This episode explores how Hungary’s illiberal, soft authoritarian regime and its controversial gender politics and policies are intertwined. Drawing on Éva Fodor’s analysis of the regime’s distinctive features, it examines its pronatalist and ethnonationalist agenda, as well as what she terms the “carefare” policy. How do attacks on gender – including those targeting academic freedom – connect to the vicious attacks against LGBTQI and trans community in Hungary? In what ways is Hungarian pronatalism premised on the internal exclusion of the marginalized Roma population? Why are conservatives and authoritarians, not only in Hungary, so fearful of what they call “gender ideology”? Tune in to hear Éva Fodor unpack Viktor Orbán’s old and new strategies to secure the regime and advance an ethnonationalist agenda – strategies that have been emulated by the US and other countries.
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S11E05 Éva Fodor
Shalini: [00:00:00] Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I am Shalini Randeria at the Central European University in Vienna, and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute Geneva.
This is the fifth episode of season 11 of Democracy in Question. I am very pleased to welcome today my colleague Éva Fodor, who is a professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University, where she is also pro-director for teaching and learning. Éva is a sociologist who started her career at Dartmouth College in the US before joining the faculty of CEU more than two decades ago.
Her work in the field of comparative social inequalities has focused on how and why gender differences in the labour market are shaped, negotiated, and reproduced in various societies in many [00:01:00] different social contexts. Her first book, titled “Working Difference. Women's Working Lives in Hungary and Austria”[1] compared the gender regimes in Austria and Hungary between 1945 and 1995. Her most recent book, “The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary”[2], published in a couple of years ago describes the establishment of what she calls a “regime of carefare” in Hungary after 2010 under the Victor Orbán´s government. She has also published on the new pronatalism[3] of the Hungarian government, its peculiar gender regime[4] and the state-socialist roots of illiberal gender politics.[5]
The impact of illiberalism on gender justice is the subject of her forthcoming article in the Annual Review of Sociology. I will discuss with Éva the specific nature of Victor Orbán´s illiberal soft authoritarian regime in Hungary and [00:02:00] its controversial gender politics and policies. We start with a brief discussion of the distinctive features of the Orbán regime more generally, which has held Hungarian society in its grip for 15 years.
I ask Éva to explain the strategies it has deployed to secure its hegemony. We will also talk about Orbán's attacks on academic freedom, epitomized by the ousting of our university, the CEU from Budapest, a strategy that is now serving as a model for the Trump administration. A common element in many authoritarian attacks on academia and critical scholarship is the demonization of gender studies and of the very category of “gender”.
We will try to unpack the various tactical uses of “gender” as an empty signifier in Hungary and beyond. How are these attacks on gender related to vicious attacks against LGBTQI [00:03:00] and transpeople in Hungary? Against this background, we then explore the Orbán regime's underlying demographic imaginary, and its stark rejection of so-called Western immigration policies using a rhetoric that is ethno-racially coded, and culturally essentialist.
In what ways is Hungarian pronatalism premised on the internal exclusion of the marginalized Roma population, for instance? And why has Orbán's attempt to substitute migration by a pronatalist ideology been rather unsuccessful? In the last part of our conversation, I ask Éva to explain her concept of carefare and its unintended consequences, including the widening of income inequality in Hungary.
Welcome Éva, and thanks so much for being on the podcast with me today.
Éva: Thank you, Shalini. It is an honour to be here.
Shalini: Over the last 15 years or so, Hungary has become a [00:04:00] textbook example of how the post 1989 dreams of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe have proved to be rather illusionary. Contrary to expectations of an irreversible progress towards liberal democracy and open markets after the collapse of state socialism and Hungary's subsequent entry into the European Union, the country has turned into a soft authoritarian regime since 2010. So, before we turn to your arguments about the new care regime of social policies, let us first focus on this political transformation that will give us the background to the argument you are making. What are the distinctive features of this right-wing, populist and anti-liberal, or as Orbán himself proudly calls it an “illiberal regime”?
And what strategies were used [00:05:00] by four successive governments headed by Orbán with the parliamentary super majority, which was put in place through a peculiar mix of crony capitalism[6] with some neoliberal elements, patriarchal ideology, and a thinly disguised neo-patrimonial authoritarian role.
Éva: Well, illiberal regimes or soft authoritarian regimes, as you call it, retain some of the features of democracy, but they hollow it out or they sort of dispense with some of the important features of democracy, like the rule of law. They also tend to change electoral rules in order to favour them for the next elections. And Orbán has been very successful at that. And particularly East European ones tend to ignore principles of an open society and also eliminate the independence of the different branches of the government, particularly the judiciary. They also eliminate academic freedom. Those are the general features of illiberal regimes.
