Last Updated on February 18, 2019 by Karl Thompson
Hungary’s Right Wing government recently announced a new social policy exempting women who have more than four children from income tax for life.
There are also other financial incentives designed to encourage families to have more children – such as loans of up to £27,000 which will be partially or fully written off if the couple go on to have two or three children.
The stated aim of the policy is to reverse the country’s population decline so that Hungary does not have to rely on migrant workers in the future.
The Prime Minister, Victor Orban stated that women having fewer and fewer children was a problem all over Western Europe, and that the solution tended to be to increasingly rely on immigrants in the future, to replace the ‘missing’ native children. Orban believes that Hungarians would rather have Hungarians working in the future rather than immigrants.
Relevance to A-level sociology
This is an unusual example of a right wing (New Right) policy explicitly designed to encourage marriage and the more babies being born (it seems within nuclear families).
At the same time it is pro-nationalist and and anti-immigration, hence anti-globalisation.
I guess from a narrow minded ‘Hungary first’ Nationalist perspective if makes sense in a ‘defend our boarders’ sort of way.
Unfortunately in itself it’s going to do nothing to actually stem the flow of migrants to Europe from poorer non-European countries, and neither is it going to do anything to curb global population growth – surely from a globalist/ environmentalist perspective what we need is wealthier countries having fewer babies, and more migrants from areas where the birth rate is still high to fill jobs in developing countries in the future?
This is a great example of an unusual family policy, quite extreme in nature, and also a good example of how short-sited Nationalism is.
