loan of €31,500 is available to women under the age of 40 marrying for the first time; a third of the debt is cancelled when a second child is born and the entire debt is waived after a third birth. Following the birth of a second child the government will provide €3,150 towards its family’s mortgage, then €12,580 after a third child and thereafter €3,150 for each additional birth. For families with three or more children the government will offer a subsidy of €7,862 towards the purchase of a seven-seat family vehicle.

Most recently, the government has reinforced these provisions by exempting women who give birth under the age of 30 from income tax, at least until they reach the age of 30 (the details are still unclear, but the significance is obvious). So, what is the outcome of so many fiscal incentives to increase the birth rate? Hungary’s critics (the usual globalist suspects) claim the policy is failing because the population is still declining. But that is a red herring: the population is declining because many older people are dying, while others are emigrating due to the war in Ukraine.

The key question is whether the fertility rate is rising. If the natal demographics can be turned around, other factors encouraging emigration can be addressed separately. When Viktor Orbán came into office in 2010, Hungary’s fertility rate was 1.33 children per woman. In every year since then it has increased, reaching 1.54 last year. That is a considerable achievement. The government’s aim is to reach 2.1, the point at which population holds steady, by 2030.

Yet the most startling effect of this unique initiative – Hungary is spending around 5 per cent of GDP on family policy – is the social transformation caused by its other outcomes. Over the past decade in Hungary there has been an astonishing 92 per cent increase in marriages, while divorce rates have fallen by 37 per cent – demonstrating how frequently financial problems contribute to marriage breakup, notably in Britain, where marriage is fiscally penalised, so that UK marriage rates have fallen by 16 per cent over the same period.

By tying their fertility promotion programme firmly to marriage and the family – the primary building blocks of society – the Hungarian government has brought about increased social stability, so that births out of wedlock have fallen by 11 per cent. Hungary has rediscovered the natural pattern of civilised existence, in contrast to Britain where, pressured by lobby groups such as Stonewall, the government has created a family-hostile environment. You can send your son to school in Hungary with well-founded confidence that he is not known there as Susan or being stuffed with puberty blockers.

Yet nothing creditable about Hungary is ever published in Britain’s woke mainstream media, totally ignorant of Hungarian society and content to parrot the demonisation of that country promoted by George Soros. The EU claims there is corruption in Hungary; if so, it is unlikely to amount to the €29.6bn that procurement corruption alone in Brussels cost EU taxpayers between 2016 and 2021.

The EU is concerned that Hungary is a threat to democracy: MEPs have claimed it is an “electoral autocracy”. It is edifying to know that Ursula von der Leyen, voted into office by a massive electorate of 705 MEPs in a poodle parliament that does not even have the power to initiate legislation, is prepared to challenge Viktor Orbán, who has won three successive supermajorities in general elections and, between elections, has put major issues to public vote in referenda.

What concerns the EU about “electoral autocracy” is not the supposed autocracy, but the electoral element. In EU-speak and the vocabulary of Western elites, “democracy” is a euphemism for oligarchy. Giving an electorate a genuine say on an issue of importance – for which David Cameron is still pilloried by his peers over the Brexit referendum – is unforgivable. Orbán’s offence, in the eyes of the elites, is that he represents the interests of the people he governs, rather than the closed circle of technocrats managing decline and destroying the entire culture of the West as they do so.

Hungary is seen as dangerously influenced by residual Christian values, as giving undue influence to the populace (populism), the heresy whereby government is based on what the public wants, rather than what the World Economic Forum prescribes. Hungary is criticised for not being more overtly hostile to Russia, on whom it depends for its energy: not a team player, say critics, not engaged with “European values”.

They need to have their memories jogged, to remind them of what Hungary has suffered over the past century. At the infamous Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungary was stripped of two-thirds of its territory, one-third of its ethnic Hungarian population, all of its seaports and almost 90 per cent of its natural resources. Nor has the country forgotten how it was abandoned by Europe in 1945 and handed over to the Soviet Union, nor how Western propagandists promised help if Hungarians would rise up against their Communist oppressors and, when they did so, left them to the vengeance of the Soviets.

With experiences like that, it is unsurprising if Hungary feels disinclined to destroy its own interests and economy by assisting the European powers that have dealt with it so treacherously in the recent past and, through the medium of the EU, are attacking her even now because that nation has preserved its identity and culture, rather than turning itself into a facsimile of the Parisian banlieues.

The real threat posed by Hungary, as it grows its population in lieu of replacing it with non-Europeans, regenerates family life and values, and asserts the primacy of man/woman marriage is the image it will continue to present, over the coming years, of how civilisation could have flourished here and in other woke hellholes, if our politicians had retained the slightest vestige of patriotism and integrity.

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