Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced a seven-point family protection action plan in his state-of-the nation address in Budapest on Sunday.
“This is Hungary’s answer to challenges, rather than immigration,” the prime minister said. Listing the points of the action plan, Orban said
- 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.
Orban called Brussels “the citadel of new internationalism” and immigration as “the instrument of this internationalism”. He said there are once again forces that want to see open societies and a world without nations, “fabricate” a supranational global government and are still controlled from abroad.
“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,”
Orban said.
The prime minister called the Hungarian opposition “a bunch of pro-immigration politicians who are kept on a respirator by George Soros and the EU bureaucrats”.Orban said “it is a kind of political pornography” that the Socialists and the extreme right have formed 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 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 are deeply related and the achievements “can never be attributed to blind luck alone”.
Orban noted that in 2009, towards the end of left-wing rule, “our shared assets, reserves and future possibilities had all been used up”. Hungary needed more than just crisis management, it needed a complete renewal, a new direction, he said.
Today, the number of marriages is increasing, 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 said.
Thanks to the joint efforts of the past ten years, Hungarians have 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 said.
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 for seniors.
Orban announces major family protection package