The pro-family policies pursued by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government as an alternative to mass immigration are reaping dividends, with births up 9.4 per cent year on year.

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The principal and interest payment liabilities on loans taken out by private individuals and businesses up to the present day have been suspended up to the end of the year, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced on Wednesday, in a break of the cabinet meeting, in a video message posted on his Facebook account.

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Speaking of government measures to rein in the ‘incalculable’ impact of the new coronavirus outbreak, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Friday that the primary goal is to keep the number of cases and fatalities to a minimum while the government is already “making plans for tomorrow and the day after”.

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Although relatively small in size and population, the country of Hungary is playing a huge role in helping persecuted Christians around the world, providing millions of dollars in aid.

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Hungarian European Parliamentarian Balázs Hidvéghi declared this week that “radical Muslim antisemitism” is on the rise in Europe thanks to massive illegal immigration.

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Hungary become the first European Union member state to join the new International Religious Freedom Alliance launched by U.S. President Donald Trump, announced Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó on Wednesday.

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had discussions with numerous prominent Italian politicians at the beginning of this week. During his visit to Rome, where he was invited to speak at the “National Conservatism Conference,” he met Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and Giorgia Meloni, the president of the right-wing Brothers of Italy. He also had discussions with Italy’s former prime minister and the leader of Forza Italia Silvio Berlusconi, and former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.

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Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó presented a proposal to Ukrainian government officials on Friday concerning Ukrainian language education to minorities and the preservation of ethnic Hungarians’ mother tongue in Transcarpathia.

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BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary’s Jewish community on Sunday commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of the Budapest ghetto, where over 70,000 Jews were confined near the end of World War II.

While some 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust in Nazi-run death camps, in forced labor battalions or by the Nazis’ Hungarian allies, many Budapest Jews survived the war. Many were forced into the ghetto, others hid around the city under assumed identities or were helped by sympathetic foreign diplomats like Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg.

Hundreds of people attended the commemoration at Budapest’s Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe, including Holocaust survivors, diplomats and politicians.

Robert Frolich, the synagogue’s chief rabbi, spoke of “ambivalent feelings” surrounding the commemoration, which contains pain and mourning, but also the “celebration of life.”

“Seventy-five years ago, Europe’s last ghetto, the Budapest ghetto, was liberated. This is what we remember today,” Frolich said. “Ambivalent feelings gather inside us, because the reason for the event, the liberation of the ghetto, is itself ambivalent.”

“It contains pain, it contains tragedy and the mourning which cannot be put into words, which is unspeakable and can only be experienced. At the same time, it contains joy, relief and the celebration of life.”

Jews were forced to move into the ghetto, set up over more than 20 city blocks in Budapest’s traditional Jewish quarter, from the end of November 1944.

Enclosed with wooden planks and brick walls, conditions in the ghetto during the cold winter were inhumane. Residents faced mass starvation and disease. Thousands of dead bodies had to be lined up at a square after the ghetto’s designated burial areas were full.

According to historians, by the end of 1945 the deaths of some 14,000 people could be attributed to the conditions in the Budapest ghetto — either those who died there or those who became sick there and passed away in the months following its liberation on Jan. 18, 1945.

Around 420,000 of the Hungarian Jews killed during the Holocaust were residents of countryside cities and villages. They were deported from their homes by rail to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps in less than two months in mid-1944.

Tamas Mester, president of the Budapest Jewish Community, spoke of growing responsibilities to remember the suffering.

“As time passes, our duty strengthens to guard the memory of the victims and oppose the growing pressure of forgetting,” Mester said. “At the same time, it is an important task to help and care for the survivors.”

Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, Israel’s ambassador to Hungary, mentioned Hungarian Jews who chose to stay in Hungary instead of immigrating to Israel or elsewhere after the Holocaust.

″(They) had to face, for decades, the constant hardship of communism following the war. But against all odds, they managed to plant the seeds of Jewish identity for the next generations, who by now make Jewish life in Hungary and elsewhere flourishing once again,” Hadas-Handelsman said.

“This does not mean that the dangers and the threats that Jews were facing before completely disappeared. As the Hungarian proverb says, ‘Evil never sleeps,’” the ambassador added. “Today, 75 years after the Holocaust, worldwide anti-Semitism is unfortunately on the rise again.”

Vince Szalay-Bobrovniczky, deputy state secretary for civil society relations, said despite the Holocaust, Budapest now has a “considerable community” of Jews.

“Facing up to its past, Hungary is united in the interests of preventing any people belonging to a national, ethnic, racial or religious minority from suffering grievances,” he said.

(Breitbart)

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Sir Roger Scruton has died and Britain has lost her greatest conservative thinker, writer, fox hunting man, philosopher and all-round-hero of the right.

Like so many of the bravest and best, he was a prophet almost without honour in his own country.

In the Eastern European countries where he had fought for freedom under Communism, he was properly recognised as a hero: in 1998 President Vaclav Havel awarded him the Czech Republic’s Medal of Merit (First Class) for his work in the Eighties smuggling samizdat literature and encouraging underground networks behind the Iron Curtain; in June 2019, the Polish President awarded him Poland’s Order of Merit; last month (December 2019) President Viktor Orban of Hungary awarded him their Order of Merit, saying he had ‘foreseen the threats of illegal migration and defended Hungary from unjust criticism.’