Orbán followed this [00:06:00] playbook quite successfully. But his regime has possibly maybe three unique features. One of them is, as you already mentioned, is crony capitalism. It is simply corruption. The vast degree of corruption was facilitated unintentionally, of course, by the European Union´s structural funds, which Hungary received. And that was a lot of money. In fact, the new buildings, or all of the new investments in Hungary happened by. using European Union money, and this money got distributed to Orbán cronies. Thereby Orbán managed to create a loyal following, a set of oligarchs whose money is untouchable and who are, loyal to him and support him in power. So, this is one important feature. Of course, elements of this are happening elsewhere, but the extent to which Orbán went, was significant.
The second one was Orbán’s effort to eliminate academic freedom. And again, a lot of soft authoritarian leaders take steps towards this direction. But Orbán has gone to the limit and has managed to ban gender studies, expelled the central European University [00:07:00] and also limits significantly the academic freedom of existing Hungarian state universities. This is the second one.
And the third one I would say, is that Orbán was possibly the most radical of illiberal leaders in pushing a profoundly pronatalist, family focused agenda. These measures are important everywhere, at least on the European continent, because birth rates are declining. But Orbán focused a lot of attention on this.
Shalini: We will come, of course, to the question of pronatalism and how it relates to the carefare regime in greater detail.
But could you say something more about the specificity of the attack by the Orbán regime on academic freedom? Could you explicate what has happened not only to the Central European University, where at that time you were the face of the university for the Hungarian media, but after the CEU was forced to leave, there was a restructuring of [00:08:00] the public universities and an ongoing attempt to restructure the Academy of Sciences. It could be what is describing some of those restructuring attempts because it seems as if JD Vance and others in the US seem to think, that is the playbook on attacking universities in the sense of controlling them, not destroying them.
Éva: Orbán was a very good teacher in that regard. We have a lot of state universities, very few private universities in Hungary. The first thing he did was, that he said, let uss privatize these state universities. I will create foundations and I will give these universities to the foundation. The foundation is going to control the universities from now on. The government will give some money to this foundation, like an endowment and, yearly funds to the foundation. And the foundation will then have complete freedom in managing the university. So, this sounds good, right?
But the problem is that the foundations are [00:09:00] going to have a board of trustees, and these boards are typically very small and are loyal followers of Orbán. Orbán managed to appoint his best cronies to these positions. and they are there for life. They get a huge salary. These small groups of three or four people manage universities. They manage the funding of universities. They have full control over the educational program. They have full control over personnel. This was the first step. And by now, I think 90% of universities operate on this structure. Some universities protested, for example the University of Drama and Theatre protested, and there was a long negotiation. But Orbán, of course, won. The university had no chips to bargain with. He also eliminated the master's program in gender studies, that was a tiny program, but it was significant symbolically. The second most important arm of this was the attack against the Academy of Sciences, which had its research groups and also had a lot of funding to distribute to researchers. And Orbán reorganized this in a way that retained the research groups and [00:10:00] retained the funding, but again, in a way that he managed to have full control over who gets funding, what kind of projects get funding, how the money is distributed between natural and social sciences, et cetera.
And now there is yet another step in this attack, where he is trying to integrate these research units with universities, and distribute the research groups into the university, merge them with the university which would completely change the nature of what the people do there, and also change the type of control that is being exercised over them.
Shalini: I am going to return to the question of gender studies, which you just touched upon. Like Hungary, the previous Polish government, the PiS government also banned the teaching of gender studies, and President Erdogan in Turkey has distanced himself from the 2011 Istanbul Convention[7], which seeks to protect women from violence, including domestic violence.
Hungary didn't even ratify the convention that came into force in 2014, [00:11:00] and one of Orbán´s former justice ministers, a woman, openly derided it. But this anxiety that gender seems to cause, is not limited to illiberal regime. We recently had an attempt by the Danish Parliament to distance itself from the Istanbul Convention. The Parliament voted to do so, but it was only the public outcry against such a move that has prevented it for now.
French conservatives and President Macron's cabinet tried to legislate against gender, arguing that it is activism masquerading as scholarship. That gender studies is not a legitimate academic discipline. Why are conservatives and authoritarians so scared of what they call “gender ideology”? Or, as Judith [00:12:00] Butler recently asked; Why are we -that is they- afraid of gender? And what exactly do they mean by it? Could you talk about the Orbán regime's various attempts to legislate against gender equality and against gender justice?
Éva: Let me start with the first bit about gender and what gender means. So, “gender” is a very popular word. There is a Hungarian conservative daily that publishes articles every day. And I counted in the past year, that they published over 400 articles in which they mentioned the term “gender”. And this has been going on every year for the past five years.
