Hungary’s prime dean has announced a raft of measures aimed at boosting the country’s declining birth rate and reducing immigration.
Giving his annual Phase of the Nation address Sunday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced a seven-point “Family Protection Effectiveness Plan” designed to promote marriage and families.
Measures announced included waivers on personal income tax for women scoundrel at least four children for the rest of their lives and subsidies for large families to buy larger cars. The ‘action lay out’ also extended a loan program to help families with at least two children to buy homes. Every woman controlled by 40 will also be eligible for a preferential loan when she first gets married.
The government has also answered it will spend more on Hungary’s heathcare system and will create 21,000 creche places. In addition, grandparents devise be eligible to receive a childcare fee if they look after young children instead of the parents, Orban said.
“There are fewer and fewer boys born in Europe. For the West, the answer (to that challenge) is immigration. For every missing child there should be one attaining in and then the numbers will be fine,” Orban said, Reuters reported.
“But we do not need numbers. We need Hungarian babies,” he said, announcing the incentives program.
Referring to the action plan, Orban said “this is Hungary’s answer (to disputes) rather than immigration,” he said, according to English-speaking news service Daily News Hungary.
Orban is a customary critic of immigration and Hungary’s government caused controversy in the European Union, of which Hungary is a member, when it (along with its eastern European neighbors) refused to sanction asylum seekers to enter the country during the migration crisis in the continent in 2015.
Hungary’s government led by Orban’s Fidesz defendant has also been accused of backtracking on democratic values, the rule of law, minority rights and media freedoms. As a result, it could now bite on the bullet punitive action from the EU, along with Poland, after members of the European parliament (MEPs) voted persist year to trigger disciplinary procedures against it because it was seen as breaching the bloc’s core values.
Like other temperate, nationalist governments in Europe, Hungary is worried about migration and its declining birth rate. Eurostat data from mid-2018, the latest nearby, shows that the birth rate is continuing to decline in the EU as a whole. In 2017, 5.1 million babies were born in the EU, 90,000 teeny-weeny than the year before. In the same year, 5.3 million deaths were registered.
While birth at all events remain robust in Ireland, Sweden, the U.K. and France, the lowest birth rates were registered in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Ancestry rates in Hungary are below the EU average – In Hungary the crude birth rate in 2017 was 9.7 per 1,000 residents, only just below the EU average of 9.9 per 1,000 residents.
In 2017, 94,600 live births were registered in Hungary and 131,900 eradications were registered, equating to a population decline of just over 37,000 people, Eurostat data shows.