Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has announced that birth rates and demographics will be his top priority following a triumphant re-election, with mass migration rejected in favour of policies supporting Hungarian mothers.
“My first priority as something we’re all aware of, something we all know, yet something that during our everyday struggles we rarely concern ourselves with, because its long-term nature means that it doesn’t dominate people’s thinking. This is the societal phenomenon called demography,” said the Fidesz leader in an interview with Kossuth Radio, a transcript of which has been seen by Breitbart London.
Prime Minister Orbán told the broadcaster that demographics was, fundamentally, “about the following: how many children are born to Hungarian women; how many children we raise together; whether there will be a Hungarian future; whether the Hungarian nation will survive biologically and numerically; what we must do to stop the decline we clearly see in this area; and what we must do to change the fact that we have more funerals than christenings.”
The issue of falling birthrates is far from unique to Hungary, plaguing much of Europe, North America, and the Western world.
However, most of Orbán’s contemporaries are attempting to tackle it by importing vast numbers of migrants from the Global South while the native population continues to shrink — a strategy some experts have denounced as a Ponzi scheme, as the newcomers will eventually grow old themselves.
Prime Minister Orbán said his new government would soon be launching a “major family policy action plan, which will be preceded by a national consultation on starting families and raising children,” adding: “We don’t want to exclude men from this consultation, but essentially we’ll be seeking the opinions of ladies.”
His goal is that, by 2030, Hungary will “become a country which is able to sustain its own population level, to reproduce itself. To put it plainly, we want a country where the number of children being born is at least as high as the number of people departing this life.”
He said he would seek to achieve this by casting aside the globalist values of what he called “liberal democracy”, which has “become hollow”, in favour of a modern form of “Christian democracy”.
“There are, of course, other cultures in a society; and as we’re tolerant people there’s room for them,” Orbán explained. “But all the same our lives have a foundational culture which needs to be protected – and this is Christian culture.”
The “utterly failed” system of liberal democracy rejects this notion, in the Hungarian leader’s view, and consequently “does not provide an answer to the question of what we should do about migration – or if it does provide one, it in no way defends us against migration, but rather supports it, regards it as something natural and positive, and promotes its realisation.
“It doesn’t defend the borders, because it doesn’t recognise the need for borders, and doesn’t recognise that they must be retained and strengthened.
“It doesn’t protect us in the sphere of families, because liberal democracy doesn’t strengthen families: it maintains that there are many varieties of family, there are many varieties of lifestyle, and we mustn’t make distinctions between them… One of the consequences of this is that we are living through a period of demographic decline,” he warned.
Prime Minister Orbán appeared to anticipate that the European Union establishment, which is vigorously opposed to his anti-mass migration stance, would attempt to thwart his domestic programme, despite its resounding endorsement in recent national elections — and indicated that his government would be pursuing new constitutional amendments and regulations “capable of repelling attacks from Brussels”.
“We stand on the foundations of sovereignty, and Brussels cannot take Hungary’s sovereignty away from us,” he vowed.
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