On a quiet park bench in Debrecen, eastern Hungary, 33-year-old social worker Barbara Elek refreshes her email inbox with trembling hands. Ten days removed from her third round of in vitro fertilization, she and her 34-year-old chef husband Levi wait for life-changing news: whether their years-long struggle to start a family has finally succeeded. If the treatment fails, Barbara says, the grief of losing a pregnancy will not be their only burden. If they cannot prove an expected child by November 1, the couple stands to lose everything they have built financially.
Like tens of thousands of other young Hungarian couples, Barbara and Levi accepted a 10 million forint (£25,000) interest-free loan and a linked mortgage subsidy under a landmark pronatalist policy introduced by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government in 2010. In exchange for promising to have two children within a set timeline, the pair gained access to unprecedented financial support. But under the policy’s fine print, couples who fail to meet their child-bearing commitment face crippling penalty interest between 1.5 and 3.5 million forint (£3,700-£8,600) – a sum Barbara and Levi say they simply cannot afford.
Orbán’s 15-year experiment in state-backed fertility promotion stands as one of the most ambitious population policy overhauls in modern history. When Fidesz took power in 2010, Hungary faced a demographic crisis: its fertility rate rested at 1.25 children per woman, far below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to sustain a stable native population, compounded by mass emigration and minimal immigration. Orbán’s approach rejected the Western solution of increased immigration, famously stating: “We don’t need numbers, we need Hungarian children.” Over 15 years, the government rolled out billions in incentives: tax breaks for large families, interest-free home loans, mortgage subsidies, and grants for home renovations and larger vehicle purchases, all restricted to married, heterosexual couples with formal employment.
For a decade, the policy appeared to deliver on its promises. Hungary’s fertility rate climbed steadily, hitting 1.59 by 2020, earning the program praise from conservative circles around the world, particularly in the United States. But by 2025, that progress had evaporated: the fertility rate fell back to 1.31, barely higher than its 2010 baseline. Demographers now widely classify the initiative as a failure to meet its core goal of reversing population decline. What went wrong with one of the world’s most aggressive pronatalist projects, and what lessons can other nations grappling with falling fertility learn from Hungary’s experience?
Supporters of the policy argue it still softened the blow of a continent-wide fertility decline. “Without these policies, there would be hundreds of thousands of fewer children,” says Fruzsina Skrabski of pro-family NGO Three Princes, Three Princesses, who notes the program simply did not go far enough to reverse long-term demographic trends. For large families like Maté and Agi Gorondy of suburban Budapest, who have five children under 10 and may have more, the incentives have been life-changing. The couple leveraged generous maternity pay, tax cuts, and subsidies to renovate their home and buy a larger vehicle; as a mother of more than two children, Agi will pay no income tax if she returns to work. Maté says a cultural shift is visible even at the neighborhood level: “Four- or five-child families are no longer rare” in his community, a shift reflected in mid-2010s data that saw a steady rise in families with three or more children, peaking in 2020 before declining again.
Critics, however, point to deep structural flaws that limited the policy’s impact. The benefits were unevenly distributed, notes János Tóth, a demographic studies professor at the University of Szeged: the incentives worked well for lower-middle-class rural families, but did little to boost fertility in urban areas, where birth rates are lowest and the cost of living has eroded the value of the 10 million forint baby loan amid soaring inflation. Tóth adds that the policy focused too heavily on encouraging additional children from existing parents, rather than removing barriers to first-time parenthood – “the first child is the most important.”
Other experts argue the temporary rise in fertility simply reflected a timing shift, not a permanent increase in total births. “These policies prompted a cohort of people to have children they would have had anyway, just a little earlier than planned,” explains Eva Fodor, co-director of the Democracy Institute at Central European University. After the initial rush of earlier planned births, rates naturally fell back to trend. A similar pattern has played out across Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, which did not implement Hungary-scale pronatalist incentives, saw an identical rise and subsequent fall in fertility over the same period.
