The idyllic scene of a stay-at-home mother cuddling her young sons, Vazul, Magor and Matyas, in front of a wood-burning stove in their thatched cottage, would delight Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
We found the Dani family with three boys living contentedly and without money worries next to a forest near the capital Budapest.
Their happy situation is mainly thanks to an audacious pioneering scheme in Hungary that has been designed to stop the population falling by boosting birthrates: the government has scrapped women’s personal income tax if they have more babies.
‘We are announcing a lifelong tax exemption for mothers of two, three or more children,’ Mr Orban proclaimed last month. ‘2025 is the year of the breakthrough. There is nothing like this in the whole world! We will be a tax haven for millions of women who choose to make their family a career.’
The ‘lifelong’ aspect of this outstanding policy means even if the mothers go back to work after having children, they will never have to pay tax.
It is the latest raft of handouts available to women to increase birthrates. There is also a host of tax exemptions, grants and cheap loans. Hungary’s move is being watched across the globe.
We found the Dani family – mother Ibolya and sons Vazul, Magor and Matyus – living contentedly and without money worries next to a forest near the capital Budapest
The country’s population fell by nearly 10 per cent in 50 years to its current level of 9.9million. But the birth crisis here is far from unique – fewer children are being born globally, particularly in the richer Western nations.
According to a ground-breaking report in the Lancet medical journal last year, that means in the ‘near future we face a staggering social change’ and a ‘reshaping of the world in which we live in today’. Yet no country has so far discovered a way to solve this so-called ‘baby gap’.
The facts are simple. To keep a country’s population stable, every woman must have 2.1 babies. This is called the fertility replacement rate, and anything less means there would not be enough fit and able humans to work, create wealth, pay personal taxes and support the elderly to keep a society functioning.
With falling birthrates, each generation will be smaller than the one before it. And no nation in history that has faced a collapsing population has ever turned the situation around.
By the end of the century, said the Lancet, there will only be six countries in the world – Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan – where the 2.1 replacement rate will be sustained.
In the UK, total birthrate is expected to fall from 1.49 in 2021 to 1.3 in 2100. The number of pupils in state schools is expected to drop by 50,000 in the next three years. Already some primary schools in London have been forced to close or merge because there are simply not enough children being born to fill the desks.
Even in the traditionally baby-making Catholic nations of Europe, it is the same sorry story.
Italian newspaper La Stampa has said ‘for every child under six years old, there are already five elderly people,’ and pointing out that this is unsustainable because ‘three workers [are needed to] support every pensioner’.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orban encouraging bigger families on his 2023 Christmas card
The paper added a chilling prediction: Italy’s worker pensioner ratio will, in a matter of years, fall to 1.1. At which point the welfare state ‘will collapse’ because not enough people will have been born to sustain it.
Hungary’s birthrate was at a record low of 1.25 in 2010 when Mr Orban and his populist Fidesz party came to power.
He introduced initial policies of cash handouts, tax incentives, interest-free loans, subsidised nursery places and even free IVF treatment to encourage motherhood. Maternity leave was also extended to encourage women to stay at home while fathers went out to work (the men get just ten days off when their child is born).
At first the results looked startling. By 2021, the birthrate was up to 1.61. But the uptick dropped back to 1.5 last year.
‘We need more Hungarian children,’ Mr Orban repeatedly declares. He released a ‘Merry Christmas’ card in 2023 to the nation showing him cradling a baby and surrounded by the newborn’s five adoring siblings.
So can his plan, laced with persuasive propaganda and lures, really crack the birthrate dilemma?
The Mail went to Hungary to talk to some women – including Ibolya at her cottage with her sons, aged ten, nine and four.
Seated in her living room, she told us: ‘After my second son was born, I began thinking of a third. We did the sums and couldn’t afford it. Then our dream came true because of the government’s financial help. It meant I wouldn’t have to work again.
We cross the road to a beach on the bank of the Danube to speak to Dora Nagy, 36, who has two-year-old identical twin girls
I could be a full-time mother, which is what I wanted.’
Ibolya, 33, is a talented musician who was born in Romania and moved to Budapest as an opera student in her early 20s. Her husband, ten years older, is a low-paid chef at a country club.
She told us: ‘The family is the cement of society. I came home from school as a child and found my mother always there.
‘She was the central point of my life. I want it to be the same for my boys.
‘And most importantly, thanks to the government, we don’t have to worry about money. We have already received some extra state benefits and a tax-free grant of £25,000 for having our family.
‘Now I expect I will be rewarded more by Mr Orban.
‘The tax-free grant meant we were able to buy a new car, and we bought a house.
‘The state assistance means we can afford music lessons for our two eldest boys, who are talented at the cello and violin.
‘They have a real chance of success in life.’
Ibolya loves being a mother. But not all women are prepared to take state money to be baby makers. In a playground at Veroce village, on the banks of the Danube an hour’s drive from Budapest, we met Boglarka Gaspardy-Boros, 28, who worked as a dental assistant before marriage beckoned. She has three children, aged five, two and nine months.
She said many Hungarian women of her age don’t want children, even though it could mean a lifelong exemption from tax.
‘They want their careers, their lifestyle to stay the same. I am one of the few who have started a family.’
Then she adds: ‘But it is for the family to decide on how many they have – not the state.
‘What the state is offering is not enough to make me have another baby. My husband already does three jobs and a fourth child would be too expensive.’
