Hungary’s demographic challenges

A conservative commentator welcomes the government’s efforts to reverse the demographic decline with subsidies for families rather than by facilitating immigration.

In Magyar Demokrata, Gábor Bencsik praises the government for incentivizing childbearing in order to stop the country’s democratic decline. The conservative pundit suggests that while liberal democracies are ageing, many non-liberal regimes are experiencing a huge population boom. Liberal democrats in the West, however, criticize policies that are intended to boost the birth rate, claiming that such measures would violate individual rights, and instead they want to stop depopulation by inviting in immigrants, Bencsik writes. Notwithstanding its two thirds majority in Parliament, it took real courage from the Hungarian government to go against the trend and introduce a new system of family benefits that in the long run may prove strong enough to reverse the demographic decline, Bencsik hopes. He notes that since 2011, the birth rate has stopped declining, and a modest increase has been reported this year.

Tags: birth rates, demography, family, migration