Marriage is on the increase while abortions and divorces are in decline as Hungary chooses to support families instead of mass migration. The national consultation regarding the promotion and protection of families with children will start this week. The postal service will start delivering the questionnaires to members of the public in the next few days, the Minister of State for Family and Youth Affairs at the Ministry of Human Capacities announced at a press conference held on Monday in Budapest.

Minister of State Katalin Novák said the government wishes to adopt further measures which seek to promote the births and raising of children. Therefore as part of the latest national consultation they are seeking to learn about the people’s opinions to assist with their future decisions.

She said the questionnaires will feature ten yes-no questions. The government will expect answers by 21 December, and later on it will also possible to fill in the questionnaires online.

The questions relate to the introduction of full-time motherhood for women raising minimum four children, the two-thirds protection of grants provided for families raising children, and the provision of support for family members looking after sick children at home.

In the questionnaire people will also be asked whether they agree that a child has the right to grow up in a family, if possible, in the care of a mother and a loving father. The 10th question of the questionnaire concerns the possibility of guaranteeing the two-thirds protection of fiscal family grants.

In reference to this, Mrs Novák said this question is important because they would like to “carve in stone” family grants so that they cannot be easily removed as was observed earlier during left-wing governments, for instance, in the case of the elimination of the first-home housing benefit. The decisions of young people to have children are not made for terms of government, the Minister of State stressed.

“In recent years, finding the proper response to Europe’s demographic decline has become one of the biggest sources of disagreement between European and Hungarian politics,” the official spokesman for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Cabinet Office, Dr. Zoltán Kovács, said in a post on Hungary’s official website announcing the national consultation.

“While Brussels bureaucrats and the European liberal, pro-migration mainstream see immigration as the necessary and unavoidable solution, the Hungarian government stands committed to the idea of increasing birth rate through more effective family support measures,” the spokesman added.

Dr Kovács revealed how existing pro-family policies implemented by the Orbán government are already reaping rewards, with abortion dropping more than a third from 2010 to 2017 (40,449 to 28,500), divorces fell from 23,873 to 18,600 in the same period, with marriages increasing by 42 per cent. Their reduction in abortions has garnered praise from pro-life organisations worldwide.