Hungary’s 2026 election marks a major political shift. The new government led by Péter Magyar has presented a program with several constructive commitments relevant to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), equality, institutional independence, and civil society space. These include pledges to restore key institutional safeguards, improve the operating environment for civil society, address menstrual poverty, and strengthen responses to violence against women. 

At the same time, the program remains marked by strategic ambiguity and serious omissions. It does not amount to a coherent SRHR or human rights agenda. Core issues such as contraception, abortion-related barriers, comprehensive sexuality education, LGBTQ+ equality, Roma women’s health, and socio-economic barriers to reproductive autonomy are either absent or insufficiently addressed. ASTRA Network welcomes the positive openings in the program, but stresses that these must be translated into explicit guarantees, implementation mechanisms, and protections for those most exposed to discrimination and rights violations. 

Constructive Commitments 

The pledge to ensure transparent financing for civil society organizations, repeal laws that harass or restrict their activities, and allocate more dedicated resources to CSOs from 2027 is a positive development. If implemented properly, these measures could help rebuild an enabling environment for independent civil society after years of pressure and stigmatization. However, consultation must go beyond being “heard.” ASTRA Network calls for structured, regular, and transparent mechanisms through which CSOs, especially those working on SRHR, women’s rights, Roma rights, disability rights, and LGBTQ+ equality, can shape policy design, implementation, and monitoring. 

The commitment to reinstate the independence of the Equal Opportunities Authority is also significant. A functioning equality body is essential for addressing systemic discrimination, gender-based violence, workplace inequality, and unequal access to services. Similarly, the proposed creation of an independent Health Ministry, patient rights feedback mechanism, and quality assurance supervisory authority could improve health system governance. These institutions should be legally protected, adequately funded, transparent, and empowered to provide effective remedies for rights violations. This broader institutional reform could also build on Hungary’s ombudsperson traditions, including the mandate for future generations, by strengthening independent and adequately resourced mechanisms for long-term, rights-based policymaking. 

The program’s recognition of menstrual poverty is one of its most developed SRHR-relevant components. It rightly identifies menstrual poverty as a public health, equality, and social inclusion issue. ASTRA Network welcomes this recognition and calls on the government to move beyond acknowledgement by ensuring budget allocations, access to free or affordable menstrual products, and measures addressing stigma in education, health, and social policy. 

Strategic Ambiguities and Structural Concerns 

The program contains several references to demography, birth rates, and the need to increase the number of children born in Hungary. It also acknowledges barriers to gender equality, including the gender wage gap, the glass ceiling, and unequal care responsibilities. These references create openings for reform, but family policy cannot substitute for a comprehensive SRHR framework. 

A credible SRHR agenda must protect reproductive autonomy and address access to contraception, abortion-related care, fertility treatment, comprehensive sexuality education, confidential youth-friendly services, informed consent, and bodily autonomy across reproductive health care. Particular attention is needed to the gap between adolescents’ legal age of consent and their ability to access health care independently, which can leave young people without timely and confidential support. 

The program’s references to “humane” maternity care and dignified treatment during childbirth are welcome, but its diagnosis remains too narrow. Political support for reinstating “chosen obstetricians” does not amount to structural maternity care reform. Such a model may reassure some women, but it risks reproducing class-based inequalities unless accompanied by systemic change. 

Hungary’s maternity care crisis is not reducible to provider choice. It is shaped by overmedicalization, hierarchical obstetric culture, weak informed-consent standards, workforce pressures, limited accountability for abusive treatment, and insufficient investment in midwifery-led and community-based care. Meaningful reform requires evidence-based clinical guidelines, mandatory informed consent standards, accountability for obstetric violence and abusive treatment, investment in midwives, reliable data, accessible complaint mechanisms, and supported choices regarding childbirth, including midwife-led services and safe, regulated home birth within the public health system. 

The program also recognizes the poor state of infertility treatment and the inaccessibility of IVF services. This is important, particularly as many people are forced to seek care abroad at high personal cost. However, IVF must not eclipse the broader SRHR agenda. A policy framework focused narrowly on supporting childbirth, while neglecting contraception, abortion barriers, sexuality education, and bodily autonomy, cannot be considered comprehensive. 

Critical Omissions 

The program’s silence on LGBTQ+ rights is a major concern. Péter Magyar’s statement that “everyone can live with or love whomever they want” may be read as a symbolic gesture, but it is not a policy commitment. The program contains no explicit guarantees on anti-discrimination protections, legal recognition, freedom of assembly, protection from hate violence, or equal access to family-related and health-related rights. In a context where LGBTQ+ communities in Hungary have been targeted by hostile political narratives and restrictions on public visibility, explicit legal and policy protections are essential. 