But of course, gender and gender ideology means a wide range of things for this conservative newspaper as well as for anti-liberal, anti-gender forces. And interestingly, the meaning changes dynamically. I could follow how that meaning changed over time in Hungary. There is ongoing confusion about what “gender” really is. And in fact, Judith Butler, in the book that you [00:13:00] mentioned[8], argues that there are contradictions. There are explicit contradictions in the arguments of people who blame gender ideology for all the ills of society.
And those contradictions are there exactly. So that the term gender would be opened up for a variety of interpretations. So more and more people could buy into the idea that “gender” is dangerous and problematic. It is not accidental that this confusion and contradictions are around this term. The Orbán government specifically used the term “gender”, as I said, in different ways. So first in 2015 or 2016, they started to use it to create space between the European Union and Hungary and basically argued that Hungary has a different set of values - and they used that especially in the area of immigration. That was the period when the large wave of immigrants swept through Hungary and the European Union tried to distribute immigrants or refugees across different countries, and Hungary protested that. Orbán really tried to suggest that there is a huge difference in the values between the [00:14:00] European Union and Hungary and used the idea of gender and gender ideology to support that claim.
Shalini: So, the claim was that these are Muslim refugees coming from Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan?
Éva: That was not an issue. The fact that these migrants from Syria might have a different approach to gender and gender relations did not cross Orbán 's mind. The problem was that the migrants were constructed as violent, and having different values, a different religion, a different culture. The gender ideology was used not against the migrants; it was used against the European Union. Orbán argued that the European Union has this bizarre gender ideology and has similarly bizarre ideas about accepting migrants. He was using gender as a way to say: The EU is out of touch with how people really think. And to quote Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes's book[9]: “We don't want to be just the imitators of the West, we want to do our thing”. That was the first thing, in 2015 or 2016.
And then they switched. And you can [00:15:00] follow that if you read the articles in these conservative dailies. Around 2020 the government started to use the term “gender” to construct George Soros[10] as the public enemy. And they claim that George Soros is buying into the gender ideology of the west. His goal is to replace good Hungarians with people of colour, with immigrants. the idea was whenever the idea of gender and gender ideology came up, it was always associated with something bad, evil, terrible things happening. Only in the past five years or so has the concept of gender really focused on LGBTQ and trans-rights. Before that, this was just a secondary issue. It's only recently that this is the major focus of attacks against the concept of “gender”.
Researchers argue, following Ernesto Laclau´s[11] concept of an empty signifier, that “gender” functions as a concept that has a very broad set of meanings, and everybody can fill it with whatever they want to fill it. And illiberal or soft authoritarian leaders fill it with their own [00:16:00] ethnonationalist, xenophobic content
Shalini: Demography and so-called family values play a role in this entire construct. Demography becomes an important area of major concern for not only authoritarian regimes, but for all conservative political parties across Europe and Republicans in the US. they are all panicking about the changing composition of the demos due to immigration on the one hand, and due to falling birthrates in their respective countries On the other.
Now Hungary is no exception here. Quite the contrary. What is the factual statistical background that redefines society and polity under Orbán's rule? He has been also employing a self-proclaimed Christian civilizational ethnonationalist rhetoric. And it is an interesting marrying of civilizational [00:17:00] values and nationalism, here paired with Christianity, which has also helped him to redefine who belongs to the country. And it has shaped new election rules, on the one hand, and extremely strong anti-immigration policies on the other. And yet, interestingly, Budapest has a rather large Chinese diaspora, which has been there for much, much longer then the 2010s, and it is not perceived as any threat to Hungarian national identity. Neither are Chinese guest workers who are imported by large Chinese investors for battery manufacturing plants, for example, seen as a danger. So, it is not that all immigrants are alike. Orbán´s regime even introduced a so-called “golden visa scheme” for a couple of [00:18:00] years, and in order to attract “good foreigners” to the country, and it seems to exempt foreign nationals from its strict immigration rules as long as they are wealthy or potentially benefiting oligarchic business interests.
So could you explain this rather contradictory attitude towards immigrants of different kinds and of the use of a Christian civilizational discourse, which somehow seems to be able to include the Chinese diaspora.
Éva: That is an interesting question. One that the urban government has not quite tackled yet very clearly, because indeed there is migration into Hungary, an increasing amount of migration. The number of migrants per year is growing quite rapidly and has grown in the past few years rapidly. Many of them are migrant guest workers who live in very isolated factory units or special dormitories designed for workers. [00:19:00] Their presence is kept mostly under wraps, so we don't hear anything about them. You are right that there is also a Chinese minority living in Budapest. Again, that doesn't seem to bother the government, because, I think, the government itself and individual people within the government benefited a great deal because of the golden visa schemes.
