social policy

At the end of 2025, Lithuania’s Parliament adopted amendments to the unemployment insurance system intended to strengthen incentives for a faster return to the labor market. However, according to the LFM, the fundamental problem remains unresolved: for the fourth consecutive year, Lithuania records the highest unemployment trap rate in the European Union, and remains the only EU country where this indicator exceeds 100 percent.

In the end of 2025, progress on Ukraine’s reforms showed mixed results. While there was some improvement in certain areas, others slowed down or even raised concerns.

Ukraine\'s European integration process is often discussed in terms of legislative directives and macroeconomic indicators. However, at the heart of this process lies the most vital and sensitive resource – people. For many years, labor migration from Ukraine to Poland was quite high, but often temporary in nature.

We are pleased to present the eighteenth issue of 4liberty.eu Review, titled “Reinventing Family Policies in CEE?”. This time, our primary focus is on social and family policies in the region, their shortcomings, and much needed reforms.

The functioning of all public services depends on it; hence completely different infrastructures are needed for a hundred people and 500 million people. Meanwhile, the fundamental demands of young people and the elderly differ.

Family policy has become a universal content of election programs of all parties. In this area, the parties unanimously offer increases in public spending, regardless of the added value of the increase.

Social policy can be seen from a fragmented perspective with a purpose to justify growing costs of welfare and ideological battles against the free market economy. Such policies try to advocate limits of the market economy or even undermine its role, for the sake of making ‘progress’ in changing the economic system.

Family Protection Action Plan, which bears all the hallmarks of an authoritarian staple, is dehumanizing, pits demographic groups against each other and distorts the markets. It also creates a distraction for the citizens and puts the opposition in a corner where their only option is a bidding war.

Some view social justice as the comprehensive equality of normative rights as well as social and material goods, others doubt whether social justice can even be defined, never mind actually achieved. But what does justice mean for liberals? And when is a society or a state just in the liberal sense?

It is very common to mistake social policy for socialism.