Hungarian president at BYU predicts demographic crisis

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Utah Business

As fertility rates drop worldwide, the president of Hungary warned of a coming “demographic ice age” Tuesday in a speech at Brigham Young University.

Elected in 2022, Katalin Novák is the first woman president of Hungary and, at age 46, its youngest. A married mother of three children ages 20, 17 and 15, she has hinged her presidency on encouraging marriage, strengthening families and reversing the declining birthrate in Hungary and around the world. Before becoming president, she served as the minister of Family Affairs.

“If we have no kids, we have no future, and having children is saving the world,” she said. “We speak always or very much about climate change, about the challenges we face and how we should protect our planet. But my main question is, ‘Why should we save our planet if not for the future generations?’”

People in Europe, including Hungary, and other developed countries are not having children at a rate equal to replacement level, leading to what has been called a “demographic winter” into a “demographic ice age,” Novák told an overflow crowd at the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies.

“We are about to give up on our future,” she said.

Novák was in Utah after speaking at the United Nations General Assembly and meeting with the governor of Texas last week as well as Elon Musk on Monday. She also sat down with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on Tuesday to discuss Utah-Hungary relations and joint priorities, according to the governor’s office.

Poll: Republicans see Trump as a ‘person of faith’ ... more so than Mitt Romney, Mike Pence and others

More than half of Republicans see former President Donald Trump as a person of faith, putting him ahead of more vocally religious figures like his former vice president, Mike Pence, according to a new national poll conducted by HarrisX for the Deseret News.

Registered voters were asked whether they considered a list of political figures people of faith. Trump rose to the top of the list for Republicans, while President Joe Biden topped the list for Democrats. Among independents, Sen. Mitt Romney was most likely to be chosen as a person of faith.

Among Republicans, 53% said Trump was a person of faith, ahead of every other person on the list — although he was statistically tied with Pence, who came in at 52%.

Trump also led several of his other opponents in the Republican presidential primary, with 47% of Republican respondents saying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a person of faith, 31% for Sen. Tim Scott, 31% for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 30% for entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and 22% for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Only 23% of Republicans said Biden is a person of faith, while 12% said the same of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The poll was conducted Sept. 8-11, among 1,002 registered voters, and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points.

Read more about how different faith groups feel about the former president and other 2024 presidential contenders.

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‘Puka mania’: How this fifth-round pick from BYU has taken the NFL by storm

Puka Nacua, the wide receiver out of Orem High and BYU, is the steal of the draft and the talk of the National Football League, or at least he was until Taylor Swift dropped in. He is the subject of talk-show gab and the press and the TV booth.

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