And secondly, because the Chinese community has Chinese shops, which are very cheap. So people are happy. It was the refugees or the migrants who swept through Hungary in 2015 who came from Syria. They looked different and they were constructed as violent. And what is interesting is, that when I say they swept through Hungary, I meant “swept through”. They went through Hungary. They arrived in Budapest. Nobody wanted to stay. Everybody wanted to go to Germany or Austria, but the Hungarian government panicked. And it didn't help that the European Union then started to talk about redistributing refugees. And that allowed the government to construct a national level hysteria around the figure of the migrants.
So much so, that even though most [00:20:00] Hungarians have never seen a refugee in their entire lives. Yet, if you ask them, if you ask children in schools about what they think about the refugees, they definitely think that they are really the evil of character from fairytales.
Because this had nothing, to do with actual personal experience, just government propaganda. So indeed, the government has this double standard towards migration. And you are right about the connection between civilization and Christianity. Orbán said that he was representing the DNA of Western European Christianity, which is really interesting because you see how he imagines this community on a biological basis, and this in sharp contrast to what people who migrate into the European Union from the outside, particularly from the Middle East, represent
Shalini: This in a country, which has never been religious!
Éva: That is true, too. The notion of Christianity is also ridiculous. I think he used western Christianity as a sort of identical to the concept of civilization and that had a biological element to it, [00:21:00] which of course people coming from Syria or Afghanistan could never live up to.
Shalini: The biological element, of course, plays a huge role in the demographic imagination. Orbán is stated quite explicitly, he is very keen to raise the birth rates of Hungarians instead of allowing migration into the country for, as he put it, “Hungary doesn't need large numbers, it needs only more Hungarians”. So it is about genetic quality, openly framed in biological and ethnic terms, which trumps quantity. Against this background, what are the tax benefits and other social policies, that have been put in place to incentivize Hungarian citizens to have larger families?And to what extent have these policies been effective.
Éva: Hungary is a “family friendly” country, this is the very first message that you see as you enter the country at the airport. A huge [00:22:00] poster. This is the main political message, that the government wants to communicate about the country to foreigners entering Budapest.
What this really means is, the government spends an inordinate amount of money on social benefits to families. Indeed, this is a significant chunk of the GDP. Very few countries spend such a high percent of their GDP on family benefits. Now there is a wide range of such benefits. Many of them are familiar from elsewhere. But again, the unique feature of Hungary is that Orbán takes bits and pieces from different countries and then he combines them. He did the same with pronatalist policies, and these include tax rebates. And then there are also subsidized mortgages. Also subsidized loans to buy a car or to renovate your apartment.
There is also something called a “baby grant”. And that is interesting because you can get a baby grant, not when you have children, but you can get a baby grant if you promise to have children. If you don't end up having the children, you have to pay it back. But if you do, then it is all yours. This, [00:23:00] by the way, represents a significant degree of risk. For families and particularly for women in the future, because a lot of times people don't have the three children that they promise or they get divorced before they do. So this is a potential risk, which we don't see yet because the baby grant is for 10 years and they only introduced it about 10 - 12 years ago. So we haven't seen the end of the story yet.
The most recent is a tax exemption for others. This is interesting for many reasons. One is that it isquite radical, so up until now, women with four children were tax exempt, but very few women have four children.This year the government introduced tax exemption for mothers with three children. That is already a larger group, and as of next year, some mothers, younger mothers with two children, will also be tax exempt for life. You get this and then you are never going lose it.
And secondly, this is only for mothers. I mean, after all, fathers also have to pay for children. Fathers also often participate in raising, children; yet it is [00:24:00] mothers who have the tax exemption. Suggesting again, the importance of women and women's role or the responsibility of women. All of these have been tried elsewhere, but Hungarians put it together and then altogether it is a lot of benefits, really many more than elsewhere. Now, in terms of the effectiveness, the total fertility rate has risen in Hungary. And interestingly as it started to drop, the government introduced new measures and then people responded and started to have more children again. But even though the fertility rate has risen, the actual number of births has not, because the cohort which was giving birth is smaller and smaller. So in the end, the measures do not lead to an increase in the size of Hungarians. It leads to fewer women having more children, therefore more work for women. But I want to say one more thing here, and this is that demographers typically evaluate the effectiveness of pronatalist measures only by focusing on these two measures, the total fertility rate and birth.
