Hungary launches seven-point family plan

“This is Hungary’s answer to challenges, rather than immigration,” the prime minister said at the launch of his seven-point plan.

• Every woman under 40 years of age will be eligible to a preferential loan when they first get married.
• The preferential loan of the family home purchase scheme (csok) will be extended; families raising two or more children will now also be able to use it for purchasing resale homes.
• The government will repay 1 million forints of the mortgage loan of families with two or more children. This measure was first announced in August 2017 for families with three or more children, with the government paying off 1 million forints of families’ mortgages for every third and subsequent child from January 2018. The measures has now been extended to include families raising two children.
• Women who have had and raised at least four children will be exempt from personal income tax payment for the rest of their lives.
• The government will launch a car purchase subsidy programme for large families. Families raising at least three children will be eligible to a grant of 2.5 million forints to buy a new car seating at least seven people.
• The government will create 21,000 creche places over three years.
• Grandparents will also be eligible to a child-care fee and look after young children instead of the parents, the prime minister added.

The number of measures announced are to support larger families in addition to the lifetime income tax break for women with more than four children.

Orban said there were once again forces that wanted to see open borders and a world without nations. These forces wanted to “fabricate” a supranational global government controlled from abroad. He called Brussels “the citadel of new internationalism” and denounced immigration as “the instrument of this internationalism”.

“The target countries for migrants are witnessing the emergence of a Christian-Muslim world with a shrinking rate of Christians. But we, central Europeans, still have a future of our own,” he added.

Orban described the Hungarian opposition “a bunch of pro-immigration politicians who are kept on a respirator by George Soros and the EU bureaucrats”.

He said it was “a kind of political pornography” that Hungarian Socialists and the extreme right would want to be together in a coalition. “We have to hear that listing MPs of Jewish origin is not anti-Semitism and he who says this wants to become mayor of Budapest instead of just sneaking away. We can only say that this is a shame,” Orban said.

“Neither the third two-thirds majority, nor the outstanding economic growth were given to us as a present, Hungarians have worked hard for both,” he said, adding that politics and the economy were deeply related and that such achievements “can never be attributed to blind luck alone”.

In 2009, at the end of left-wing rule, “our shared assets, reserves and future possibilities had all been used up” and Hungary needed more than just crisis management, it needed a complete renewal, a new direction, he said.

The number of marriages have since increased, infant mortality has been reduced, employment has grown from 55 percent to 70 percent, unemployment has been reduced to one-third of its earlier level, incomes are growing, and the minimum wage has more than doubled, he highlighted.

“In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the west to this is migration,” he pointed out. “They want as many migrants to enter as there are missing kids, so that the numbers will add up. We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.”

Hungarians have renewed faith in their future again, Orban said. “For us, victory is not when our party wins but when it is our country that is victorious,” the prime minister explained.

Orban said Hungary is a place where everyone will benefit from being Hungarian, and step by step, with persistent hard work, “we will eliminate poverty”.

He said everyone will have work and a home, every child will have access to creche, kindergarten, school, school dinners and textbooks, there will be support for young people, and a respectable old age to look forward to for seniors.

Orban’s government launched a “public consultation” last year, mailing questionnaires about migration and family policy to every Hungarian household.

The head of the Prime Minister’s Office Gergely Gulyas meanwhile told a press conference on Friday that regarding the upcoming visit by Franz Timmermans to Budapest, the EC’s first vice-president Timmermans “plays the role of chief European Union official” while he is at the top of the “Socialists’ pro-migration [EP election] list”.

About the Venice Commission delegation collecting information in Budapest about public administration courts, Gulyas said the Hungarian regulations fully stood the test of constitutional and international legal requirements.