Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó has described how his country has rejected multiculturalism and mass migration and as a solution to demographic and labour market challenges, favouring a more socially cohesive society and policies which support local people to raise their own families and up-skill.
“We have made it very clear during the debate in the European Union that we do not consider migration as a proper answer to our challenges regarding demography, or our challenges regarding the labour market,” the Hungarian told Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House in an exclusive interview.
“When it comes to demography, we would rather support our families to be able to raise more kids, and not to make it an economic decision whether to have another kid or not,” he explained.
Szijjártó described some of the policies the Fidesz-KDNP government under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to support natural population growth as an alternative to mass migration, some fairly standard — free kindergarten, school books and meals, and so on — and others more creative, such as a “taxation system which favours the family.”
For example, he described how “in case of raising three kids and having a salary around the average, you are basically exempt from paying personal income tax; you can get good tax exemptions if you build a house or buy one if you have kids in the family.”
With respect to the labour market and the country’s economic needs, Szijjártó said his government preferred to to modernise the education, involve businesses in shaping the curriculum, and support skills training, rather than the low-pay, relatively unproductive model adopted by pro-mass migration governments.
Finally, he offered fierce defiance to outside, globalist forces pressuring the country to embrace diversity and multiculturalism like some other countries in Europe, saying it was every nation’s right to choose the sort of society it wants.
“Our country has a totally different history, for example, compared the the United States, or France, or whatever,” he explained.
“We have always been a kind of homogenous society, and we believe that it must be a decision of ours, up to the decision of our nation, whether we want to change that or not — and our decision is no, we don’t want to change that,” he continued.
“We never judge those who think that multiculturalism is more beneficial for them, but we expect them not to put pressure on us to think the same way, and especially we find it unacceptable — we find it absolutely unacceptable — that anyone would highlight multiculturalism as by definition better, or more valuable, than a homogenous society,” he insisted.
“Let’s leave it to the given nations to make a judgement, to a make a decision, on that.”
Watch Breitbart Deputy Political Editor Amanda House’s Interview with Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó in full here.
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