Budapest, Hungary. Hungary’s LGBTQ+ community is preparing for the annual Pride march in Budapest on Saturday, with activists calling for the restoration of rights they say were eroded during Viktor Orban’s 16 years in power. The march has been authorised this year after police attempted to ban it last year under Orban.
Last year’s march and this year’s event
Last year’s Pride march turned into a mass anti-government demonstration that attracted tens of thousands of people after police sought to ban it under Orban.
This year, following Orban’s defeat by Peter Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party in April, the ban has been lifted and the march is allowed to proceed. Organisers said that while this marks progress, further changes are needed.
“Last year, our love of freedom and our courage forced authoritarian power to retreat… But we have not reached our goal yet,” the organisers said ahead of Saturday’s event.
Laws introduced under Orban
Orban, who presented himself as a defender of what he called Christian values against Western liberalism, introduced laws that ended the change of gender in personal documents, halted adoption by same-sex couples and banned materials in schools seen as promoting homosexuality or gender transition.
Impact on the community
Adam Andras Kanicsar, an LGBT activist and writer, told Reuters that the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights had a traumatic effect on the community and that recovery would take time.
“I’m still processing the Orban regime, I guess, and then I will process it for years. And I’m not alone with it,” he said during a film shoot in a vintage shop in Budapest.
“In these last 16 years …working as an LGBTQ journalist and writing and speaking about LGBTQ people meant that I always had to go that one extra mile, every time…And I will never get back these miles in my life.”
Magyar’s position
Magyar, a conservative, has asked for patience when Hungarian media asked about changing legislation that curtailed the rights of the LGBT community.
In parliament, he told Orban’s Fidesz party “to leave the bedrooms of the Hungarian people as soon as possible” and criticised Fidesz’s move to curb the right to assembly in order to ban the Pride march.