It’s 2017 in Hungary’s capital city of Budapest, and the World Congress of Families has landed in town.
Organised by US anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ personality Brian Brown, the annual gathering of Christian nationalist campaigners, political figures, think tanks and academics pulled off its biggest coup yet: welcoming Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to the stage as a keynote speaker.
Orbán used his speech to describe Europe’s future as “under attack”, with the region “losing out in the population competition between great civilisations”. He claimed that the EU wanted to solve the problems posed by an ageing population and low birth rates with immigration.
Hungary, he told the audience, believes differently.
“We must solve our demographic problems by relying on our own resources and mobilising our own reserves,” Orbán said, through the “restoration of natural reproduction” to achieve “replacement” birth rates for a white, Christian Hungary.
This was the moment the great replacement conspiracy theory went mainstream. An EU leader promoting a far-right belief that falsely claims white people face a demographic winter due to immigration, a replacement aided by feminists and liberal elites who repress the white birth rate through abortion and contraception.
The speech kicked off Orbán’s great replacement policy platform, one that effectively banned asylum-seeking people from entering the country, punished the LGBTQ+ community, and incentivised married Hungarian women to have more babies.
The same year, as if to emphasise Orbán’s point, Hungary’s minister for human capacities, Miklos Kasler, wrote: “To this day six million abortions have been performed, thereby causing one of the worst demographic disasters of the Hungarian nation. If it had not been so, there would be over 20 million ethnic Hungarians in total.”
On Sunday, Hungarians said they had had enough. After 16 years of authoritarian rule, Orbán and his Fidesz party were out. His former colleague turned political rival Péter Magyar and his centre-right Tisza party won a massive majority.
Orbán’s defeat is not only a relief to the European Union and to Ukraine – Magyar has promised to unblock a €90bn EU aid package to the country, which Orbán had objected to – but it served a body blow to the conspiracist anti-gender movement that saw Hungary as its home in Europe.
How Orbán took the great replacement mainstream
Orbán used his 2017 World Congress of Families speech to announce his family protection programme, where married ethnic Hungarian women would receive rewards for having multiple children. The idea had disturbing echoes of Hitler handing out medals to large families in 1930s Germany.
Unlike child benefit or tax credits in the UK, the policy rewarded a narrow, racialised and gendered group, excluding Roma women, single mothers and rainbow families.
“In my interpretation,” Katalin Kevehazi, the president of the Budapest-based JÓL-LÉT (Well- Being) Foundation, told Balkan Insight in 2019, “this Family Protection Programme […] is part of a ‘nation-building’ agenda.”
The approach is summed up in Feminism For The 99%: A Manifesto. Authors Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser write that by “incentivising births of the ‘right’ kind, while discouraging those of the ‘wrong’ kind, [governments] have designed education and family policies to produce not just ‘people’ but (for example) ‘Germans’, ‘Italians’ or ‘Americans’.” Or, in this case, Hungarians. By 2022, Hungary had passed new restrictions on abortion, demanding women listen to a foetal heartbeat before a termination.
It was this family protection programme that cemented Orbán’s position as the darling of the global anti-gender movement.
Conservative-turned-Reform commentator, Tim Montgomerie, described the scheme as “worthy of close study”, while members of Trump’s administration praised Hungary’s “procreation, not immigration” approach. Media personality Tucker Carlson described Hungary as having a government that “actually cares about making sure their own people thrive, instead of promising the nation’s wealth to illegal immigrants”.
Alongside rewarding heterosexual, Christian marriage, the government attacked the LGBTQ+ community, which they positioned as a threat to children and to Hungarian culture. In his ambition to create a “Christian Hungary in a Christian Europe”, Orbán acted to strip away LGBTQ+ equality.
Parliament passed laws to prevent same-sex couples from adopting, and mimicked Orbán’s “lion” Putin in banning so-called “gay propaganda”. In May 2020, the government effectively outlawed legal gender recognition for transgender and intersex people, followed in 2025 by Hungary amending its constitution to define “the mother is a woman, the father is a man”. That same year, Hungary banned Pride marches.
All this activity turned Hungary into the heart of European and transatlantic anti-gender organising, with think tanks such as the Danube Institute and the Centre for Fundamental Rights setting up shop in Budapest and backing anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ efforts globally.
But Orbán did not always get his way. A 2022 referendum to further restrict “gay propaganda” was defeated by a “hope-based campaign” that celebrated LGBTQ+ people, their friends, and families. And in 2024, Fidesz suffered a major blow to its popularity when President Katalin Novak had to resign having pardoned a man jailed for forcing children to retract sexual abuse claims against a director of a state-run children’s home. The scandal exposed a hypocrisy at the heart of a party that claimed its anti-LGBTQ+ laws were motivated by child protection.
And on 12 April 2026, Orbán did not get his way yet again. He suffered a decisive defeat, with Magyar winning a two-thirds majority in Parliament at an election that had a record-high turnout of 79.5%.
Magyar is no liberal. LGBTQ+ rights groups have criticised his silence on gender rights, which still face an uncertain future, and it is unclear if he will reform Hungary’s abortion law (abortion is legal but with barriers to access). But one thing is for sure: losing Orbán serves as a body blow to a movement determined to strip away women’s, migrant, and LGBTQ+ people’s rights.
This article is republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
