At CPAC Hungary in Budapest, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. She is Hungarian, a wife and a mother, and she works for the Hungarian government. And if that is not enough, she is studying for a law degree.
After the final speech by President Javier Milei, she excused herself. She had an exam to take. I watched her go and thought: There she is. The conservative woman that the Western European establishment insists does not exist. The woman who truly has it all and does it all.
I grew up in the Netherlands. From the moment I entered university, the message was clear: your degree comes first, your career comes second, and your children, if you must, come last. Having a baby before thirty was treated not as a life choice but as a failure of ambition. The modern Dutch woman was defined by what she produced professionally, not by what she built personally. This was sold to us as liberation.
The numbers show what that liberation actually looks like. The average age at which Dutch women become first-time mothers has risen from 24.3 in the early 1970s to over 30 today. The share of women under thirty who are already mothers has dropped from around 30% a decade ago to roughly 20% now. Meanwhile, childcare costs hundreds of euros a month, even after subsidies. Young couples cannot buy homes. Financial incentives to start a family young are almost non-existent. Parental leave remains only partially paid.
None of this is accidental. The Dutch state needs women in the workforce. Not because it truly values their ambition, though it readily claims that it does, but because it has made financial commitments that demand tax revenue. Open borders, mass migration, and net-zero climate targets expand in cost with every passing year. These are expensive ideological projects, and they require workers to fund them.
The Dutch woman has been conscripted into financing a political agenda that was never hers. Her delayed motherhood is not a triumph of progressive values. It is a fiscal strategy with feminist branding.
That is the lie at the heart of the Dutch model. It presents itself as expanding women’s choices. Structurally, it depends on women not making certain ones. It celebrates the woman who delays family as enlightened and quietly penalises the woman who does not. This is what the Netherlands calls freedom.
To see that another reality is possible, we just have to go to Budapest, Hungary.
From the moment you arrive, the message is different. Banners at the airport tell you this is a family-friendly country. Under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, it is not a marketing slogan. It is a political commitment, backed by one of the most serious pro-family investment programmes in the democratic world. Since 2010, Hungary has dedicated approximately 5% of its GDP to supporting families, not merely compensating them for the cost of existing but actively investing in their formation. Orbán made a decision the Dutch state has never been willing to make: that Hungarian families are worth more to Hungary than any ideological project imported from Brussels.
What does that look like in practice?
The cultural results are visible. Marriages in Hungary more than doubled between 2010 and 2021, reaching the highest figure in four decades. The number of divorces per marriage has halved. Hungary’s fertility rate rose from a historic low of 1.23 in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021, the second-largest increase of any OECD country over that period.
Since October 2024, mothers with three or more children pay no personal income tax for life. From 2026, that exemption extends to mothers under thirty with even one child. For a woman on an average salary, that is more than one million forints (over €2,600) in her pocket each year. The income tax exemption alone is estimated to directly benefit up to 250,000 mothers.
The CSOK Plusz programme offers families subsidised home loans at 3% interest: 15 million forints for one child, 30 million for two, and 50 million for three. Upon each new birth, a portion of that principal is forgiven. There are mortgage deductions, subsidised cars for larger families, and a prenatal loan available to young married couples before a child is even born.
The Hungarian state is not waiting for you to prove you deserve support. It is telling you in advance that it believes in your family. Attributing individual births to specific policy instruments is, by its nature, methodologically imprecise. Demographers will debate the counterfactual for years, and rightly so. But here is what the fertility debate misses entirely.
The point of Hungary’s family policy is not only to move a number on a spreadsheet. It is to build a society with a different set of values. One in which the state does not treat the birth of a child as a private inconvenience to be managed but as something worth organising public life around. Where the Dutch government looks at a young woman and sees a taxpayer it cannot afford to lose, the Orbán government looks at her and sees a mother it wants to support.
Western Europe has spent decades telling women that equality means sameness: the same hours, the same priorities, and the same sacrifice of the things that are particular to being a woman. Hungary is telling a different story. It is telling women that the state is on their side, regardless of which life they choose to build. That is not a conservative fantasy. Depending on your definition, it is the most genuinely feminist position a government can hold.
The Netherlands calls itself a free country. Yet a country that tells women they can have it all, while offering only limited support to make both a career and a family realistically attainable, is not advancing feminism. It is using feel-good rhetoric to serve its own interests.
Hungary, on the other hand, under Orbán, is building a society in which a woman can be a mother, a wife, a professional, and a student. A society in which she can truly have it all. Where she is free to pursue her happiness: whether in family, career, or both. Isn’t that real empowerment?
The Netherlands calls that conservative.
I call it real freedom.
