Hungary’s baby-making summit dominated by paranoia, not policy

BUDAPEST — The children’s tricycle parade began a little past 10 a.m. on a cool, overcast Saturday morning across from Vajdahunyad Castle in the Budapest City Park.

The dirt path around the faux-gothic castle was dotted with newly erected booths, set up to sell baked goods or provide children’s entertainment. A low rumble drifted across the bridge that spanned the castle’s moat, growing steadily louder, until a wave of furiously pedaling children burst into view, parents running beside them.

The parade opened the third, and final, day of the Budapest Demographic Summit — Viktor Orbán’s biannual get-together of right-wing thought leaders who gathered to discuss Europe’s declining population and falling birth rates.

But the family festival, which featured face painting, carnival games, and a petting zoo, cut a sharp contrast with the siege mentality that pervaded the gathering of politicians and conservative luminaries over the previous two days.

“We live in an era where everything that defines us is under attack,” said Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who channeled the spirit of the summit in an early keynote speech.

“In our view, demography is not just another of the main issues of our nation. It is the issue on which our nation’s future depends,” she said.

As other speakers took to the stage, the list of enemies of the family took on a distinct culture wars flavor. There were the usual suspects: Liberalism, feminism, Marxism; but also smartphones and sex-ed. Woke banking featured in a diatribe from Australian preacher Nick Vujicic, while Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán decried climate change panic as the reason people were having fewer babies.

And there were rallying calls for traditional, married, preferably heterosexual, family units.

“The proper encapsulating structure around the infant are united and combined parents, man and woman," said Canadian psychologist and polemicist Jordan Peterson as he paced up and down the stage in the Budapest Fine Arts Museum’s elegant Renaissance Hall. "All alternatives to that are worse … Single people, divorced people, gay people, deviate from that,” he said.

Andreas Kinneging, professor of philosophy at the University of Leiden, continued in the same vein.

“Our task is to figure out what is the role of men and what is the role for women, and which roles best correspond to their respective nature,” said Kinneging, before suggesting his own answer to the question to a taken aback female moderator: “One of them works and one of them takes care of the children.”

Occasionally, the conference strayed onto more substantive territory. James Heckman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, spoke about the importance of family in closing educational and wealth gaps, citing evidence showing that training parents to help educate their children could improve their socioeconomic trajectory. But these moments were few and far between.

The population riddle

There are important questions about what works and what doesn’t to encourage child-rearing.

Surveys show that both men and women in Europe want more children than they actually end up having. Rapidly declining birth rates also skew the population pyramid, leaving fewer working-age people compared with older retirees (something called the dependency ratio). That can cause problems with pension payments and health care provision.

It’s especially a problem in countries like Romania and Bulgaria, where the low birth rates are compounded by high levels of emigration. “My country is among the most aging and rapidly shrinking countries in the world. Over the past 10 years we have lost 850,000 of our people, which is 12 percent of our population,” said Bulgarian President Rumen Radev at the summit.

On paper at least, Hungary’s results in raising its fertility rate are impressive, and could serve as a lesson for others. The country plows about 5 percent of its GDP into policies to encourage family formation, including tax breaks and low-interest loans for families with children, and free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. Since 2010, when Orbán took power, Hungary’s fertility rate has risen by about 25 percent, going from the lowest in the EU to a bit above the bloc’s average of 1.5 births per woman.

But the actual role of the Hungarian government’s policies in driving this change is an open question. The country was one of the hardest hit by the financial crisis, which may have had a role in depressing births in the period immediately before and after Orbán took power. Furthermore, other countries in the neighborhood have seen similar recoveries, pointing to what may be a regional trend rather than the success of special efforts on the part of the Hungarian government.

Recent data shows fertility rates in Hungary plateauing, or even dipping. That could be a temporary blip. But if it is sustained it will put out of reach Orbán’s goal of reaching 2.1 births per woman by 2030, the magic number needed to keep the population stable without immigration.

Regional tensions

Actual policies were thin on the ground at the Budapest summit. Instead, there were ethnic grievances and regional politics.

The speaker of the Azerbaijani National Assembly, Sahiba Gafarova, brought up Nagorno-Karabakh, the territory violently contested with neighboring Armenia, accusing Armenia of “vandal[izing] all historical, cultural and religious sites of Azerbaijan in these territories.” Less than a week later, Azerbaijan would launch a military offensive in that region.

Željka Cvijanović, the former prime minister of Republika Srpska — a majority Serb region within Bosnia and Herzegovina — spoke about the importance of the traditional family and sustaining birth rates threatened by globalists and liberalism. Ignatius Aphrem II, patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, discussed the plight of Christians in Syria, which he said was made worse by international sanctions on the country.

And the choice of the Transcarpathian Children’s Choir to perform one of many musical interludes wasn’t a coincidence. The region in western Ukraine has a significant ethnic Hungarian minority, and the two governments are locked in a language dispute after Ukrainian was made mandatory in schools. Dressed in embroidered white gowns, the children sang Templom és iskola (Church and School), a poem about the Hungarian language, church and schools by early 20th century poet Sándor Reményik.

Hungary’s President Katalin Novák took the stage next, praising the choir’s performance despite "the desperate circumstances they live in."

"We will not give up,” said Novák, echoing Reményik’s verse.

In Budapest City Park, people’s concerns were more prosaic, miles away from fears of moral drift and civilizational decline.

Istvan was a tired-looking 45-year-old with two blonde three-year-old boys on tricycles. He’d gone to the family day festival with his wife. Asked how he found raising his kids in Hungary, he said “so-so” and then paused. “It is difficult.”

What would make his life easier? “Better job. More money,” he said with a laugh. “This is the problem in Hungary I think.”