Hungary will not see a “demographic turnaround” unless young people working abroad are offered attractive opportunities at home, the deputy group leader of opposition LMP told an online press briefing on Monday.
Máté Kanász-Nagy called the government’s family policy a “failure”, and insisted that the emigration of young people was one of the country’s gravest challenges. In the past decade some 400,000-500,000 young people left Hungary for other countries in western Europe in the hope of leading a better life, he said.
Rather than building a knowledge-based society, the government has worked to create “an entire economy to serve multinationals … turning Hungary into an assembly plant”.
The jobs offered in that system involve work of little value-added and meager wages, which “is not attractive to young people”, Kanász-Nagy said. Citing survey results, he said “every other Hungarian aged 16-24 is mulling a future in another country”.
Concerning the government’s new offices set up to help young people returning from abroad, LMP politician said the system was a “PR trick”, insisting that the offices could not provide any more help than basic advice in Hungarian cities rather in other countries.
Young people voted with their feet. They might come back after Fidesz leaves office but even then it will take time.
If young people with skills have gone abroad, and are earning good money abroad, it will take a massive increase in average wages, apart from anything else, to encourage them to return. Help with making a decent house affordable would be useful too. Also, if young people have got used to living in a country with a less, shall we say, negative culture, it will also be difficult to encourage them to return to a place where they will receive a daily diet of undiluted negativity.
For my wife leaving Hungary was like leaving a cultural fish bowl to live in a much bigger universe and understand the world as it really is rather than from a very limited perspective that exists for most Hungarians. As much as she feels Hungarian she can see that most of the people she left behind live in a very narrow world. I think most young Hungarians who emigrate come to realize that and they have much more freedom and opportunity than they could ever have at home Hungary is far from the centre of the universe except in the teachings of Orban. If you have ambition and talent go West.