Number of marriages, fertility rate up in Hungary

Due to the government’s family support policy, the number of marriages has gone up by 42 percent and the fertility rate by 21 percent in Hungary since 2010, the state secretary for youth and family affairs said on Wednesday.

This is an outstanding achievement considering the fact that the number of marriages had dropped by 23 percent between 2002 and 2010 “thanks to the previous, left-wing government’s anti-family policy”, Katalin Novák told an international conference of Christian journalists in Budapest.

The number of abortions, though still high, has dropped to an all-time low, she said.

While there is a general trend of overpopulation in most parts of the world, Europe “has fallen” from this point of view, Novák said, arguing that none of the countries on the continent had a fertility rate that is sufficient for reproduction.

“Europe’s population has been growing in absolute terms, but only due to migration,” the state secretary said.

The Hungarian government responded to the problem of population decline with a policy of supporting families, Novák said. This policy, she said, is for introducing further family supporting measures each year without scrapping any of the existing ones.

As a result, Hungary now spends 5 percent of its GDP on family support schemes, twice the OECD average and two and a half times more than in 2010, she said.

Novák called the Hungarian government “lucky” because with a mandate received from voters it could pursue “a consistent and predictable family policy” over the past nine years.

Source: MTI