ZILIA MESZAROS, a mother of three, was waiting at a Budapest primary school for her eight-year-old daughter to finish after-school football. It was a scene to warm the heart of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister. The country’s population has fallen from 10.7m in 1980 to 9.5m today, and increasing the birth rate is central to Mr Orban’s ideology. Nothing governments do makes sense, he said last month, “if there is no one to inherit it”.
Without migration, a country needs a fertility rate of about 2.1 to maintain its population. When Mr Orban came to power in 2010, Hungary’s was just 1.25, but by 2021 it had climbed to 1.61. Fidesz, his party, touted this as proof that their pro-natalist policies were working. Yet by 2025 the rate had fallen back to 1.31, with just 72,000 babies born, the fewest on record.
Hungary spends an extraordinary 5.5% of GDP on child-support measures, and middle-class working mothers like Ms Meszaros are the prime targets. Mothers of three or more children pay no income tax, and that exemption is gradually being extended to mothers of two. Parents can get interest-free loans and subsidised mortgages. A childless woman earning 1m forints ($2,940) a month takes home 665,000 forints after taxes; with three children, that rises to 963,500 forints.
Ms Meszaros says these measures make a big difference to her budget. They let her afford private-sector health care, among other things. But they did not affect how many kids she decided to have: “I don’t think they encourage people to have more children, but I think they encourage you to work if you have children.”
Indeed, Hungary’s fertility rate has followed a similar path to those of nearby Czech Republic and Slovakia, which spend much less on child support. Nevertheless, Mr Orban’s family policies are at the heart of his campaign in Hungary’s general election on April 12th. Polls show he is trailing the opposition Tisza party, led by Peter Magyar, by a solid margin.
Peter Szitas of the Danube Institute, a conservative think-tank, says spending money on families is valuable regardless of how many extra children it leads to. Just as important, Hungary’s family policies and anti-immigrant ideology are essential to Mr Orban’s international appeal, particularly to American conservative populists. In Fidesz’s rhetoric, “family and Christianity are almost used as synonyms,” says Zsolt Enyedi, a political scientist at the Central European University. Pro-natalist policies send a message to the MAGA world, he says: “It is about changing society at the biological level, which is the most basic level you can imagine.”
All European countries face demographic challenges, but in Hungary they have especially strong historical echoes. Before the first world war Hungarians worried that emigration would leave them facing nemzethalal (national extinction) among more numerous Slavs and Germans. Today immigrants, particularly Muslim ones, are the populist right’s bogeymen. Even should Mr Orban lose, his pro-natalist policies may continue: Tisza promises to spend yet more on them. ■
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