But prenatal [00:25:00] measures have a lot of impact on society that we typically ignore. On the plus side, Hungary´s family friendly measures have reduced some inequality For example, in the past 10 years, child poverty rates have declined, it has been cut in half. Hungary had a huge risk for children to be poor, and now it is comparable to other European countries. It used to be more than twice as high as it is now. Simultaneously, however, it also increases inequalities in other groups of the population. This money that goes to family benefits has to come from somewhere. It comes from social services, in terms of healthcare and education. And for example, we can see that while the poverty rate amongst children declined, the poverty rate amongst the elderly has increased.
So it has impacts that we don't typically assess. There is one more thing that I think is very important to mention here: not everybody is eligible to get these benefits, and that principle in and of itself increases social inequalities. [00:26:00] In this sense, Hungary's ethnic minority Roma are particularly impacted because most of these policies go to families or women who work. You can only be tax exempt if you actually have a formal job. Many of the Roma population work, but they work in informal and small contract-free jobs and therefore they don't pay taxes, they don't pay social security, they can't claim back those taxes, so they're completely left out, of these benefits.
And the third group who is left out, are non-heterosexual couples because often many of the benefits go to married couples. And you cannot get legally married if you are not a heterosexual couple.
Shalini: Do you think it is oversight, or it really is intentional that demographic social policy measures are targeted in a way to exclude the Roma?
Éva: Yes, it is absolutely intentional. The government wants to increase the size of certain kinds of Hungarians. The Roma are intentionally excluded. [00:27:00] For a long time, there has been a discussion about the huge birth rate amongst the Roma. The birth rate amongst some groups of the Roma, particularly those who live in very poor areas, is indeed higher than the regular population, but it's not sky high. The government is not looking to have more children amongst Roma families. I think that's very clear.
Shalini: There has been a strong backlash against reproductive rights all over Eastern Europe and also more recently in the US. The previous right populist government in Poland put in place a draconian law banning all abortions. A law that the new centrist coalition government under Tusk has been unable to change so far. Despite Poland being a strongly Catholic country, there were massive public protests against the anti-abortion law in Poland. What changes have been made regarding reproductive rights in Hungary in the last 20 years, as the regime changed from a socialist one, which should at [00:28:00] least ideally be in favour of gender equality, to this rather nostalgic, patriarchal one that you have been describing, which clearly tends to increase women's subordination?
And what has been the popular reaction to these changes, more generally? To what extent is society in Hungary divided over gender issues? Or how immune are people to the kind of reactionary patriarchal ideologies that the regime has spent a lot of money propagating?
Éva: Orbán´s party, FIDESZ, has been ruling in coalition with a minor party, mostly invisible, a Christian Democratic Party, and their only visible contribution to politics is an occasional insistence on the restriction of reproductive rights. Nevertheless, FIDESZ has been resisting any real change or introducing any direct restrictions to, for example, abortion rights [00:29:00] Instead, they made the process of getting an abortion harder, more onerous on women.
For example, they now require that somebody who wants to have an abortion has to go in front of a committee and discuss this, and then they have to listen to the heartbeat of their fetus before they get an abortion. This is really cruel on the women who clearly do not make this choice lightly.
Also, they introduced a phrase in the constitution, in the preamble of the Constitution, that says that life begins at conception. I understand this as taking steps to lay the groundwork for the possibility of restricting abortion rights. But the Hungarian public is very much pro-abortion, plus the number of abortions is declining anyway because of the availability of contraceptives. One thing they did, that is interesting, is that they nationalized all fertility clinics, most of them were private. They bought them.
Shalini: These are clinics which do assisted reproduction!
Éva: Exactly. The only interpretation is that [00:30:00] they are trying to exercise control over who can have children and who cannot. Otherwise, this whole thing does not make sense other than of course, it is economically advantageous. at this point, the ground is prepared for the restriction of reproductive rights in Hungary, but I don't think the government wants to take that step, when the popularity is wavering.
Shalini: Let me now turn to a key term in your book that is the “idea of carefare”. Could you elaborate what you mean by this term and explain how this particular kind of gendered care regime is of a piece with anti-liberal authoritarian rule?
Éva: I have to start a bit further back. As citizens of democratic societies, we have a certain set of rights. One of which is social rights, that is the right to protection, to social solidarity if in case of need. Now, who is needy is defined in different ways. And this is why we have different [00:31:00] types of welfare regimes, which operate on different principles of who is eligible for what kind of support, and how those needs should be met. In some welfare states, these subsidies are guaranteed as a universal right.
For example, in state-socialist Hungary, family benefits were given as a universal right. In other countries social benefits, for example welfare benefits, accrue on the basis of work history. You have to have worked for wages. For example, some type of social welfare in the US goes only to women, if they are working or if they're enrolled in some sort of a work program. These types of states are called workfare states.
