Banning Pride
An attempt to ban Budapest Pride reminds Iván Merker that Hungarian liberalism is over, and not for the better.
One of the most consequential and yet most uncertain details in Orbán’s Year in Review speech was his aside to the organisers of Budapest’s Pride march. ‘I advise the Pride organisers not to work on organising this year’s march. It is a waste of money and time.’
This announcement and the following communication from ministers make it crystal clear that the government intends to ban the annual Pride march. On the other hand, unlike every other announcement from the speech (including the related idea to write into the constitution that there are only two genders), we don’t really know how they intend to do this. Előd Novák, MP for the far-right Our Homeland party already proposed a bill to ban ‘public gatherings promoting homosexuality’. Whether Fidesz will vote for Novák’s bill, propose its own, or use other means, is yet to be seen.
Nonetheless, some facts seem to be clear. First, that this announcement happened in the context of further (and equally unclear) crackdown on civil society and LGBTQ+ rights inter alia. (You can read more about the speech in general in Hanna’s last newsletter.) Second, that this announcement came in the global context of a growing far-right and, in particular, the new Trump administration’s alarming tendencies. This not only emboldened the government but – as they were glad to admit – created the political conditions for this announcement. Third, that banning Pride increases the 15-year-old pushback against LGBTQ+ rights and is one of the most significant (but, as we shall see, not the first) attacks on political freedoms.
And yet, for Hungary’s so-called liberals, the reaction is lukewarm. LGBTQ+ organisations and some opposition figures including the Mayor of Budapest have raised the alarm and signalled that they intend Pride to take place nonetheless but so far there were no large-scale efforts to mobilise citizens in support of Pride. For contrast, four years ago ca. 10 thousand people demonstrated against the so-called homophobic law. But one also suspects that this might change once we know what banning Pride actually means.
(I will focus on liberals, because the old left has become almost completely liberal after the coup against László Botka in 2018, and unfortunately the new left is not present in electoral politics. In any case, the left-wing YouTube channel Partizán at least did an interview with Pride organisers.)
Liberal media dug up decade-old commentaries for Orbán and other ministers on why they won’t ban Pride, including, most disgracefully, retroactively reinterpreting Orbán’s 2015 threat against the LGBTQ+ community (‘we are lucky they do not provoke us, I hope this equilibrium will remain in place’) into a principled statement of the right to protest.
The general discourse, while discussing this topic, did not do so with the same elan as it did previous attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. And Péter Magyar and his party remain silent.
Shame on them. They will get as their reward what LGBTQ+ get as punishment. I might call that a silver lining, but I recognise that the further autocratisation of Hungarian politics is bad regardless of my opinion of the individual actors. A recognition that has been completely missing from Hungary’s so-called liberal elite for the last year and a half.
The Fast Decline of Hungarian Liberalism
At the risk of sounding like a parody lefty, I will take a detour from LGBTQ+ rights to Palestine. Or rather, to pro-Palestine protests.
After October 7, like in many European capitals, a group of individuals attempted to hold protests to show solidarity with the Palestinian people. No matter what you think of the politics or motivation of these people, it is also fairly clear that such demonstrations would’ve been attempted by small crowds, posed no risk of violence and posed no threat to Budapest’s Jewish community (or to anyone else, for that matter). We know this because when demonstrations were finally to take place (making use of legal loopholes), this is exactly what happened. And if police judged that there was a risk of violence nonetheless, they could have avoided that by properly policing the demos.
Nonetheless, following Orbán’s public statement that, in Hungary, no demonstrations ‘showing sympathy with terrorists’ should take place, police banned the demonstration. It was followed by banning at least six other demonstrations. Even demonstrations that very obviously did not sympathise with Hamas. For example, a planned demonstration for 22 November 2023 was banned, despite the demonstration explicitly showing solidarity with civilian victims on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, recognising the freedom and rights of both sides, and rejecting antisemitism among other forms of racism.
Let me quote at length from the police statement on the ban.
‘The reporter [i.e., the person who reported the planned demonstration to the police] himself emphasised the basic principle, also set in law, that anyone can join the demonstration who agrees with its goals and wishes to exercise the basic right of assembly peacefully. The reporter expects Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Israeli, and Palestinian people to attend. He believes that it is essential that the current war is ended in a way that adequately guarantees the freedoms, rights, living conditions and security of members of both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples.
‘The assembly authority [i.e., police] believes that this opportunity to join the assembly, at that time and location, might provide an opportunity to individuals to join the assembly, who might potentially wish to voice their opinion in favour of the Palestinian Hamas terror organisation, representing the Palestinian point of view, as they have not been able to do so at demonstrations with this aim that were consistently banned.’
