Hungarian stylist Mark Lakatos is not the professional yardstick of family policy, despite what target voters left without metaphysical reference points may think. It is important to make this clear from the outset, when we have had to enshrine in constitutional law that the mother is a woman. And there is only one. These are important tautologies that help us survive the liberal zeitgeist.
There is only one mother and not many more children, 1.59 to be precise. This is a figure we are happy about, because it represents a 30% increase on the Hungarian fertility rate of 1.23 ten years ago. Since Europe's demographic disaster does not encourage Europeans to have children but to hold conferences about the topic, this increase is a source of admiration and some envy from Zagreb to Stockholm.
A Hungarian speaker at a conference regularly receives congratulations and praise for the Orban government's family policy from friendly politicians whose coalition partners in other forums are expressing 'serious concern' about the Orban government's nationalist and homophobic policies. Business as usual, why should demographic and family policies be different from other policies? At these international events where we discuss Europe's demographic tailspin, the Eastern European participants are usually genuinely interested in the specific measures of Hungarian family policy, such as what percentage of the home creation loan can be written off after the birth of the second child, etc. Western European guests are less interested, but they know the ship has sailed and they genuinely agree with everything, as they have been for decades. The shrimp sandwiches are always fresh, the coffee almost always, and they give expert lectures on how the population of the Netherlands is not technically shrinking (carefully avoiding the fact that the number of Dutch people is decreasing in the Netherlands).
Today's fertility rate of 1.59 for Hungarian women is the result of the hard work of four successive Orban governments, with a disproportionate financial outlay, unprecedented in Europe, of more than five per cent of GDP. The increase in the fertility rate is indeed high in relative terms, but for the uninitiated, the fertility rate of a biologically self-sustaining community is two - meaning that we would have to achieve at least one more increase of the same magnitude as the last ten years just to stay where we are now.
Population decline is not a recent phenomenon, although there are professional debates as to whether it dates from 1970s or in the brave new world of the fall of Socialism. Let us refrain from attaching graphs and confine ourselves to what is certain in this respect: the rapid decline in the population ran parallel to the period of loss of national wealth, which coincided with the robber privatization of state assets on the material level and the cultural terrorism of the Hungarian Free Democrat’s Alliance on the intellectual-cultural dimension. While pushing the country in total material dependency made it understandably difficult to have children, the greater damage was clearly caused by the liberal-fascist cultural hegemony: for example, that is the reason why we came to call childbearing a responsibility rather than a blessing. In the period after the change of regime, we could hardly articulate or express our instinctive opposition to the sick paradigm of liberal values. Let us not forget the two decades in which we struggled hopelessly to survive in a fetid intellectual morass whose noble traditions are now carried on by the Bartus-Perintfalvi-WMN cultural circle. In such a material and intellectual environment, dominated in every way by the local bosses of the global deep state powers, it is a miracle that there was a birth rate above zero at all.
Demography is an increasingly frequent topic at conferences of the European right, with at least as much weight as migration or the rise of the woke movement. It is right that we report on Hungarian successes, that we inspire others, and it is also right that we highlight in the domestic media the successes achieved at enormous cost and against enormous media backlash. But let us be realistic: every demographic policy has two pillars, while ours has only one. This pillar, which is a financial one, can be washed away by an economic downturn or a change of government, because the survival of the nation is not a national minimum in Hungary. But demography is also a matter of the mind, with cultural context and trends having more influence than material factors.
Thirteen years of right-wing government have not even managed to crack the liberal hegemony of the consciousness industry, let alone offer young people an attractive intellectual alternative. This is not about holding anyone accountable, because we know how difficult it is. We have achieved so much in the culture wars that Hungarian radio stations are now playing songs that are at least not hostile, they are not about people being depressed, with the singer being misunderstood even by her hamster. This is an important milestone we have reached in thirteen years. But to produce works that captivate the viewer, that make a young person feel that it is cool to be Hungarian is a different thing entirely. The Irish have created a high-budget film epic about Michael Collins that millions have identified with, the Poles about the Battle of Warsaw, the Russians have created the iconic figure of Danila Bagrov, and today the young men who grew up on Balabanov's films are defying the united Western forces on the front line in Luhansk. What have we done in this respect? We made a pathetic animation of the middle age battle of Bratislava.
The intellectual pillar of the Hungarian demographic rebirth is missing, and I do not say this at any international event. Not a single work has been produced since the change of regime with which we can identify, which gives us strength and faith. There are no patterns, there are no men, there are liberal-leaning kids constantly playing with their phones, whose creativity stops at wearing their baseball caps backwards. Despite appearances, these are very real factors in a demographic process - to deny this is to deny the importance of the spiritual dimension of our lives.
Of course, there is an explanation: en bloc, this is the Hungarian art world, Comrade Aczel bought them by the kilo, and these are their children. The director with nationalist sentiments is like a white raven, our writers are dissecting their own wretched, wounded little souls with a cultural Marxist spin and a lot of self-hatred. It's all true. And yet: without art, i.e. without powerful symbols and behavioral patterns, there is no identity, and a weak Hungarian identity will not become a growing, strengthening nation.
The government's directive is right: it is the Hungarian government's job to help young people so that there are no financial obstacles to having the children they want. I would add quietly: for centuries, there have generally been financial obstacles to having children, and there has generally been no government support. Now there is. What more do we need? The rule of law?
The author is the foreign affairs coordinator at the Center for Fundamental Rights
