Hungary, he told the audience, believes differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe must solve our demographic problems by relying on our own resources and mobilising our own reserves,\u201d Orb\u00e1n said, through the \u201crestoration of natural reproduction\u201d to achieve \u201creplacement\u201d birth rates for a white, Christian Hungary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The speech kicked off Orb\u00e1n\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same year, as if to emphasise Orb\u00e1n\u2019s point, Hungary\u2019s minister for human capacities, Miklos Kasler, wrote: \u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Sunday, Hungarians said they had had enough. After 16 years of authoritarian rule, Orb\u00e1n and his Fidesz party were out. His former colleague turned political rival P\u00e9ter Magyar and his centre-right Tisza party won a massive majority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Orb\u00e1n\u2019s defeat is not only a relief to the European Union and to Ukraine \u2013 Magyar has promised to unblock a \u20ac90bn EU aid package to the country, which Orb\u00e1n had objected to \u2013 but it served a body blow to the conspiracist anti-gender movement that saw Hungary as its home in Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How Orb\u00e1n took the great replacement mainstream<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nOrb\u00e1n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn my interpretation,\u201d Katalin Kevehazi, the president of the Budapest-\u00adbased J\u00d3L-\u00adL\u00c9T (Well-\u00ad Being) Foundation, told<\/a> Balkan Insight in 2019, \u201cthis Family Protection Programme […] is part of a \u2018nation-building\u2019 agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe approach is summed up in Feminism For The 99%: A Manifesto<\/em>. Authors Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser write that by \u201cincentivising births of the \u2018right\u2019 kind, while discouraging those of the \u2018wrong\u2019 kind, [governments] have designed education and family policies to produce not just \u2018people\u2019 but (for example) \u2018Germans\u2019, \u2018Italians\u2019 or \u2018Americans\u2019.\u201d Or, in this case, Hungarians. By 2022, Hungary had passed new restrictions on abortion, demanding women listen to a foetal heartbeat before a termination.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt was this family protection programme that cemented Orb\u00e1n\u2019s position as the darling of the global anti-gender movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conservative-turned-Reform commentator, Tim Montgomerie, described the scheme as \u201cworthy of close study<\/a>\u201d, while members of Trump\u2019s administration praised<\/a> Hungary\u2019s \u201cprocreation, not immigration\u201d approach. Media personality Tucker Carlson described Hungary as having a government that \u201cactually cares about making sure their own people thrive, instead of promising the nation\u2019s wealth to illegal immigrants\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAlongside 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 \u201cChristian Hungary in a Christian Europe<\/a>\u201d, Orb\u00e1n acted to strip away LGBTQ+ equality.<\/p>\n\n\n\nParliament passed laws to prevent same-sex couples from adopting<\/a>, and mimicked Orb\u00e1n\u2019s \u201clion<\/a>\u201d Putin in banning so-called \u201cgay propaganda\u201d. In May 2020, the government effectively outlawed legal gender recognition<\/a> for transgender and intersex people, followed in 2025 by Hungary amending its constitution<\/a> to define “the mother is a woman, the father is a man”. That same year, Hungary banned Pride marches.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Orb\u00e1n did not always get his way. A 2022 referendum to further restrict \u201cgay propaganda\u201d was defeated by a \u201chope-based campaign<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd on 12 April 2026, Orb\u00e1n 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%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s abortion law (abortion is legal but with barriers to access). But one thing is for sure: losing Orb\u00e1n serves as a body blow to a movement determined to strip away women\u2019s, migrant, and LGBTQ+ people\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This article is republished from Open Democracy<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/images.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n Sian Norris<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 Orb\u00e1n to the stage as a keynote speaker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1559","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-article","8":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1559"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1566,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions\/1566"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The approach is summed up in Feminism For The 99%: A Manifesto<\/em>. Authors Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser write that by \u201cincentivising births of the \u2018right\u2019 kind, while discouraging those of the \u2018wrong\u2019 kind, [governments] have designed education and family policies to produce not just \u2018people\u2019 but (for example) \u2018Germans\u2019, \u2018Italians\u2019 or \u2018Americans\u2019.\u201d Or, in this case, Hungarians. By 2022, Hungary had passed new restrictions on abortion, demanding women listen to a foetal heartbeat before a termination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was this family protection programme that cemented Orb\u00e1n\u2019s position as the darling of the global anti-gender movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conservative-turned-Reform commentator, Tim Montgomerie, described the scheme as \u201cworthy of close study<\/a>\u201d, while members of Trump\u2019s administration praised<\/a> Hungary\u2019s \u201cprocreation, not immigration\u201d approach. Media personality Tucker Carlson described Hungary as having a government that \u201cactually cares about making sure their own people thrive, instead of promising the nation\u2019s wealth to illegal immigrants\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cChristian Hungary in a Christian Europe<\/a>\u201d, Orb\u00e1n acted to strip away LGBTQ+ equality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Parliament passed laws to prevent same-sex couples from adopting<\/a>, and mimicked Orb\u00e1n\u2019s \u201clion<\/a>\u201d Putin in banning so-called \u201cgay propaganda\u201d. In May 2020, the government effectively outlawed legal gender recognition<\/a> for transgender and intersex people, followed in 2025 by Hungary amending its constitution<\/a> to define “the mother is a woman, the father is a man”. That same year, Hungary banned Pride marches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Orb\u00e1n did not always get his way. A 2022 referendum to further restrict \u201cgay propaganda\u201d was defeated by a \u201chope-based campaign<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And on 12 April 2026, Orb\u00e1n 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%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s abortion law (abortion is legal but with barriers to access). But one thing is for sure: losing Orb\u00e1n serves as a body blow to a movement determined to strip away women\u2019s, migrant, and LGBTQ+ people\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This article is republished from Open Democracy<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 Orb\u00e1n to the stage as a keynote speaker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1559","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-article","8":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1559"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1566,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions\/1566"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/figure>\n\n\n\n Sian Norris<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"