This is where we come to my concept of carefare. I constructed the term “carefare” analogous because in Hungary, currently the most generous benefits go to people who birth and take care of children. You also have to be working for wages at the same time, but that's not enough.
In addition to working for wages, you also have to produce children and have to raise [00:32:00] them. And this is why I call the Hungarian welfare state a carefare state, a carefare regime. It distributes the most generous, politically legitimate, unquestionable benefits, to parents and particularly married working parents.
Now, it is important to emphasize that I created this term carefare because I wanted to emphasize that these pronatalist policies are not just a random collection of policies, but they serve a purpose. And the purpose is to reshape the principle of citizenship in a way that serves an illiberal, ethnonationalist, pronatalist agenda.
And also, to highlight the fact that some people do not have citizenship rights. Some people are included and others are excluded. The concept of a carefare regime suggests that social rights are denied for some people. And those are people who are particularly poor, who do not work in the formal economy, the elderly, et cetera. So often the most [00:33:00] vulnerable.
Shalini: So would the Chinese immigrants who have been living in Budapest now, probably in the third generation, get these social benefits?
Éva: If they are Hungarian citizens, if they're working for wages? Yes, they would.
Shalini: In many countries like Austria or Germany, many of these social welfare policies would be tied to residents, but not to citizenship.
Éva: And some benefits, for example parental leave, go to people who are not Hungarian citizens. But the majority, that come with a lot of money, go to a citizen of Hungary.
Shalini: One of your key arguments in the book, Éva, is that unlike in new liberal contexts, the care of children and of the elderly in Hungary has not been outsourced to a network of private firms. Instead, it has been what you call “sentimentalized” in order to emphasize that it is women's “natural and patriotic duty” to be solely responsible for childcare, which then remains, of course, unpaid labour, but [00:34:00] compensated by some of these social policy payments. So, coupled with women's paid work outside the home and their other domestic chores, this means a higher, a triple burden on women. The question is, however, why do women not reject the prevailing pronatalist ideology, which would want them to bear more children than they have already and care for an even larger family while continuing to work for relatively low wages outside the home? Carefare had the demographic consequences, intended by the regime, in terms of really raising the birth rate over a sufficiently long period - or as there has been a short increase after a certain measure is introduced and then the fertility rate flattens out again?
Éva: Each measure produced a temporary increase in birth [00:35:00] rates, and then the birth rate started to go back down. At which point the government introduced a new measure and the most recent one, the tax exemption, also managed to push up the birth rate a bit.
And you are asking why women are not rejecting these measures. Women are not only not rejecting these measures, but these measures are extremely popular in Hungary. In fact, I am fairly sure that should Orbán lose the elections, these measures would stay in place because they are embedded in the Hungarian psyche that it would be very difficult to get rid of them.
So why don't people notice that this is in fact inflicting a great deal of work burden on women, and on families in general? It is a good question and I have two answers. One has to do with the concept of the families. Orbán cleverly occupied this discursive space, which is hard to criticize the family. The family is sacrosanct in Hungary. Of course it is very important elsewhere as well. But in Hungary, under state socialism, the family was considered a refuge from the [00:36:00] oppressive politics of the government. Therefore, it increased in importance. And I think that importance remained through the economic crisis that followed the fall of the communist regime where families had to often pull their resources to survive. So it is difficult to criticize anything that has to do with the family in Hungary, and Orbán uses this.
It is very difficult for a feminist researcher to criticize what he is doing because after all, he is giving money to people who are raising children. That is expensive, that is hard work.
The second answer is much more prosaic. These measures put money into people's pockets who had not seen this much money before. For example, the baby loan which is 10 million Forint is a sum that most lower middle-class people never see in one pile[12]. It is this group of people, who live in the countryside, who have a moderate amount of income, but would have trouble buying a house or buying an apartment. They are especially supportive of these measures because for them this is a life changing opportunity, which then translates into full [00:37:00] loyalty to towards Orbán.
Shalini: In what ways does this regime that you describe in such a minute detail differ from earlier ones under state-socialism, which were also encouraging family formation and supporting women's role in paid employment? And what impact has Orbán´s care-regime had on inequalities of class and of gender in the era of what you term “state-mandated patriarchy”?
Éva: Interestingly, regimes and certainly -Orbán´s regime do not do anything new. Whatever they do, has been tried before. Only if you put them together, you end up with something that is detrimental to democracy and liberal open society values. Pronatalist measures, I think, create much more inequality than previous ones.
And this is also in answer to your second question. For example, consider the question of tax exemption. In a [00:38:00] way, this reduces inequalities because this reduces the gender gap in wages amongst some women and men. The gender gap is about 16 to 17% in Hungary. Now, if you don't have to pay income tax, then you get 15% of your salary back.