We then cross the road to a beach on the bank of the Danube to speak to Dora Nagy, 36, whose two-year-old identical twin girls in pink are playing on a climbing frame. Her eldest girl, aged four, is at school in the next village along the river where they live.
She has lived in London, working at a restaurant where she met her Spanish husband.
‘I went there to learn English, but I found no one spoke the language in the shops or streets – everyone was foreign,’ she said.
‘The price of a flat was expensive, and when Covid struck, in 2020, I decided we should return to Hungary.
‘I was already pregnant with my first girl and I didn’t really think about state help for being a mother.’
However, she was offered work in a friend’s shop back in Hungary, which meant she had an official employment contract.
‘That allowed me to get an interest-free loan from the government because I was expecting a baby, formally working and paying tax. We were able to get a flat and do it up when the twins came along.
‘I won’t rely on the state long-term, and wouldn’t try for more children because of the Orban money on offer. I am retraining to be a money exchange trader so I can be independent and earn my own income for my family.’
But what of concerns about women’s rights?
Dr Fanni Csernus, Amnesty International’s gender studies expert in Hungary, recently sounded a warning: ‘The government here is insisting a woman’s primary duty is to give birth and raise children. It is forcing one section of society into a situation of constant dependency, which is very problematic.
‘We are at a point where a woman’s very existence and financial security depends on how many children she has.’
They are sentiments which Professor Eva Fodor, a Hungarian social scientist and gender studies expert, would likely applaud. Like many Left-leaning academics, she opposes the birth-boost plan.
At the Budapest campus of the Central European University of Vienna, Professor Fodor said the policy is only encouraging ethnic-Hungarian married mothers to have children – ignoring single parents, those unmarried and gay couples as well as those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, such as impoverished Roma families – of which Hungary has many.
As for a birth gap reversal, she says: ‘No single policy has ever changed a falling population.
‘My students, in their early 20s, say they don’t want children. It’s not trendy. They want to enjoy their own lives.
‘I don’t call the birthrate decline a problem. What’s wrong with a falling population? People could migrate here to increase numbers, if that is issue.’
Echoing her views, the Lancet report controversially stated an ‘obvious solution’ to the birth gap is letting people from countries with a large young population to migrate to others – such as Hungary or Britain – which do not.
Natalie Bhattacharjee, one of the authors, predicted: ‘Reliance on open immigration will become necessary to sustain economic growth.’
This has, of course, alarmed Right-wing political leaders in an increasingly populist Europe and America. Many have fought against lax borders while claiming, like Mr Orban, that more births in traditional families are the solution to the baby gap.
Into the heated Left vs Right fracas has stepped the Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, owner of X and the father of at least 13 children by various mothers.
In a social media conversation with Holland’s populist leader Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician warned that his country risked losing Western values thanks to mass, uncontrolled immigration. ‘Agreed,’ replied Musk, currently Donald Trump’s unofficial right-hand man. ‘If your birthrate in Holland stays as low as it is, your nation will die by its own hand.’
Only last week, Musk warned of the ‘catastrophic population collapse’. He posted a picture holding a sign saying ‘Make More Babies’ as one of his followers on X posted United Nations figures showing the declines in birth rates between 1950 and 2024.
An anonymous message soon appeared in response to Musk’s alarm. It said specifically of Hungary: ‘Orban’s family policies have a dark secret: they aren’t about raising birthrates but about raising white birthrates. Tax breaks and cheap loans are tailored to exclude poor Roma families, the very community that could help reverse the population decline.’
When we spoke to Hungarian Roma families, they complained about missing out on the baby boost benefits. Mr Orban’s incentives to make women into mothers are tied to strict regulations concerning parents’ previous employment and making regular tax returns – effectively ruling out the Roma, the newly arrived immigrants and others working in the economy.
An hour’s drive away from the Danube, we visited a Roma village called Acsa with 200 residents. It is a place of shabby properties, where fierce-looking dogs barked at visitors and the ground underfoot was mostly mud.
When we knocked on the door of one house with a sunken, tiled roof, a 27-year-old mother-of-three Nema Georgina said she was aware of the handouts to encourage baby making. ‘But, of course, we haven’t been offered them in our community,’ she said.
‘I get £150 a month in universal state benefit given to all mothers. My husband works on the black market. He used to go to a construction site but that went by the wayside. Now he does odd jobs whenever he can.’
Her mother-in-law owns the dilapidated house, where ten people live, including Nema’s family, some cousins, her sister and all their children. ‘It has no heating,’ she says, apart from its open fireplace. ‘At night it can drop to minus 8 degrees inside. The young ones are often sick, my toddler has the flu. It is hard to nurse a child better when it’s so cold.
‘It’s not fair my sister and I are not given the same money that is helping other Hungarian mothers.’
‘Will you and your husband have more children,’ I ask. ‘No,’ she says with certainty. ‘The reason is obvious. We have no home of our own and struggle to feed the three kids. The government don’t want Roma to have bigger families. We are not the right sort of people.’
As Hungary’s radical attempts to increase its birthrate take root, the question is whether Britain – where the baby gap is causing increasing concern – will follow suit.
A recent survey by London University revealed 31 per cent of Gen Z Britons are not interested in having babies, many of them explaining they ‘find children a nuisance’ and ‘want time for themselves’.
It is an ominous situation that worries Rupert Lowe, former Reform MP and champion of many on the Right, who said: ‘Having a child is an incredibly difficult decision for young men and women now. The brutal truth is: we need Britons to have more children. We are dying out.’