In other words, if you cannot guarantee that ‘Hamas sympathisers’ will not join the protest in accordance with their legally recognised right, too bad, we need to ban it. I believe this creates a pretext to ban just about any public assembly on any topic, except those in favour of the Israeli war effort. But even so, maybe some pesky Hamas supporters will go there because that is now their only chance to voice their opinions on Gaza.
But the most outrageous section concerns the location, Gyula Germanus Park. Germanus was a professor of oriental studies who converted from Judaism to Islam. (Read his Wikipedia, he had the life of a character from the Empire podcast that he basically was.) The organisers chose this venue as a symbolic place to show the peaceful coexistence of Judaism and Islam. But to quote the police, ‘while respecting the subjective views of the reporter, this choice of location may even trigger negative emotions in others, which may mean that, in the opinion of others, it is not possible to "leave" or "change" religion, to choose it of one's own free will. This fact, the contingency of subjective opinions, strengthens the legality of the ban.’
This is nonsense. That religion can be chosen of one’s free will is not a subjective matter for a state authority, but a constitutional right. To go further, it is also one of the main tenets of liberal thinking. So where were Hungary’s liberals when fundamental political rights were trampled?
Some, like the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, supported the right to peaceful protest. However, most remained silent. And worse, many, like the green-liberal Mayor of Budapest, even supported the ban.
But if demonstrations can be banned because their location of choice might offend people opposing fundamental constitutional rights, then any protest whatsoever can be banned. If you cannot protest in solidarity with civilians in Israel and Palestine, because some people (let’s name them: religious fundamentalists) do not think Gyulas Germanus should have had the right to convert to Islam, then you can ban Pride for causing offence to, among others, religious fundamentalists.
Of course, not all protests will be banned. That is exactly the point. I might take offence at neo-Nazi commemorations of the ‘heroes’ butchered in the Siege of Budapest, this is not taken as cause to ban them. What offences are relevant causes to ban protests is politically pre-determined. Offence taken at protests against governments close to Orbán count when banning protests, just as offence taken at social phenomena Orbán opposes.
Thus, Hungary’s former liberals sleepwalked into a situation where the groundwork has already been made to ban demonstrations at will, and now the geopolitical situation is ripe. But this is only half the story.
For the last decade, Hungarian liberals and lefties have faced a truly vicious dilemma. On the one hand, they had principled disagreement with Orbán’s government and rightly recognised that change for a more liberal (or, for that matter, left-wing) direction is only possible once Orbán is out. On the other hand, this has never seemed possible without détante and later alliance with far-right Jobbik, and alliance with what we might call post-Orbánist forces (Péter Márki-Zay, Péter Magyar). But these forces, especially Péter Magyar, have been part of the same regime that liberals recognise as antithetical to their ideals. And to make things worse, the other forces of the opposition, too, had serious disagreements, both ideological and political, that need to be set aside to win against Orbán. You have to choose between not compromising your political ideals and being able to get rid of Orbán.
To make things worse, opposition to Orbán has since decades transformed into a hysterical form of anti-Orbánism. For many opposition voters, hatred of Orbán is at the centre of their political identity. This is on a personal level extremely relatable, but that has created the incentive to choose the ideological compromise in order to get rid of the ‘fat man of Felcsút’ or however you prefer to deride him.
This has created a truly toxic environment for principled liberalism. What if, after all, voicing liberal views will fuel Orbán’s antiliberal discourse? Isn’t this just a distraction, why should one participate? This has culminated in Péter Pető, a left-leaning journalist not normally opposed to political realism, having to remind listeners of the popular Háromharmad podcast that instead of mental gymnastics around the question ‘what if the Pride ban is to hurt my favoured political party’, the correct thing is always to follow their opinions.
What Now?
As a lefty, I have no principled problem with people becoming less liberal, of course. But the decline of liberalism in favour of flavourless, mildly rightwing anti-Orbánism? Spare me.
And spare me especially as this now has great consequences. I care for Hungary and do not want to live in a country where Pride is banned. I want to be free – wasn’t that their whole shtick as well? Or do they only want to be free from taxes and Viktor Orbán?
Hannah Arendt remarked that the Third French Republic didn’t fail because there were too many fascists, but because there were no true Dreyfusards left, people believing in republican ideals. There is great wisdom in this and I can only hope opponents of Orbán recognise this.
Iván Merker