A Carefare Regime

Abstract

Hungary’s anti-liberal government has invented a novel solution to the care crisis, which I call a “carefare regime”. This chapter describes four key features of the policies, policy practice and discourse that make up Hungary’s carefare regime. I argue that in contrast to welfare state models familiar from developed democracies, in post-2010 Hungary, women’s claims to social citizenship are most successfully made on the basis of doing care work. The state is re-engineered rather retrenched: services are not commodified but “churchified” in an effort to redistribute resources and build political loyalty. Women are constructed as “naturally” responsible for reproduction and care and this responsibility is tied to sentimentalized notions about femininity and true womanhood. In addition to providing care in the household, women are increasingly engaged in the paid labor market too, where the tolerance for gender inequality is officially mandated. A carefare regime provides limited financial advantages for a select group of women, while simultaneously increasing their devalued work burden both in and outside the household: it feeds a growing underclass of women workers.

The missing arc of a backlash? Thirty years of constitutional debate on ‘women’s equality’ in Hungary

“…Policies aimed at countering demographic decline put women at the 'crossroads of employment and family policies' ( Hungler & Kende, 2019) and mothers of young children are especially vulnerable to rights violations by their employers. 17 Care work in the family is mainly undertaken by women, and state policies tend to maintain this status quo (Fodor, 2022). The gender gap grew, at least temporarily, during the national lockdown due to COVID-19 in 2020; highly educated urban women were most strongly hit by this phenomenon (Fodor et al, 2021).…”