BUDAPEST, Hungary — A dozen children sprint across the green lawn around the forsythia bushes, which are in full saffron-colored bloom. Sárkány rét (“Dragon Meadow”) is a beautiful park overlooking the Danube, with a view of Budapest’s famous landmarks: the Buda Castle, the famous parliament building, and the Basilica of St. Stephen.
Gabor, a father of two, smiles at this idyllic moment. If Prime Minister Viktor Orbán were here, he might deploy a camera crew to capture this scene as the fruit of 14 years of family policy.
“Hungary has structured its entire state and economy around family,” declared Balázs Orbán, a top adviser (and no relation) to the prime minister. Parents here receive large tax benefits that will get larger next year. The government promotes marriage and tries to make parenting easier, in part by building and maintaining beautiful parks.
But four years from now, Dragon Meadow will be a bit emptier than it is today. Hungary’s birth rate in 2019 was 1.55 babies per woman and rising. Today, it is down to 1.38 and falling.
Hungary’s ruling party continues to tout its family policy, and it generally waves away its recent demographic warning signs. I attended and spoke at a conference on family policy here, hosted by the conservative Danube Institute (which paid my way here). From the podium, every Hungarian official touted last decade’s rise in births and marriages. Not one spoke about the recent 15% drop in the birth rate.
One year from now, Orbán’s party, Fidesz, looks likely to face its toughest challenge to date. Orbán’s government has been sanctioned for corruption, and his decade in charge has been marred by scandal and power grabs. On the streets and in the pubs of Budapest, his family policies face critique or dismissal.
American conservatives, particularly those of the post-liberal bent, have been looking to Hungary as a possible model for family policy. The recent history ought to be a warning that the Orbán way is not the path to saving the family.
Family policy
Orbán was elected prime minister in 2010, and the next year, the parliament passed the “Fundamental Law,” something of a new mission statement for the country. In addition to consolidating Orbán’s power, the Fundamental Law proclaimed Hungary’s Christian character and pledged to protect traditional marriage and “the family as the basis of the survival of the nation.”
“Hungary shall support the commitment to have children,” the law states.
When American conservatives talk about supporting family, progressives reply with a challenge: Put your money where your values are. Orbán has done that, creating a massive raft of financial benefits for parents, especially those who start families young and have many children. He also spends a lot to promote marriage.
Hungary has a large per-child tax deduction that gets progressively larger with the second and third child. Parents of one child get about a $58 tax break per month, while parents of three children save about $530 in taxes monthly. This is more generous than the U.S. child tax credit — in a country with a far lower average income.
Also, Hungarian mothers of large broods are exempt from paying income taxes for the rest of their lives. Recent law has made the deductions larger and extended the lifetime exemption to mothers of two or more children. Under prior law, the threshold was four children.
Everywhere you look in Budapest, you see signs of a society trying to welcome children. Starting at the airport baggage claim, you see ads with smiling families and the motto “Family-Friendly Country.”
The city is dotted with playgrounds that all look awesome. They are colorful and clean, and they look just the right amount of dangerous. Built into the southeast face of Gellert Hill, the same mountain as Dragon Meadow, is Csúszdapark, or Slide Park. Atop Slide Park are tall, rustic-looking wooden forts. Between the slides of all shapes and sizes were boulder-covered slopes for climbing. As I admired this park, a Romanian mother named Rosanna arrived — she had been searching for this playground. “It’s spectacular!” she gushed.
From its fundamental law to its fiscal system to its infrastructure, Hungary tries to be family-friendly, and the political leadership takes great pride in this.
Taking a pro-family stance is taking a side. It could offend some concepts of “liberalism.” It’s not neutral. It is, technically speaking, discrimination. Every playground you build displaces some other use of finite urban space or parkland. Hungarian Culture Minister Balázs Hankó argued at the conference that “traditional family values” must be affirmed in law because they are under attack by “the rainbow ideology,” by European Union mandarins and Western cultural elites.
And by all appearances, Hungary’s family policy has made a difference. Hungary’s birth rate when Orbán took over was just above 1.2, and over the next decade, it rose steadily to above 1.6 in 2021. “Hungary now has the third-highest fertility in the EU. … In 2010, we had the lowest.”
Balázs Orbán crowed at the conference that “the number of marriages has gone up by a third. The number of divorces involving children has dropped by 80%.”
But things have turned south since 2021. The birth rate has fallen from 1.61 to 1.38 in 2024.
While I was in Hungary, the government released its February numbers, and they were even grimmer: Births fell by 5.8% from last February, after you adjust for last year’s Leap Day, making this February the lowest month of Hungarian births on record.
Marriages, too, were down 7.9%, year over year.
