Hungarian Conservative

In 2020 and 2021 both the number of births and the fertility rate increased in Hungary during the COVID-19 pandemic because the poverty and disadvantage of those with children relative to childless people decreased to such an extent that having children was no longer a financial disadvantage in 2019 and 2021.

In 2021 Hungary had the tenth lowest proportion of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU, at 18.4 per cent. This compares to 30.6 per cent in 2014, when we ranked twenty-fourth, and our improvement of 12.2 percentage points is the largest among Member States.

GDP per capita growth has been above the EU-27 average in every year since 2010, so the Hungarian economy has grown faster than the EU average. Our decline in 2020 was also below average, and even below the large decline in 2009—despite the fact that the EU average decline in 2020 was larger than in 2009.

The Roma were the real losers of the fall of communism. With the regime change, most Hungarian Roma, and in fact, many non-Roma Hungarians, lost their livelihoods, as the unskilled jobs they had filled vaporized with the collapse of the outdated and unsustainable industry created under state socialism.

The 22.4 percentage point reduction in child poverty between 2014 and 2021 in Hungary, which is also an EU record, is clearly due to employment growth, and primarily to the growth of the employment of women with children.

In 2020, a year in which poverty deepened due to the global pandemic, as opposed to the decreasing trend of the previous decade, the relative income poverty rate was 12.7 per cent in Hungary, compared to the EU average of 16.5 per cent.