Large crowd defies government ban to join Budapest Pride march

Hundreds of thousands of people defied a government ban by marching at Budapest Pride on Saturday, the largest demonstration ever against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has intensified his anti-LGBTQ+ campaign while trailing in the polls.

Hungarian officials threatened to use face recognition to fine participants and even jail Budapest’s mayor for holding the event. However, a harsh crackdown could risk a backlash from Hungarians who oppose the heavy-handed rule of Europe’s longest-serving prime minister — including his former supporters.

Orbán outlawed the Pride march for the first time in 30 years, but people defied his ban by showing up in record numbers. They filled the streets of central Budapest to support the LGBTQ community but also to defend freedom of speech and assembly.

Budapest mayor Gergely Karácsony, who became the host of the pride march, told the crowd that Orbán’s days were numbered.

“History has shown us that these regimes have one thing in common: they end,” he said, noting Orbán’s close relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

“On the day we also commemorate the departure of the last Soviet troops, we don’t need Putin’s followers to replace them.”

The crowd chanted “Russians go home” in an echo of the fall of communism in 1989.

“I have voted for Orbán several times but won’t ever do that again,” said Luca Kásás, a 35 year-old nurse who attended the event with her young daughter. “I want her to grow up in a place of freedom, not oppression.”

The Hungarian strongman has fallen behind centre-right rival Péter Magyar ahead of elections next spring.

Pride was a “demonstrative humiliation of everything we think about life, and a demonstrative threat to our own children”, Orbán told a forum of party insiders this month. “It is a parade that cannot happen in Hungary. You may gather, but you may not parade and trample on child protection laws in Hungary.”

Orbán’s stance is further straining ties with the EU, where he has long been criticised for eroding civil liberties. EU courts have also ruled against his moves to limit the independence of the judiciary, the media and the education system.

EU commissioner for equality Hadja Lahbib condemned the ban, saying it was part of ‘‘a wider push to roll back progress and undo the rights that generations had fought for”. Speaking at a press conference at Budapest city hall on Friday, Lahbib said, ‘‘to gather peacefully — it is one of those rights and it must be upheld”.

Budapest consultancy Political Capital said the ruling party Fidesz had tried to use the issue to portray the opposition as focused on liberal, metropolitan issues, but that the tactic had failed. Instead Fidesz found itself in a bind: it risked looking weak if it let the march proceed and authoritarian if it cracked down, the consultancy said.

“We should not make fools of ourselves by making a law we do not enforce,” infrastructure minister János Lázár told a forum in eastern Hungary this month. “That will make us weaker than when we started.”

Opposition party Tisza and its leader Magyar are beating Orbán by a double-digit margin in opinion polls. Magyar expressed support for the event, but said he would not attend as he was leaving for a family vacation on that day.

“We are building a country where it doesn’t matter where you were born, what family you grew up in and whom you love, only what you do for the community,” Magyar told local news web site Telex. “I call upon police to defend Hungarian people, if necessary, against the oppression of those in power.”

Hungary’s justice minister Bence Tuzson has warned that the event is illegal, threatening Budapest’s liberal mayor Gergely Karácsony with a jail sentence after he pledged to hold it as a municipal event to bypass the ban.

Csaba Faix, founder of LGBTQ rights group Family is Family and a former Karácsony aide, said Orban’s crackdown had galvanised people to defend their liberties in general.

“Pride is not a universally supported issue in Hungary, but the mayor — whose support has been restrained in the past — saw it as a symbol of the oppressive Fidesz world, so he engaged more directly,’’ Faix said.

Judit Beres, a woman in her 60s holding up a rainbow flag alongside the Swedish flag, joined the march on Saturday. She said she had emigrated from Hungary with her husband in 1987 after working “for years for freedom of speech . . . Now, after almost 40 years, I had to come back, to fight for the very same thing once again”.