Emboldened by President Trump, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary on Monday escalated his culture war against what he calls “gender madness,” after his governing party voted to amend the Constitution to mandate that all Hungarians are either male or female.
The amendment proposed by the government was endorsed by Parliament, where the prime minister’s Fidesz party has a large majority. It was the latest in a series of moves by Mr. Orban to rev up his conservative base and distract attention from economic problems and a surging opposition movement ahead of elections next year.
“The international gender network must take its hands off our children,” Mr. Orban said on Monday. “Now, with the change in America, the winds have shifted in our favor,” he added, referring to the re-election of Donald J. Trump as president.
The amendment on gender included a clause that enshrined the protection of children’s “physical, mental and moral development,” reinforcing a law passed last month that banned gay pride events as a danger to the welfare of the very young.
The legislature also changed the Constitution to allow the government to strip dual nationals of their Hungarian citizenship if they are deemed dangerous to the nation. Some of Mr. Orban’s most vocal critics are Hungarians who fled abroad and took a second citizenship in another country.
The changes were part of what Mr. Orban said last month would be a “spring cleaning” to cleanse Hungarian politics of “stink bugs.”
The amendments mark the 15th time that Hungary has revised its Constitution since Mr. Orban became prime minister in 2010 and set about transforming his country into a self-declared “illiberal democracy.”
Liberal critics have denounced the changes as a retreat from democracy and an assault on the core values of the European Union, of which Hungary has been a member since 2004. Mr. Orban’s supporters, who include Mr. Trump and many prominent U.S. Republicans, however, see Hungary as a model of successful conservative politics in action.
Mr. Orban has won four general elections in a row, ramping up culture war issues ahead of each ballot. A year before the last election, in 2022, his party pushed legislation through Parliament that outlawed the “popularizing” of homosexuality, as well as content that promoted a gender that diverged from the one assigned at birth. Fidesz won a landslide after demonizing its opponents as “woke globalists” and “warmongers” intent on sending Hungarian youth to fight Russia in Ukraine.
The party’s credentials as a protector of children, however, were dented badly early last year, after it became known that the justice minister, Judit Varga, a leading Fidesz politician, had lobbied to pardon a man convicted of covering up pedophilia in a state-run children’s home. The minister and two other prominent Fidesz figures, including Hungary’s president, Katalin Novak, resigned amid a public uproar over the pardon.
All three had been at the forefront of Mr. Orban’s efforts to present Hungary as a bastion of family values, committed to fending off what Fidesz reviles as attacks on Christianity and Hungarian sovereignty through imported L.G.B.T.Q. “propaganda.”
The pedophilia scandal also gave birth to what has since become the biggest political challenge to Mr. Orban in many years — an opposition movement led by Peter Magyar, a conservative former Fidesz loyalist and ex-husband of Ms. Varga. Mr. Magyar, who had held Fidesz-controlled diplomatic posts and senior positions in state agencies, broke with Mr. Orban over the pedophilia pardon scandal and traveled the country mobilizing opposition to the previously unassailable governing party.
Some opinion polls indicated that his upstart political party, Tisza, could defeat Fidesz in next year’s election. Mr. Magyar’s rise has been fueled in large part by widespread public anger at endemic corruption, Hungary’s soaring inflation rate — the highest in the European Union — and other economic ills.
Unlike several more established opposition leaders, who have organized street protests in recent weeks against the ban on Pride events, Mr. Magyar has stayed clear of the issue, frustrating Fidesz’s effort to portray him as an enemy of Hungarian values. But his stand has also angered Hungarian leftists, who accuse him of putting political calculation ahead of principles.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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