Calling Saturday’s Pride parade in Budapest “repulsive and shameful”, Hungary’s rightwing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán blamed the EU for encouraging opposition politicians to organise the LGBTQ+ event, which became the focal point for a clamorous anti-government protest.
The march in Budapest for LGBTQ+ swelled into one of the largest displays of opposition to Orbán witnessed in recent years. According to local media, some 100,000 people turned out despite efforts by the administration to impose a police ban backed by the threat of fines.
Yesterday, in an address to an online group of supporters known as Fight Club, Orbán claimed that opposition politicians encouraged by “Brussels” had urged their followers to swell the ranks of those marching in the parade.
“Since yesterday, we are even more certain that these people [opposition politicians] must not be allowed near the helm of government. And we will not allow them,” Orbán reportedly said. He offered no evidence to support his contentious remarks about the march, which was organised by the Budapest municipality at the behest of Gergely Karacsony, the city’s mayor, a politician long accused by the Orbán government of being an EU “puppet”.
In calling events at the march “repulsive and shameful,” Orbán specifically cited a drag queen show, men wearing high heels and the distribution of pamphlets on hormonal therapies.
Attempts had been made to prevent the march under a law passed earlier this year that authorises the prohibition of Pride marches, in the name of protecting children’s rights over all others. Over the past decade, Hungarian LGBTQ+ community rights have been whittled away as Orbán asserted and imposed his rightist Christian agenda.
Opponents viewed the attempted ban as a further sign of his drive to curtail democratic rights ahead of next year’s election, when the dominance enjoyed by Orbán’s party is expected to come up against the strongest challenge it has yet faced since coming to power 15 years ago.
On the eve of the Pride parade, Orbán had been scathing about European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen‘s appeal to Hungarian authorities to let the march proceed. He accused her of looking down on Hungary “as a subordinated country” and compared her request to receiving orders from Moscow in communist times.
