Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has become a towering figure in European politics over the past 12 years thanks to his promotion of ‘Christian democracy’ as an alternative to western liberalism, which he claims has lost its way. But a change to abortion laws introduced by the Hungarian government this week may indicate an alarming shift in his methods.
The new regulation, brought in with little warning or debate, requires pregnant women to listen to their foetus’s heartbeat before they can access abortion services. Coming into force on Thursday, it strengthens abortion laws which have remained liberal throughout Orbán’s leadership.
In Hungary, abortions are legal up to the twelfth week of pregnancy, or at any time if the pregnancy is not viable. Women must give a valid reason for the abortion, and have to attend counselling sessions where they are presented with alternatives such as adoption. In this way, the rules have maintained freedom of choice while attempting to also further Orbán’s ‘pro-family’ social agenda.
The ‘foetal heartbeat’ rule is being portrayed, in part, as another attempt to hold back the tide of population decline.
Orban’s aim is to increase his country’s low birth rates, which are predicted to lead to a 12.3 per cent reduction in the Hungarian population by 2050. The ‘foetal heartbeat’ rule is being portrayed, in part, as another attempt to hold back the tide of population decline. It’s being claimed that the rule will result in fewer abortions and more adoptions.
Yet the political impetus for the change came not from Orbán’s Fidesz party, but from Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland), a deeply socially conservative force which entered the Hungarian parliament for the first time after elections in April. Western progressives rail against Orbán but Mi Hazánk makes Orban’s Fidesz appear a model of centrist moderation.
The deputy leader of Mi Hazánk, Dóra Dúró, has been pushing for the new heartbeat rule for years and is in no doubt that it is ethical. She said the law is intended to give foetuses the chance to ‘say to the mother with the heartbeat: “I am alive and feeling”.’
Although many Hungarians agree with Dúró – and although the Hungarian constitution itself says life must be ‘protected from conception’ – such sentiments have not, until now, exerted a major influence on abortion law in the way that they have in Poland. Yet the government echoed Dúró’s ethical justification for the heartbeat rule, pointing out research showing that two-thirds of Hungarians associate the start of life with the foetus’s first heartbeat.
This seems to mark a shift away from pragmatic reasoning about demographic change and towards more ideological policymaking. Even Hungary’s controversial ban on the display of LGBT content to children last year was justified in less moralising terms: the government claimed that while it respects the rights of members of the LGBT community, it also has a duty to promote the benefits of raising children within a traditional nuclear family in which ‘the mother is a woman and the father a man.’
For all the claims that Orbán runs an ‘oppressive‘ regime, he has tended to avoid introducing restrictions, instead focusing on a network of financial incentives encouraging young people to freely choose traditional conceptions of marriage, childbirth and family.
Perhaps such incentives are now seen as insufficient to reverse Hungary’s demographic decline, or maybe the looming economic crisis makes such policies impractical as a long-term solution. Whatever the cause, the nature of the heartbeat rule suggests a new approach to fostering Christian social values.
Orbán’s supporters argue that such a shift is necessary due to increased international pressures on Hungary. They’re certain that the EU is withholding funds from Budapest because of Orbán’s socially conservative policies, while the European Parliament on Thursday claimed that the country has become an ‘electoral autocracy’. Western progressivism – epitomised in Hungarian eyes as ‘LGBT ideology’ – is portrayed as a hostile foreign force. Orbán received a standing ovation during his recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas when he called for international meddlers to ‘leave our kids alone.’
But he also faces new domestic pressures from the right in the form of Mi Hazánk. The growth in the party’s popularity indicates that a significant portion of Hungary’s conservative electorate believe Orbán is not going far enough in opposing western progressivism. Ever the astute political strategist, Orbán may be taking Fidesz further down the path of prescriptive religious conservatism to head off this emerging threat to his supporter base.
Progressives will argue that such a shift was inevitable. But Fidesz’s remarkable success over the past 12 years has been largely down to its ability to make Christian conservatism desirable as a cultural and social force. If it pivots away from this approach and opts instead for more moralising and more restrictive policies, Orbán’s popularity could quickly start to wane.
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