Government Assistance and Family Support in Hungary

For a good month now the media have been full of reports about different ideas to reform the welfare system and to modify government support given as an entitlement to families for every child up to the age of twenty-one.

The debate about child support is not new.

SZDSZ has argued for a number of years that well-off families didn’t need these monthly checks. SZDSZ highlighted two prominent politicians with large families: Viktor Orbán and Ferenc Gyurcsány. Orbán has five children; Gyurcsány, four. Surely, these two people don’t need government handouts!

MSZP was reluctant to change the current system. Socialist politicians argued that deciding who is eligible and who isn’t would cost more than the government would save on the few thousand families who wouldn’t qualify.

In fact, no party thought about the issue in a truly innovative way until now, when MDF came up with a “revolutionary” idea. Erzsébet Pusztai, who is the party’s spokesman on social issues, outlined an entirely different system of child support. Although I don’t think it will be implemented, I find it intriguing and worthy of consideration.

First, let me say something about “free” Hungarian education. The fact is that it isn’t free. Most of the children must buy rather expensive textbooks; only children whose parents can prove that their income is under a certain level will receive textbooks free. Cafeteria food is not free either.

Again, one must prove eligibility. Erzsébet Pusztai with MDF’s blessing proposed a different idea.

Child support for children between the ages of four and fourteen should be given not to the parents but to the kindergartens and schools. In return schools would be truly free. No one would have to pay for textbooks, for food in the cafeteria, or for trips organized by the school.

Moreover, MDF proposes to lengthen the school year. As in most countries, schools close for two to three months during the summer. Not only do children forget a lot that they learned during the school year; parents also have a difficult time finding accommodations for them during the long vacation. The better off parents spend money to send their children to camp; in some cases grandparents must take care of the kids while the parents work. The children of poorer families often end up hanging out on the streets.

MDF would go even further. If Pusztai’s ideas were adopted, they would introduce much longer school days. In the afternoons beside extra classes in, for instance, foreign languages, there could be more gym, art, and music lessons. Schools would provide breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snacks. Moreover, the students could do their homework at school. They wouldn’t even have to carry their books home. In addition, they wouldn’t be unsupervised during the afternoon when their parents are still at work. Apparently about 250 billion forints are currently spent on child support. That amount of money would be enough, according to Pusztai, to introduce the new system. I might add that MDF’s proposal also has another, most modest agenda: to make sure that parents receiving child support actually send their children to school. The Orbán government tried something like that by introducing legislation that tied child support to school attendance. The parties then in opposition, MSZP and SZDSZ, fiercely attacked the legislation and after 2002 the Medgyessy government abolished it.

Zsuzsa Ferge, a sociologist whose main concern is poverty, is outraged. She and others suspect anti-Gypsy bias behind the idea. Ferge also believes that this suggestion is strange coming from MDF, a party that has always emphasized the importance of family but now is trying to weaken family bonds. Zsuzsa Ferge said that the MDF politician’s ideas exhibited inadequate knowledge of European practice and the philosophy behind it. In plain English, Erzsébet Pusztai is ignorant. As far as know, Zsuzsa Ferge hasn’t made any constructive suggestions except to give more money to the poor.

One might have thought that after this rebuke Pusztai would be less zealous. But no! She stuck her neck out again when the mayor of a small village in northern Hungary came up with another idea. This time about financial assistance to families without a steady income.

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