Viktor Orbán’s party faces its biggest controversy yet

Hungary’s governing Fidesz Party is in crisis over an issue it has staked its credibility on: the defense of the traditional family. One of the ministers who pioneered Viktor Orbán’s family policy and served as president of Hungary, Katalin Novak, has been forced to resign over a pedophile scandal. Novak resigned on February 10 after a story revealed she had pardoned a man convicted of covering up sexual abuse cases of children at a state orphanage. Judit Varga, the former minister of justice, who signed off the pardon last April, was also forced out. Varga had been due to lead Fidesz’s list in the upcoming European parliament election.

Fidesz pro-family policies are part and parcel of efforts to keep Hungary ‘ethnically homogeneous’

This is not the first scandal to taint the image of Orbán’s Fidesz as a conservative Christian force upholding traditional family values in Europe. In 2020, Belgian police responded to a call regarding a Covid lockdown violation in Brussels. They found a twenty-five-strong gay orgy. Officers apprehended a man attempting to flee the scene down a drainpipe with ecstasy in his backpack. He turned out to be Jozsef Szajer, a founding member and a Fidesz member of the European Parliament, leading to his prompt resignation a few days later.

The simultaneous departure of Novak and Varga is a major blow to Fidesz. They were both young, popular with the voters, and as women in prominent positions, rare in a male-dominated party. Novak was a key figure in the government’s family policies and efforts to reverse the declining birth rate in Hungary.

When Fidesz came to power in 2010, the birth rate was at a record low, with Hungarian mothers bearing an average of 1.25 children. Through cash handouts, tax incentives and interest-free loans, young couples were encouraged to have more children. By 2021, the birthrate was up to 1.59 despite a significant fall in the number of women of childbearing age. During the same period, the number of abortions halved in Hungary, and the annual number of marriages almost doubled.

Hungary appeared to be confounding the liberal orthodoxy that governments cannot influence the decision of couples to conceive. The birthrate is still far from the 2.1 figure necessary to end the demographic decline, but the much mocked and criticized family policy of Fidesz won grudging international respect. There has been a dip in the birth rate since 2021, but it is still above 1.5, and the budget plans for this year indicate that the government is unswerving in its efforts.

Most countries across Europe have witnessed a steady decline in birthrates since the 1960s. Western nations, however, quietly tackled the workforce shortage provoked by aging populations by allowing young migrants to settle in their countries.

Hungary’s Orbán wanted none of that. Early in the 2015 refugee crisis, he became an emblematic figure for anti-migration sentiments in Europe and beyond. In a 2022 speech, the Hungarian prime minister exclaimed: “We are willing to mix with one another but we do not want to become peoples of mixed race.”

Fidesz pro-family policies are part and parcel of efforts to keep Hungary “ethnically homogeneous.” Hungary has a sizable Roma population — estimates range between 400,000 and 800,000. Financial incentives for couples to have more children were tied to strict conditions of previous employment and tax returns, effectively limiting support to the middle and upper classes. This excluded most Roma, who are among the most impoverished and work in the gray or informal economy. “Orbán’s ideology is that those who have stable employment get more and more resources,” says Dorottya Szikra, a senior researcher at the Social Policy Center, “whereas those who fall out of employment are abandoned by the state.”

The family model incentivized by Fidesz is conservative. While maternity leave was raised to 168 days, paternity leave is just ten working days: one of the lowest in Europe. Mothers are encouraged to stay at home and have as many children as possible, while fathers work as the sole breadwinners of the household.

The baby incentives granted by the Fidesz government are expensive. In this year’s budget, the equivalent of $9 billion will be allocated to family support — approximately 5 percent of the country’s 2023 GDP. Public services, including healthcare, are struggling in Hungary, and unemployment and other welfare payments have been gutted to pay for family support. Orbán and his ministers preach a “work-fare” state, which has increased the percentage of the adult population in employment from 56 percent to 75 percent, but at the cost of those sunk in the deepest poverty.

The recent child abuse controversy is a major setback for Fidesz. It’s a bad look for a party which presented itself to the world as a tough opponent of pedophilia to be embroiled in such a scandal. But Fidesz has won every general election since 2010 with a constitutional majority and maintains a steady lead in the polls ahead of the local and European Parliament elections in June. Orbán must now find new faces to present his government’s achievement in defending the traditional family to like-minded conservatives around the world.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.