In Britain, however, he enjoyed a more mixed reputation — epitomised by a shoddy incident following his appointment in 2018 as chairman of the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

Though it was a well-deserved appointment for such an intelligent, architecturally well-informed, civilised thinker with a strong aesthetic, the left couldn’t bear the idea of anyone so shamelessly conservative being given a government advisory role.

So an activist journalist from the left-wing New Statesman set out to ambush him — and by twisting Scruton’s words succeeded in getting him ousted from the job.

What was most disgusting about the incident was not so much the cockroach-like behaviour of the scummy leftist hack — one George Eaton — as the reluctance of the cowardly, craven, politically correct Establishment to rise to Scruton’s defence.

As I reported at the time:

The smear — a result of selective editing of the interview and malicious tweeting by the magazine’s deputy editor George Eaton — cost Scruton his job on a government advisory body. Among those who initially condemned Scruton for his alleged remarks were various Conservatives, including MPs Tom Tugendhat, Johnny Mercer and James Brokenshire, and former Chancellor of the Exchequer turned freesheet editor George Osborne.

It was only thanks to some digging from Scruton’s friend Douglas Murray that justice was restored.

But now journalist Douglas Murray has got hold of the original interview recording and analysed the transcripts in the Spectator. What becomes immediately clear is that Scruton was badly misrepresented. Not only is Eaton shown repeatedly trying to provoke Scruton into voicing provocative opinions he doesn’t actually hold, but it is also evident that the version of events Eaton subsequently presented in a series of trolling tweets bears little relation to Scruton’s measured, thoughtful discourse during the interview.

When I interviewed Scruton myself in 2017, we talked about the moment during the 1968 Paris évenéments when Scruton, who had been fairly apolitical up to that point, suddenly discovered he was a conservative.

He had watched the educated children of privilege wantonly destroying the property of their social inferiors in the name of something or other, and realised: ‘Whatever they are for, I am against.’ That was the reason he has spent so much of his life since trying to develop a philosophy of conservatism as thorough, persuasive and enticing as the variations on Marxism so compelling to those students.

Later, he provided the most satisfying definition of conservative values I have ever heard.

‘Conservatives are people who love something actual and want to retain it.’

(Or it could have been ‘attain’ it – but whatever, the general sense remains. Conservatism, unlike the hate-riddled philosophy of modern leftism, does not define itself in opposition to things nor is it obsessed with theory. Rather it springs from the very things the left is always accusing it of lacking – positivity and love).

My personal favourite of his many fine books is On Hunting. And I was so glad to read in the Christmas issue of the Spectator that as recently as February last year – on his 75th birthday – he was able, despite the protests of his lovely wife Sophie, to ride to hounds one last time.

He concluded his piece in the Spectator:

Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen. Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.

RIP Sir Roger!

The Delingpole interview with Sir Roger Scruton can be found here.

(Breitbart)

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Starting this year, the Hungarian government is set to offer free in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures for couples wanting children in order to boost the national birthrate to 2.1 children by 2030.

The Hungarian government has taken control of six private fertility clinics and plans to purchase new buildings in order to meet demands of the estimated 150,000 couples across the country who have fertility issues but want to have children, La Croix

Previously, IVF procedures were largely out of reach for many Hungarian couples due to the costs associated with the procedure, but now the pro-family government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is planning to give all couples free access.

Secretary of State for the Family Katalin Novák commented on the new measures saying: “If all couples who want a child manage to have a baby, Hungary will no longer have demographic problems.”

Hungary currently faces a demographic winter if trends are not reversed, with the population expected to decline from the current 9.7 million to six million by the year 2070.

Other nations have largely relied on mass migration to counter demographic trends and ageing populations but the Orbán government has, instead, adopted arguably the most pro-family policies in the world in order to avoid turning to migration to reverse population decline.

Among the policies adopted by the government last year has been a 30,000 euro loan to couples which is completely forgiven if they have three children. Hungary has also introduced tax breaks for families as well as extending daycare options or an allowance for elderly relatives who care for children.

Another programme will also see women with four or more children becoming exempt from income taxes for the rest of their lives.

“In our minds, immigration means surrender,” Prime Minister Orbán said last year, and added: “If we resign ourselves to the fact that we are unable to sustain ourselves even biologically, by doing so we admit that we are not important even for ourselves.”

(Breitbart)

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Almost 100,000 families have applied for some kind of subsidy provided via the government’s family protection action plan since it was launched on July 1, the Ministry of Human Resources said on Friday.

Most of the applicants are interested in availing of the state-subsidised prenatal baby support loan or a grant to buy a car, the ministry said in a statement, adding that the action plan’s housing subsidies were also popular.

Some 60,000 couples have applied for state-subsidised prenatal baby support loans, it said, adding that 46,000 couples had already signed their loan contracts.

Some 23,000 families have applied for grants to buy a car and close to 8 billion forints have been paid out to winning applicants, the ministry said.

Almost 15,000 families have availed of the government’s various housing subsidies, the statement added.

From Jan. 1, the government will launch a programme to allow grandparents to take over their children’s child-leave, and exempt mothers with at least four children from personal income tax, the ministry noted.

(Hungary Today / MTI)

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