LMP: With shrinking population, government should do more to entice young people home

Mate Kanasz-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 meagre wages, which “is not attractive to young people”, Kanasz-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, Kanasz-Nagy 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.