So that actually eliminates the gender wage-gap for women who have three children. But simultaneously, of course, this increases inequalities amongst those who have care responsibilities and those who don't. And besides, if you have a higher salary, you are getting a whole lot more money back. So people who have higher incomes can take advantage of more of these benefits because you always have to put in some of your own money in order to buy an apartment.
If you have more, you can use these benefits much more effectively. It increases class inequalities, but at the same time it pushes up the lower middle class it supports. It is the lower middle-class for whom this is the most significant, it creates the biggest impact on their lives. And you can see when you look at electoral [00:39:00] support for Orbán: rural, lower middle class is the group where he is particularly popular and in fact rural, lower middle-class women, not surprisingly. Elsewhere social policies are not weaponized, not instrumentalized for political purposes. In order to reject immigration, in order to show Hungary´s difference from the EU, in order to gain electoral votes - social policies in Hungary serve as a political weapon for a variety of fights for the liberal government.
Shalini: Another aspect of his attack on “gender ideology” so-called and also paired with his enthusiasm for pronatalism is a deep aversion to LGBTQI and trans-rights. Could you talk about the attack on queer rights in Hungary over the last decade? Why has this anti-liberal ideology met with much greater public pushback as was [00:40:00] evident in the recent showdown about the pride-march in the summer of 2025. The government banded with the help of a new legislation, threatening participants in the march, not only with surveillance, but also with criminal prosecution and fines. But the march went ahead with the support of the Budapest mayors, and hundreds and thousands of citizens also from rural Hungary came and participated in that march, and one would count those among Orbán´s voter base.
The same scenario was repeated more recently in Pécs, I believe. So how do you read these acts of popular defiance to one particular part of Orbán’s policies against so-called gender-ideology?
Éva: So let me start with answering the first set of questions about Orbán´s and FIDESZ´ attitude towards LGBTQ-rights.
FIDESZ has been spreading homophobic propaganda from the [00:41:00] moment they got into power and they have refused to legalize same-sex marriage. Recently the government introduced a new legislation that prohibits adoption of children for same-sex couples and also made it very difficult for single people to adopt children because they think that that might also lead to same-sex couples raising children.
All of this is done in the name of child protection. They also introduced a legislation that forced bookstores to cover books that addresses anything to do with LGBTQ in foil and in the name of child protection. Some of these are ridiculous and just symbolic, like this latter one. The bookstore has to put up a sign, saying that we sell dangerous books here or we sell books that might be dangerous for children here. But some of them are serious, like adoption rights and same-sex marriages. This legislation is coupled with a great deal of propaganda against the danger that LGBTQI people would pose for children and for [00:42:00] people in general.
Orbán took a further step and decided to ban the Pride March, which had been going on in Budapest for a decade or even more. And that really backfired in Budapest because as you said, about a hundred thousand people gathered in the street of Budapest and decided to march. This is about 10 times as many as we ever had during these marches, and I believe that this was less a statement in support of LGBTQ rights and more a protest against the government. At least most people understood it as such.
Shalini: Éva, thank you so much for this fascinating insight into Orbán´s policies on gender, family pronatalism, but also on the very many twists and turns and unintended consequences that they have had, and which helps us to understand also in a way why he has managed to remain in power for four successive elections.
Éva: Thank you.
Shalini: My guest, Éva [00:43:00] Fodor, has explained some of the important dilemmas of the Orbán regime in Hungary, which pioneered in many respects the anti-liberal, soft authoritarian turn in Europe that has served as a model for the US as well. The long and enduring success of this illiberal playbook has depended on some distinctive features as she pointed out.
For example, the pervasive corruption fuelled by the misuse of European Union funds, the suppression of academic freedom and a radical anti-gender ideology, along with a strongly pronatalist policy agenda. Dismantling state support to most public universities, the Orbán government has effectively privatized them, packing their boards with cadres loyal to the regime.
It also restructured the research centers of the National Academy of Sciences. As the example of the forced displacement of our institution, the Central European University shows, the regime has not even shied away from driving [00:44:00] out a private university, which it deemed dangerous due to its financial independence, its autonomy of governance, and the critical scholarship that could not be controlled by the government. The outright banning of gender studies in public universities has been part of this sweeping campaign against the remnants of academic freedom in Hungary. But this is also symptomatic of a much wider ideological weaponization of gender and LGBTQI rights in general. And this trend is not limited to Hungary. The Orbán regime has used the bogeyman of so-called “gender ideology” as part of its rhetorical battle against liberal western European values for more than a decade. But as Éva pointed out, it is only in the last five years or so that gender rights and the very concept of gender itself have become one of the government's primary targets.
