Fertility up from 1.23 children per woman to 1.59. Marriages roughly doubled, from 35,520 to more than 72,000. Abortions down from 40,449 to fewer than 22,000. Income tax exemption extended to mothers of three in October 2025 and to mothers under 40 with two children in January 2026. No other European country has figures like these, and no other European country is asked to explain them away.
The minister who carried that portfolio arrived at Hungary’s National Assembly on September 28 with his wife and their four children. Balázs Hankó had not come to plead. He came to say he would wait there for the prosecutors: “I am not going to run or hide.”
They arrived that evening. At about 9pm, officers from the intervention unit of the tax authority detained him at a building on Huszti Street in Budapest, where a summons had sent him.
On September 29 the Bács-Kiskun County Chief Prosecutor’s Office questioned him as a formal suspect over misappropriation. It alleges that between September 2025 and March 2026 the National Cultural Fund, which Hankó chaired as minister, moved 17.3 billion forints (about €46 million) through 1,079 grants outside the purposes set down in law. He has appealed against both the arrest and the charge. Prosecutors asked on September 30 for him to be remanded in custody, citing the risk that he would abscond. An investigating judge in Kecskemét rules on October 1.
He was not alone that day. Miklós Seszták, national development minister between 2014 and 2018, had been taken into custody hours earlier. The same inquiry produced a raid in July on the data centre holding Fidesz’s servers and the arrest of Hankó’s former chief of staff.
What no courtroom will test is the sequence. Prime Minister Péter Magyar announced months ago where Hankó belonged: “his place is in prison”. The prosecution service that obliged him has had no confirmed chief since the last one resigned under pressure from that same prime minister. A head of government names the destination, an acting apparatus delivers the man, and parliament clears the paperwork in a morning without a single vote against.
In Brussels that sequence is not even a footnote. The European Commission, which held Hungarian money back for years over corruption and the rule of law, pronounced the new administration sound within weeks of its formation. Ursula von der Leyen praised reforms she described as long overdue and unlocked €16.4 billion. Budapest joined the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, returned to Erasmus, and on September 23 the Commission proposed releasing a further €4.2 billion in cohesion funds.
Nothing structural was rebuilt in that time. No court was reconstituted, no prosecutor confirmed. The government changed, and that was the audit. A rule of law that thaws on a change of personnel is not law at all; it is patronage, and the men now running Hungary are the ones who passed the test.
The real charge against Hankó is written in no Hungarian criminal code. It is the fertility rate, the marriage register and the mothers who stopped paying income tax. A continent that treats its own decline as a weather system does not forgive the small country that proved otherwise, and it will not mourn the minister who kept the figures.
Hankó — pharmacist, professor, former vice-rector of Semmelweis University — said before his arrest that parliament would of course lift his immunity, and that the Fund case is “revenge” for the cultural policy of Orbán’s governments. Nobody in Budapest, on either side of the chamber, has behaved since as though he had got that wrong.
