The news from Budapest is stark and unignorable: Hungary’s birth rate, once the sick man of Europe, is showing signs of life. The Orbán government’s radical experiment in pro-natal policy has produced a modest but significant uptick in fertility. This is a story that should terrify the Western liberal establishment. Why? Because it forces them to confront their own sterile dogma. For decades, the decline in birth rates has been treated as an inevitable consequence of modernity: women in the workforce, later marriage, urbanisation, materialism. But Hungary has dared to ask: what if we fight back?
The measures are well known by now: generous tax breaks for large families, subsidised housing loans that are forgiven after three children, free IVF treatment, and a state-funded scheme that encourages women to have children in their prime. But the truly radical element is the cultural shift. The government has explicitly tied procreation to national identity, framing childlessness as a civic failure. This is the part that makes Guardian-reading types shudder. Yet consider the alternative. Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain: these are societies quietly accepting their own extinction. The Japanese government recently declared a ‘demographic emergency’. The Korean birth rate is now below 0.8 per child per woman. This is not a footnote in history; it is the death rattle of nations.
Critics will howl about women’s rights and state overreach. They will point to the paternalism of the Hungarian model. But these objections are luxuries of a civilisation that assumes its own permanence. Demography is destiny, as the old saying goes. Without babies, there are no taxpayers, no soldiers, no nurses, no one to pay for the pensions of the very generation that decided not to reproduce. The Hungarian experiment is not about forcing women back into the kitchen. It is about revaluing parenthood. It is about asking whether a society that cannot sustain itself deserves to survive.
Of course, there are caveats. Hungary is a relatively homogeneous country with a strong state and a recent history of collective struggle. Its policies may not translate to multicultural liberal democracies. But that is precisely the point. The West has become allergic to the very idea of a collective good. Everything is atomised, individualised, reduced to consumer choice. The decision to have a child is seen as a lifestyle option, no different from buying a new car or taking a holiday. The result? A slow biological collapse.
For the British, the lesson is particularly acute. Our own birth rate has fallen below replacement level. The Office for National Statistics projects that by 2045, deaths will outnumber births every year. We are sleepwalking into a demographic winter, warmed only by net migration. But migration is a short-term fix that brings its own cultural and social challenges. The Hungarian path is difficult and controversial, but it has the virtue of honesty. It begins with the premise that a nation has a right to exist and a duty to reproduce itself.
The liberal mind finds this distasteful. But perhaps it is time to ask: distasteful compared to what? Compared to the quiet euthanasia of entire peoples? The Hungarian blueprint is not a panacea, but it is a starting point for a conversation we have refused to have. Or we can carry on, comfortable in our decline, and leave the future to the Hungarians.