Roma women’s and girls’ health and SRHR needs are also insufficiently addressed. The Roma inclusion chapter focuses mainly on education, employment, housing, and poverty-related health measures, but does not adequately address intersecting barriers to health care. Roma women and girls experience exclusion shaped by poverty, racism, territorial inequality, and gender-based discrimination. These barriers include discriminatory treatment in health care settings, unequal service quality, geographic isolation, transport obstacles, cost burdens, and the absence of culturally responsive care. 

In reproductive and maternal health care, Roma women may also encounter intensified and racialized forms of systemic failure, including degrading communication, differential treatment, neglect, and, in some cases, informal segregation. Access must therefore be understood not only as service availability, but also as safety, dignity, trust, and freedom from mistreatment. Experiences of humiliation, neglect, or discrimination may lead Roma women and girls to delay or avoid care, a “silent exit” from the health care system that contributes to health inequalities. 

The program also fails to adequately address how socio-economic inequality limits women’s access to health care, contraception, abortion-related care, fertility treatment, and reproductive autonomy. Cost burdens, transport barriers, regional inequalities, lack of confidential services, and dependence on family or institutional gatekeepers all shape whether rights can be exercised in practice. These barriers disproportionately affect Roma women, single mothers, women in rural or segregated areas, women with disabilities, homeless women, adolescents, and women in state care or child protection systems. 

Another significant omission is the absence of an explicit human rights framework. Without such a framework, commitments to equality, health care reform, and inclusion risk remaining fragmented, discretionary, and vulnerable to rollback. Reform should be grounded in autonomy, participation, accountability, non-discrimination, bodily integrity, and substantive equality, rather than in administrative efficiency or demographic policy alone. 

The Istanbul Convention as a Credibility Test 

ASTRA Network welcomes the government’s intention to strengthen legislation against domestic violence and ensure more effective enforcement. A meaningful way to demonstrate this commitment would be the ratification and full implementation of the Istanbul Convention, which provides a comprehensive international framework for preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. 

In the Hungarian context, ratification would be more than symbolic. It would provide a concrete benchmark for assessing whether the government is willing to advance coherent measures on prevention, protection, prosecution, and support in line with human rights standards. 

Priority Recommendations 

ASTRA Network calls on the new Hungarian government to: 

• adopt a human rights-based and gender-responsive framework across health, equality, education, social, and family policy;  

• establish structured mechanisms for civil society participation in policymaking, implementation, and monitoring;  

• ensure that restored and newly created institutions are independent, properly funded, transparent, and empowered to address rights violations;  

• publish a roadmap for maternity care reform, including informed consent standards, accountability for abusive treatment, and investment in midwifery-led care;  

• improve access to contraception, including by making emergency contraception available without prescription, providing free contraception at least for young people, ensuring access to voluntary sterilization for adults without discriminatory age or parity requirements, and guaranteeing confidential youth-friendly services; 

• ensure that comprehensive sexuality education is based on professional standards, evidence, and human rights, and is free from ideological restrictions; 

• remove legal, administrative, financial, and practical barriers to abortion care, including mandatory and biased counselling, delays, stigma, uneven service availability, and barriers faced by adolescents, Roma women, low-income women, rural women, migrants, and women with disabilities;  

• ensure that abortion care is accessible, timely, confidential, non-discriminatory, and provided in line with WHO guidance and human rights standards;  

• address socio-economic barriers to SRHR, including costs, transport barriers, regional inequality, and lack of confidential access;  

• integrate Roma women’s and girls’ SRHR and health needs into health, equality, anti-poverty, and anti-discrimination policy;  

• introduce explicit protections for LGBTQ+ people, including anti-discrimination safeguards, protection from violence, freedom of assembly, and equal access to rights and services;  

• ratify and fully implement the Istanbul Convention.  

Conclusion 

The new Hungarian government’s program offers a mix of constructive commitments, strategic ambiguity, and serious omissions. Restoring institutional independence, addressing menstrual poverty, and reopening space for civil society are important steps. However, these openings do not yet amount to a coherent rights-based SRHR agenda. 

The reform agenda should be judged not by symbolic commitments alone, but by its concrete impact on equality, autonomy, dignity, bodily integrity, and human rights.