A government ban on gay Pride events this weekend in Budapest has put Hungary’s right-wing strongman, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in a tricky spot.
Mr. Orban’s party in March rushed legislation through Parliament that made it illegal to hold gatherings like Pride parades, under an earlier law banning material that “propagates” homosexuality.
Billed as an effort to protect children, it looked to politicians and analysts like a trap set for Hungary’s surging opposition leader, a conservative whom Mr. Orban hoped to expose as a closet liberal soft on child protection. Instead, it may be Mr. Orban who is ensnared.
Despite the ban, the Budapest Pride parade is set to go ahead on Saturday, recast by the capital city’s liberal mayor, Gergely Karacsony, as a municipal event celebrating Hungary’s recovery of full freedom when Soviet troops pulled out in June 1991.
Tens of thousands of Hungarians and foreigners, including more than 70 European Parliament members, are expected to join a parade renamed as Budapest Pride Freedom. The mayor said that thanks to the government ban it would likely be Hungary’s biggest-ever Pride parade. He predicted a turnout of at least 50,000 people.
Mr. Orban and his governing Fidesz party now face a choice: try to enforce their ban and punish participants, or let the march go ahead and risk looking impotent.
“They have trapped themselves by trying to ban something that cannot be banned,” Mr. Karacsony said in an interview.
The governing party pushed through the new law at a time when it was increasingly nervous about the rising popularity of Peter Magyar, a conservative opposition leader and former Fidesz loyalist. Then, Fidesz officials and media outlets controlled by the party demanded to know where Mr. Magyar stood on the issue.
“It was clearly a trap,” said Zoltan Tarr, a former Protestant pastor who is now a senior figure in Mr. Magyar’s upstart party, Tisza, which has a solid lead over Fidesz in most opinion polls, with elections set for next year. “We have been very careful not to fall into it,” Mr. Tarr, a member of the European Parliament, added.
While liberal critics of Mr. Orban organized street protests and demanded a lifting of the ban, Mr. Magyar stayed silent on Budapest Pride, sticking instead to relentless criticism of the government over corruption, inflation and other issues. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Mr. Karacsony, the mayor, said he decided to go ahead with the parade because he was outraged that Hungary, a member of the European Union nominally committed to freedom of assembly and minority rights, would prohibit an annual event that has taken place with minimal fuss since 1995.
Mr. Orban has for years railed against “gender insanity” and “woke globalists,” distracting attention from Hungary’s faltering economy and revving up his right-wing rural base. The ban on Budapest Pride sharply escalated that campaign.
Mr. Magyar’s silence has exasperated some L.G.B.T.Q. activists and their liberal supporters, who do not particularly like the new opposition leader but see him as the first viable challenger to Mr. Orban’s 15-year grip on power.
The Budapest mayor said it was hardly a surprise that Mr. Magyar “is not standing up for liberal values because he is not a liberal.”
Mate Hegedus, a Budapest Pride organizer, said it was “quite sad” that Mr. Magyar had not taken a stand against the ban, but called it “good tactics on their side to not go into this propaganda trap.”
Balazs Szabo, a hard-line supporter of Mr. Orban who represent Hungary’s Polish minority in a local assembly, pleaded with the government to crack down.
“It would be an unacceptable loss of face for both the police and the government if the homosexual parade were to take place,” he said in an open letter published this past week by a pro-government newspaper.
Mr. Orban said on Friday that police could disperse the banned event but, suggesting they wouldn’t, added that Hungary was a “civilized country.” Participants, he said, would face “clear legal consequences.”
Few people expect the police to intervene forcibly. But the risk of clashes grew on Thursday when a small far-right party allied with Fidesz, Our Homeland Movement, said it would hold an anti-gay parade at the same time on several of the same streets as Budapest Pride.
Our Homeland has been in the vanguard of Hungary’s small but vociferous anti-gay movement, leading a campaign to purge bookshops of what it denounces as “homosexual propaganda.”
Condemning Mr. Magyar’s refusal to either support or denounce Budapest Pride, pro-government media outlets have sought to rally public opinion by publishing photos of semi-naked men and women simulating sex acts at raucous Pride events in San Francisco and Berlin. Photos of debauchery at a youth music festival have also been presented as proof of gay bacchanalia.
Budapest Pride has traditionally been a more buttoned-down affair. Eager to keep it that way and to avoid providing fodder for Fidesz, organizers have urged visiting foreign L.G.B.T.Q. activists, who tend to be less restrained, to “not show their genitals or nipples” and respect local norms, Mr. Hegedus said. There is no dress code, he added, but “don’t wear less than you would on the beach.”
Hadja Lahbib, the European Union’s commissioner for equality, spoke in Budapest on Friday alongside the mayor in support of the banned parade. She declared the right of assembly a “core value” from which “there can be no retreat by any member state.” But, asked at a news conference whether she would join Saturday’s parade, she declined to say.
When Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, on Thursday called on Hungarian authorities to let Budapest Pride go ahead “without fear of any criminal or administrative sanctions,” Mr. Orban swiftly told her to mind her own business and stop interfering in Hungarian law enforcement.
Gabor Gyori, a political analyst with Policy Solutions, a left-leaning research group, said the conflict over Budapest Pride showed that Fidesz was running out of ideas for how to slow Mr. Magyar’s vertiginous rise in opinion polls.
“Rehashing all the old issues won’t work,” he said. “At this point they need something new or for the economy to pick up dramatically.”
A “child protection” law passed in 2021 barred minors from viewing material “that depicts or propagates” homosexuality. The new legislation passed in March expanded this to include public events like Budapest Pride and stipulated fines of nearly $600 for anyone attending.
Fidesz has been unable to recover the ground it lost in opinion polls last year with revelations that Hungary’s president, a close ally of Mr. Orban, and his since-dismissed justice minister had secretly pardoned a man convicted of covering up sexual abuse by the director of a state-run children’s home. Mr. Magyar, who broke with Fidesz over the scandal, seized on the issue of pedophilia to launch his campaign to defeat Mr. Orban in next year’s election.
Looking for a way out of the disagreement over the Budapest parade, Mr. Orban’s new justice minister, Bence Tuzson, proposed what he described as a compromise — letting the event go ahead but far from the view of children, in a sealed-off horse racing track outside the city. That, he explained in a message on his Facebook page, would protect both the right of assembly and children.
The idea was a non-starter, rejected by Pride organizers and also a senior member of Fidesz, Janos Lazar, who said it would upset the horses.
Mr. Gyori, the political analyst, said the furor has generated intense interest in an event that, until it was banned, was just another annual ritual of little interest to the general public.
“They have set themselves a trap,” he said. “It was clear this was going to happen.”
“But what are they doing to do about it?” he asked.
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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