For many Hungarian parents, financial support was never the main barrier to having more children. Antonia Miskolczi, a 29-year-old first-time mother in Budapest, says fears over Hungary’s underfunded public healthcare system far outweighed any financial incentive when she and her husband decided to limit their family to two children. After seeing social media warnings of under-resourced public hospitals and hearing horror stories from relatives, Antonia chose to deliver her son at a private clinic. “I don’t think big promises are needed. Just fix the fundamentals and the willingness to have children will increase,” she says. “Improving education and healthcare should be the very first step if people are going to feel comfortable having children.”
Fodor’s 2019 research with middle-class professional Hungarian women confirms this gap. Most respondents viewed one-time government payments as insufficient, citing a persistent lack of reliable childcare, functional public health infrastructure, and work flexibility as their core barriers to expanding their families. While Hungary expanded childcare access under Orbán, many families still report services are insufficient to meet demand.
Hungary is far from alone in its struggle to reverse falling fertility. Across the globe, more than half of all countries now have fertility rates below replacement level, a trend that has accelerated since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. South Korea, for example, has spent more than £215 billion since 2008 on fertility incentives including £20,000-£30,000 baby bonuses and monthly child benefits, yet its fertility rate fell to 0.8 in 2025. Demographers point to overlapping global crises driving this trend: pandemic uncertainty, the war in Ukraine, soaring global inflation, and widespread political instability have all eroded public confidence in the future, a key driver of decisions to have children. “Fertility tends to decline because people don’t have confidence in the future,” notes Vienna Institute of Demography demographer Tomas Sobotka.
Looking at global success stories, Nordic countries like Sweden have come closest to sustaining higher fertility through a different model: policies that prioritize work-family balance, including shared parental leave, universal affordable childcare, and support for dual-earner households. While Sweden’s fertility has also fallen in recent years, it remains far higher than most of Europe, and has avoided the extreme decline seen in East Asia. “Countries that make it easier for men and women to share work and care are far better protected against deep fertility decline,” Sobotka explains.
By contrast, Fodor argues, Orbán’s policy reinforced rigid traditional gender roles that frame women as the primary caregivers, a cultural norm that discourages many women from having children in the modern workforce. “Even state-owned companies are not flexible, they do not take into account the fact that men and women both may have responsibilities outside of the labour market,” Fodor says. This aligns with patterns seen in South Korea, where rigid traditional gender roles and a lack of work-life balance leave women bearing the full burden of childcare, driving many to delay or forgo having children entirely. Only Israel, among OECD nations, sustains a fertility rate above replacement level, a trend experts attribute more to strong cultural norms around family building than high government spending.
Orbán’s government spent roughly 5% of GDP on its family initiative, and the policy remained popular enough that Hungary’s new prime minister Peter Magyar did not campaign to roll it back after taking office in April 2026. While experts agree that any financial support for families is a net positive, Fodor argues the money could have delivered far more impact if invested in institutional infrastructure and gender equality. “If that money had been spent on social institutions and gender equality and promoting men’s role in domestic work, I think a similar increase in the fertility rate could have been achieved,” she says.
For Barbara and Levi, the policy’s contradictions have come at a devastating cost. The Hungarian National Bank estimates one in five couples who took out the baby loan five years ago have not had children, many for reasons of infertility entirely outside their control. The new government has said it is reviewing the policy’s penalty terms, but no changes have been announced yet.
The long-awaited email finally arrived. The implanted embryo had not survived. “It’s horrible, just horrible,” Levi said, holding his crying wife. In a country that brands itself as family-friendly, the couple has been left with neither the child they dreamed of, nor the financial stability the policy promised – caught in a failed experiment that has left millions of families facing uncertainty.
*This report is published ahead of the June 16 launch of BBC News Magyarul, a new Hungarian-language service from BBC World Service serving Central European audiences.*