Whatever seemed to work in Hungary from 2012 through 2021 appears to be not working today.
What’s wrong?
Some flaws appear when you look at Hungary’s policies. The most famous policy is a total exemption from income taxes for mothers. A woman with two children will never pay income tax.
This is pro-natal, but it’s also a work incentive for mothers — and these two effects could offset one another a bit. European women are already plenty career-minded, and this policy seems to reinforce the message that mothers ought to be earners primarily. One Hungarian official said careerism is the biggest obstacle to family formation in his country and that the shape of this policy doesn’t help.
Also, when it comes to housing, Hungary’s policies seem to subsidize the demand for family housing more than they subsidize the supply. This results in bidding wars rather than home affordability.
And affordability is a common explanation for this decade’s baby bust.
“The government is trying. People want to” have children, says Peter, a cab driver. “But it is hard. It’s hard to raise children well in Hungary.”
To American ears, this a familiar explanation for the baby bust: We’d love to have children, but we just cannot afford it. This affordability argument isn’t false, but it’s certainly incomplete. Millennials and Generation Z are not poorer than their predecessors, and studies suggest that most measures of affordability do not predict birth rate changes. In fact, affluence seems to be a predictor and even a cause of falling birth rates.
Peter, though, argues that Hungary is a uniquely bad place to try and start a life. “Prices are not lower here than in Germany, and jobs do not pay as much.”
Gabor, at Dragon Meadow with the kindergarten, makes a similar argument. He uses the term “environment” to describe what is or isn’t family-friendly. “Infrastructure” is the first part, and that, he praises: the great playgrounds, walkability, public transit, low crime, number of other families, and his daughter’s private school.
The family “environment,” as Gabor uses the term, also includes the economy. On this score, he says Hungary lags. “If only we were at the average of the European Union.”
But again, this critique falls a bit short. Hungary’s economy grew 1.48% last year, compared to the EU average of 1.12%. Hungary’s wages are growing about 10% per year, more than twice Europe’s average.
That said, wage growth is a downward trajectory, and this points at a deeper worry.
In explaining the difficulty of raising children in Hungary, Peter keeps using the word “safety.” This confuses me because everyone else, and later Peter, tells me crime is very low. Eventually, I realize he is talking about security — predictability and stability.
“The biggest thing is, we don’t know what tomorrow will be like. The president could wake up in a bad mood and everything change,” he says.
“You are not going to raise a child if you are uncertain” about the politics or the economy, Gabor says. Even massive tax relief isn’t enough to reassure someone who believes a recession, political unrest, or some new government misconduct is around the corner.
Gabor and Peter blame the prime minister for the uncertainty. Gabor blames Orbán’s corruption, and Peter blames Orbán’s personality. But many Hungarians also hang the uncertainty on two recent events outside Hungary’s control.
A pandemic and a war
Chas and Rudy are sitting in a booth next to the bar when I arrive at Grinzingi Borozó, an old pub filled with bricks and wood and pilsner. The men, about age 70, are still sitting there and give me a friendly hello as I settle my tab after dinner and a couple of drinks on a Sunday night.
“You have been sitting there a long time,” I say with a smile.
“Decades!” Chas responds, and he invites me to join them. Chas “inherited” this booth from his uncle and his friends years ago. Chas and Rudy are Orbán fans, and they love his family policy.
“I think family is good. Government should help people have children,” Chas says. He praises the Orbán policies because they are not mere handouts: “The benefits go to people who pay taxes.”
Like the government representatives, Chas and Rudy point to Hungary’s birth rate increase throughout the 2010s. So, I ask, What about the three years of dropping birth rates?
“First, we had COVID,” Chas explains. “Then, we had the war.”
“The war” is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which borders Hungary. While most of the fighting has happened in eastern Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly bombed Lviv, only 75 miles from Hungary. Hungarians feared the war would spill over into their country or that, as a NATO member, they would be drawn into a broader war against Russia.
COVID is past, and the war seems unlikely to spread to Hungary. But the fear of the virus, the trauma of the lockdowns, and the shock of the war may have made a permanent impact on the Hungarian psyche, perhaps creating a persistent, maybe permanent, state of worry about the future.
“Generational uncertainty” is the term used by Levente Székely, head of Hungary’s Youth Research Institute and Center for Sociology.
Then again, this may be the default state for Hungarians.
‘We planned only one’
In almost any Catholic church in the world, the crowd at a random weekday morning Mass will have a median age of about 70. At the Cave Church, a church in a cave under Gellert Hill, on a Monday morning, the usual crowd is joined by a young family, a fresh-faced mother and father and their adorable Hungarian baby.
