In Orbán’s Fight for Families, Women’s Rights are Collateral Damage
Independent organisations warn of the erosion of women’s rights and the worsening of their treatment as a consequence of the government's narrative about families.
“If you want a future for your country, you have to support mothers,” Viktor Orbán said in a video posted for International Women’s Day, in a montage of himself and US presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. In his media appearances, Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister often praises mothers, in whom he sees a solution to Hungary’s shrinking population and growing lack of workforce, while renouncing women without children.
His Fidesz government urges young women to embrace traditional family values instead of Western gender ideas, while gradually backsliding on gender equality and reproductive rights.
Since 2015, the Fidesz government has initiated a wide range of family policies, including preferential rates for house and car purchases for families, large loans for married couples, tax exemption for women with multiple children and maternity pay for grandparents.
Problems with women
This has, however, coincided with the curbing of women’s rights and a piecemeal undermining of attempts for gender equality. In 2018, the government banned gender studies at universities. In 2020, Fidesz issued a constitutional amendment stating that the “mother is a woman, the father is a man,” outlawing LGBT families and stigmatising single parents. The same year, then Justice Minister Judit Varga refused the ratification of the Istanbul convention, a legally binding international instrument for preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, due to the usage of the word “gender.” And in 2021, the government announced the latest restriction of abortion access, obliging women to listen to the “foetal vital functions” before the operation.
"I would have liked to run out of the hospital, I just knew that I couldn't, because I had to stay here to get over it," one woman recounted her experience during the mandatory evaluation preceding her abortion, in research by Patent, an association of lawyers, psychologists, and experts fighting violence against women.
Independent organisations, including Patent, have warned about the deterioration of women’s rights and protection.
“We did not experience positive progress at all in the legal aid service,” Júlia Spronz, president of the organisation, told Euronews. “There are fundamental deficiencies here, so there really is no such thing as women's protection.”
But associations like Patent, despite doing the work of a state including the operation of a helpline for abused women, battle constant underfunding and face dismissal. Independent politicians talking about gender equality in the National Assembly are routinely brushed off.
“There is nothing more saddening than seeing a woman's face distorted by hatred, so it becomes one of man,” speaker of the Assembly, László Kövér said of female politicians on a television show.
On the other hand, women with more of a traditional background find their way to Orbán’s government, like former President and Minister for Family Affairs Katalin Novák, who often boasted of her cooking and cleaning skills on social media.
Orbán, himself, would rather “not deal with women’s issues,” as he said in 2015. His current cabinet includes no women.
Lack of results
Orbán’s government spent 6% of the country's GDP, the highest ratio in the world, on family support schemes, earning the respect of conservative politicians worldwide.
"Everything about these policies is a good idea," Tucker Carlson exclaimed in 2019, referring to the Hungarian government’s family plan. He’s among the many conservative leaders and public figures praising Fidesz’s family policies.
“I very much agree with how they’re dealing with promoting and protecting the family,” former US senator Rick Santorum chimed in, addressing the attendees of the CPAC Hungary in April 2024.
Events such as CPAC (official line: God, Homeland, Family) picture Hungary’s family policies as a success - misleadingly.
The Hungarian population has been in decline since the 1980s; the number of births hit a negative record in 2023, and the number of marriages was at the lowest point since 2015 according to data from the Central Statistical Office.
In any case, according to estimates, by 2050, the population of Hungary will be below 8.5 million.
Since 2021, the number of newborns has decreased by nearly eight thousand - most affected are the areas where fertility was already lower, mainly among women living in the more developed regions of the country.
This might signal that the previously mentioned problems - lack of help for victims of domestic violence and humiliation in healthcare - contribute to some women’s decisions to have fewer children or have them later. Economic hardship and the bad state of education are also among the issues suspected to deter young people from starting families.
Of course, that doesn’t definitely mean that the current policies are failing. Fidesz has been in power since 2010, but 14 years is not enough to measure the success of such policies, experts highlight.
As demographer Balázs Kapitány told RFE/RL’s Hungarian service, Szabad Európa: “Decisions about having children are complicated and complex. People are not like a machine where I throw in a hundred forints and the hot chocolate comes out.”
Lili Rutai