A significant parallel development in Hungary has been the wholesale [00:45:00] instrumentalization of demographic concerns. While rooted in the actual reality of an aging and shrinking population as much due to out-migration as due to falling birth rates, the government maintains a complete silence on emigration of young, educated Hungarians.
It uses the fall in birth rates to fuel xenophobia and anti-immigration discourses, while conveniently hiding the reliance of the economy on migrant labour for some of its economic priorities. As Éva emphasized, however, Orbán has adopted a biological, as well as a cultural and civilizational approach to questions of ethnic and religious difference portraying Hungary as the last bulwark of Christian Europe.
The ideological building blocks of this narrative may be familiar from many other European countries where they are associated with the far-right. The fact that [00:46:00] Orbán´s FIDESZ party has been ruling Hungary with a constitutional super majority for four consecutive terms, has also exposed the discrepancy between the promises of soft authoritarian policies and their actual impact.
The flurry of pronatalist measures enacted by his government has failed to significantly reverse declining fertility. However, these measures may have had some unintended consequences, like reducing child poverty. Yet, the selective nature of these policies also reveals their racial and ethnic bias as the poor Roma minority has been excluded from them in a carefully calculated manner. The concept of carefare, which Éva has introduced in her recent work grasps a key aspect of the Orbán´s regimes strategy.
It provides generous benefits to women who give birth and take care of children, but only [00:47:00] on condition that they engage in paid work outside the home. The purpose of carefare is ultimately to reshape the principle of citizenship to serve an illiberal ethnonationalist agenda, which excludes vulnerable and marginalized groups from the benefits of full citizenship rights.
The societal values associated with the idealized view of the family, not to mention the very real monetary benefits, have so far outweighed the effects carefare has had on growing socioeconomic inequalities. So though carefare places an inordinate burden on women, it proved nevertheless to be remarkably popular. And as Éva suggests, its popularity will likely guarantee that it survives Orbán´s possible electoral defeat next year.
This was the fifth episode of Season 11. Thank you very much for [00:48:00] listening and join me again in a month for a conversation with the Sri Lankan political scientist, Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda. We will discuss the latest wave of youth-led pro-democracy movements, not only in Sri Lanka, but across South Asia and Southeast Asia as well.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course, let your friends know about this podcast, if you have enjoyed it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy
[1]Fodor, Éva (2003): Working Difference. Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945–1995. Comparative and International Working‑Class History, Durham & London: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.1515/9780822384489. Open Access under: https://research.ceu.edu/en/publications/3ed44725-e54d-40db-9404-89fd35aeea57
[2] Fodor, Éva (2022): The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary, Cham Palgrave Pivot/ Springer Nature. Open Access under: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85312-9
[3]Pronatalism refers to an attached idea of the importance of having children in order to increase the number of people in a country, particularly the number of people who do not come from another country, which is to say immigrants. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pronatalism
[4]The expression gender regime describes a concept coined by feminist sociologist Raewyn Connell, which encompasses different but interrelated dimensions of gender relations in a given sociohistorical context. These include the sexual division of labor; the distribution of power; interpersonal interactions and emotions and cultural and symbolic representations. Therefore, the gender regime provides the normative context for particular practices, relationships, events and aspirations to happen. https://glossary.centre-lives.ch/index.php/Gender_regimes
[5] For a comprehensive list of Éva Fodor's work and publications, please view ORCID under https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9705-4229
[6]Crony capitalism is a locution that suggests a kind of economic system in which advantages in form of jobs or loans ,for instance, are distributed unfairly amongst family members and friends of government officials. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/crony-capitalism
[7]The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combatting Violence against Women and Domestic Violence - also known as the Istanbul Convention- is a human-rights treaty aimed at preventing violence against women, protecting victims and prosecuting perpetrators, opened for signature on 11 May 2011. It obliges ratifying states to combat physical, sexual, psychological, and economic violence against women and, as of 2025, has been ratified by 39 countries and the European Union ( as of 2023).https://www.coe.int/en/web/istanbul-convention/about-the-convention
[8] Butler, Judith (2024). Who's Afraid of Gender? New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
[9] Holmes, Stephen/ Krastev, Ivan (2019): The Light that Failed. A Reckoning. London, Penguin Books.
[10]George Soros is a Hungarian born American financier, well known for his wealthy, philanthropic, activist profile and support to liberal causes. In particular, he established the Open Society Foundations, a network supporting democracy, human rights, education and social justice. Along with funding of progressive candidates, such actions have made him influential on one hand and target of criticism on the other. https://www.britannica.com/money/George-Soros
[11] Laclau, Ernesto (2005). On Populist Reason. London/ Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
[12] Anm.: 10 Mio. Forint entsprechen etwa 26.000 EUR