The family is visiting Budapest from Gyor, a city of about 100,000 lying roughly 75 miles to the west. They seem to be the ideal target for Orbán’s vision and policy: Catholic, young and married, visiting grandma, and attending daily Mass. But Tomas, the father, tells me with finality that their first child is also their last.
Why? Do they have economic concerns? Unexpected problems?
No. “We planned only one.”
This is very modern and European but also very old and Hungarian. “Even our grandparents’ generation did not have a lot of children,” explained Johanna Frohlich, a Hungarian scholar of both law and family. “In Hungary, we have always been struggling with this idea.”
“Egykezes” is a Hungarian word of 19th-century vintage that describes Tomas and his wife. It roughly means “only-child-ness,” and it was, according to some histories, a noted condition of Hungarian peasants nearly 200 years ago. Since then, Hungary has gone through World War I, World War II, and communism.
Hungary, culturally unique in all of Europe, may suffer from distinctive cultural, historical, and ethnic handicaps on the scores of family formation because Hungarians may have an almost-Russian pessimism, and an innate pessimism.
So, how did it work?
These were the headwinds when Orbán came into power in the country with Europe’s lowest birth rate. He declared that marriage is good, parenthood is good, and that the two are linked. Marriage increased for a decade, married baby-making increased, and unwed baby-making decreased. All this happened while most of Europe saw falling birth rates.
Then, in 2021, it peaked, and since then, Hungary has seen a precipitous drop in marriage and family formation.
What’s the explanation?
Many conservatives here say family policy is still working and that we shouldn’t worry too much about the three-year trends.
They say family policy works by changing the culture and that the benefits will only be visible in the long run. The playgrounds, the ads, and the fearless statements by the government will all sow the seeds of a worldview — not a new worldview, but an old one. The view is that marriage is a natural part of becoming an adult, that having children is a natural part of marriage, and that society has an obligation to help parents raise their children because, after all, children are what make a society survive.
Is there evidence this culture war is working, though? Is the Hungarian public more pro-family than it was 15 years ago? The government is, but what about the average adult, the average student? The evidence here is thin.
Family policy could, in fact, have the opposite effect. Maybe Hungarians don’t like being told what to believe and what to do with their lives.
“I’m on the side of promoting family,” Gabor says. He believes people will have children “if the environment is right but not because they are told to do it.” He says Orbán’s government is “trying to push the narrative that this is the good thing to do,” and that may backfire because it intertwines politics with this notion of family. Pushing people to have children when the economy isn’t great is “blackmail,” Gabor complains.
Berna, a law student from Turkey, comes to Grinzingi when she visits Budapest. She gives me a Turkish analogy for what she believes is happening in Hungary: “[Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan says we should get married and have children. Erdogan is kind of a jerk. People do not want to do what he tells them to do.”
Orbán is not quite Erdogan, but the power grabs and scandals of his reign leave him with his share of detractors. Also, Orbán’s vision of Hungary is at odds with the standard European vision: individualistic, post-Christian, and post-nationalist. Family policy, by making family a political thing — and especially by attaching it to a man like Orbán — could exert some downward pressure on family formation.
Here’s a broader interpretation of all the available data, one that strikes me as likely after many on-background conversations with demographers and Hungarian conservatives:
Hungary has succeeded mostly in boosting marriage in the last decade: earlier marriages, more marriages, and fewer divorces. This alone has boosted birth rates.
The other effects on the birth rate were narrow: A few thousand dollars may induce more baby-making only among those who are already family-minded, likely the religious, but feel constrained by finances. This is a small portion of the population, and it may be shrinking as Hungary, like all of the West, secularizes.
For a fuller analysis, we need to wait. Maybe the benefits, like many family benefits, mostly sped up the tempo of births (helped couples have their babies earlier), which looked, on paper, like an increase in the birth rate while not adding more babies in the long run. Demographer Lyman Stone thinks the data point in the opposite direction: Perhaps the current dip in the birth rate is statistical noise, and in a few years, we will see the statistical fruit of family policy.
The story that’s most likely to be true, and most important for American students of Hungary to learn, was laid out at the beginning of the conference here.
Eduard Habsburg, a Hungarian diplomat, a scion of the famed Habsburgs, and a father of six, sang the praises of his country’s family policy, which align civil law with natural law. But he had a warning: “Economics is not enough.”
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To boost family, one must realign values: inculcate the sense that one inherits something valuable from the past and has a debt to the future. Also, instill the idea that self-sacrifice is central to our calling.
Nationalism can do a little on this front. But the real source of these values will, Habsburg said, have to be rooted in faith. And no set of tax policies will convert its secular population into believers.
Timothy P. Carney is a senior political columnist for the Washington Examiner.