Orbán bans Pride in Hungary as polls show rival surging

In 1997, Hungarians held the first Pride march behind the fallen Iron Curtain. Almost three decades later, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is the first country in the European Union to ban the protest nationwide.

His illiberal government announced in late February that it wanted to ban the Pride march “in public form,” and on Monday, Orbán’s Fidesz party proposed an amendment to the Assembly Act that would make it “illegal to hold an assembly that violates the prohibition set forth in the Child Protection Act.”

The Hungarian parliament passed the amendment Tuesday, with Fidesz and other far-right lawmakers voting in favor — while liberal lawmakers disrupted the session with smoke bombs.

Opponents of Pride — and of LGBTQ+ people in general — often claim that LGBTQ+ visibility is dangerous to children, sometimes in an attempt to paint people within the community as pedophiles.

Organizers warn that Orbán’s administration could be stepping onto a slippery slope, and that banning Pride marches could ultimately mean the dissolution of democracy.

“This is not child protection, this is fascism,” Budapest Pride wrote in a statement Monday, saying that the electorally threatened Orbán wants to win votes from the extremes of Hungary’s far right to boost his chances of winning the country’s next election, likely to be held in April 2026.

In the name of children

Although Orbán has been in power for 15 years, his Fidesz party has barely touched Pride marches, even while it has begun to weaponize policies affecting sexual minorities in the last five years, in parallel with the party’s shift from the center to the hard right.

In the summer of 2020, Fidesz ended legal recognition of transgender people, and a year later, in parallel with anti-LGBTQ+ messaging, introduced the “Child Protection Act.” The law restricts rights by censoring comprehensive sex education, equating LGBTQ+ lifestyles with pedophilia, blocking same-sex couples from adopting children, and restricting content in media and advertising — steps similar to Russia’s attacks on sexual minorities. 

“Protecting children is a priority in all circumstances. Anyone who has children knows what the problem is with the Pride parade and its aftermath on social media and other public forums. I have three children and I would not want them to see such content,” Máté Kocsis, leader of the Fidesz parliamentary group, said recently to the government-aligned weekly Mandiner.

“Perhaps the organizers are also aware that what they do year after year irritates a large part of society. Abnormality provokes normality,” he added.

Fidesz has made child protection one of its key policy concerns, but has a shaky record on the issue: In early 2024, Hungary’s President Katalin Novák had to resign after the press discovered she had pardoned a man who covered up a sexual abuse scandal at a children’s home. 

The issue shook Fidesz’s core base, and reactivated the opposition, which began to coalesce around Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz member who has barnstormed onto the political scene and whose new party, Tisza, is now polling ahead of Orbán, posing a real threat to the Hungarian strongman.

The move against the Pride march is one of the strongest examples yet of Fidesz’s efforts to snare marginalized extremist voters in order to reach a majority. If, for example, the party could attract the 6 percent of voters currently saying they will opt for the far-right Mi Hazánk party, that would be enough to catch up to Magyar’s Tisza.

The majority of Hungarian voters, though, wouldn’t support a ban on Pride. According to a poll, only 36 percent of voters would support banning the march, while 56 percent would keep it open. Budapest’s liberal attitude is striking, with 78 percent of the capital’s residents wanting to keep Pride public.

Budapest’s liberal-leaning mayor Gergely Karácsony told POLITICO: “Whatever anyone says, there will be Pride in Budapest this June. It may even be bigger than ever before.

“When the problems in a country multiply, the smear campaigns of those in power are intensified. But if we accept that the law in this country no longer protects citizens from power, then we will lose everything we care about,” Karácsony added.

Mere toy or real threat?

Fidesz’s main goal in banning Pride may be electoral, in order to force Magyar — who wants to grab votes from the left and the right — into the LGBTQ+ debate, and risk alienating some voters.

“The appeal against Pride serves the purpose of setting a trap for Magyar,” said political analyst Kristóf Gáspár, from the Budapest-based Paradigm Institute. 

Whether such a strategy would work is questionable, said Szabolcs Pék, who works in polling for the Iránytű Institute, because most people have more pressing issues in their lives than Pride marches.

“When Péter Magyar goes to small towns and villages and talks about everyday problems like bad railways, having to wait three years for a hip operation, and so on — these are hard-hitting issues that matter,” said Pék.

Magyar has tried to downplay Orbán’s message, saying that “the Pride issue is just a dog’s toy,” an issue for the press to chew on, forced onto the political agenda by Fidesz to polarize voters. 

Budapest Pride organizers also say that Orbán wants to create a “fake problem” by singling out sexual minorities and focusing attention on them instead of addressing more serious issues — but they would refrain from calling Fidesz’s move a mere communication tool.

“If peaceful assemblies of any social group can be banned on flimsy grounds, then the right of assembly of every single Hungarian citizen is at stake,” Budapest Pride spokesperson Johanna Majercsik told POLITICO before the vote.

Fidesz is determined to make a ban on Pride a reality: According to the amendment approved Tuesday, anyone who holds or even participates in a gathering that “violates the prohibition set forth in the Child Protection Act” commits an offense punishable by a fine of 6,500 to 200,000 Hungarian forints (€16 to €502). The amendment allows police to use facial recognition software to identify participants.

“If our march is banned, we will take all possible legal measures to enforce our right to peaceful assembly,” Majercsik stressed. “But if the Hungarian government really goes down the road of prohibition, it will admit that Hungary is no longer a democracy.”