“Having children is saving the world,” Hungarian President Katalin Novák recently declared before a crowd at Brigham Young University. The first woman president of Hungary traveled to Utah to warn Americans of the “demographic ice age” threatening the West. Aging populations and declining fertility rates, she said, are signs that “we are about to give up on our future.”
Novák’s speech came on the heels of an address at the United Nations General Assembly and meetings with Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Elon Musk. During her U.S. tour, she has been touting Hungary’s family policies and urging others to follow suit — all while somewhat burying the lede that this once-promising post-Soviet democracy has become a bastion of nativism and anti-LGBTQ reactionism under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
