Balázs Hankó, the culture and innovation minister, said Hungarian family policy attends to the needs of the unborn and born alike.
Speaking at an international conference organized by the Danube Institute in Budapest on Tuesday, Hankó said measures enacted by previous governments still cast a shadow over the efforts of the current one, notwithstanding the turning point in Hungarian family policy from 2010.
"Our aim is that those bringing up children should not have a worse standard of life than others without children," he said at the conference entitled Family Formation - the geopolitical, cultural and legal aspects of demographic changes.
Young people must be encouraged to have children, but equally important is for the state to support families and fulfil their needs, he said.
Hankó said "dangerous trends" in the Western world were tied with the promotion of an "extreme and distorted freedom" that questioned "traditional values such as marriage and family" while relativising gender roles and gender identity itself.
He hailed the new US administration for "taking powerful steps towards normality". The EU, however, was still deaf to "the voice of our times", he added.
So values that were clear for centuries, such as "marriage is the union of a man and a woman", must be legislated for, he said.
Hankó also warned of a "demographic winter" threatening Europe, noting that in 2023 the number of children born in the EU was 15 percent lower than ten years earlier. In Hungary the birth rate fell by only 2 percent during the same period, he added.
Immigration may be a short-term fix for population loss, he said, but this was not a sustainable solution.
In 2010 Hungary's fertility rate put the country at the bottom of the pile, while now it is in third place owing to the government's family-friendly policies, the minister said.
The government is set to spend four times as much on supporting families in 2025 as in 2010, and spending would be further raised if the budget allows for this, he added.
The event was addressed by Eduard Habsburg-Lorraine, Hungary’s ambassador to the Holy See and the Order of Malta, who highly praised Hungary’s family policy.