Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s stunning loss in Hungary’s April election opened up new hopes for LGBTQ liberation. Over the last sixteen years, Orbán transformed the country into a laboratory for the global rise of far-right populism, which figures such as Donald Trump closely followed. He initially ran against the EU and its “liberal values” following the 2008 Great Recession. In power, he rewrote the constitution, placed loyalists at all levels of government, and consolidated authority in the executive.
As he centralized power, he required new scapegoats for the worsening quality of life; he did as the far right always does and turned to one of the most marginalized groups of society—the queer community. In a major escalation starting in 2020, he systematically attacked all aspects of LGBTQ life. He banned legal recognition for trans and intersex people, restricted adoption by unmarried people, and banned all portrayal of queer life to children. In 2025, he banned all Pride festivals. 200,000 people defied this attack in Budapest, waving symbolic grayscale Pride flags and transforming it into a mass protest against Orbán.
In April, protests and broader social anger at Orbán’s policies translated into a stunning defeat for his regime. Millions elected former Budapest Mayor Péter Magyar with the hope that he would reverse Orbán’s broader authoritarian project, including his attacks on queer rights. But is he really an ally in the fight for LGBTQ liberation?
No Support For The Right-Wing Magyar Government
On the campaign trail, Magyar promised to bring “system change” to Hungary, but his past as an insider in Orbán’s party betrays whose side he’s actually on. Magyar joined Orbán’s Fidesz party in 2006. When Fidesz took power in 2010, he occupied various positions of power within the country’s government and the EU until 2024. He publicly broke from the party in 2024 and joined the centrist Tisza opposition party. However, he did this to opportunistically rail against Orbán’s corruption, not on a principled working-class basis of fighting for LGBTQ rights.
Magyar stayed silent on LGBTQ rights while campaigning, even when hundreds of thousands actively defied the attacks. His carefully tailored message focused on corruption, economics, and supporting the EU rather than Russia. Neither on the campaign trail nor since he took power has he proposed any significant changes to Orbán’s severe restrictions on queer rights.
Far from taking a fundamental stand in opposition to the ban on Pride events, Magyar merely criticized the ban as a “distraction” from other issues affecting Hungarians. The 200,000 Pride marchers understood that attacks on LGBTQ rights were an attack on everyone’s rights. Neither Magyar nor the imperialist EU will effectively fight for queer people.
Build The Struggle For LGBTQ Rights & Socialism
While Magyar was the main beneficiary of the anti-Orbán sentiment, voter polls show that Hungarians want to go much further than Magyar’s conservative platform. A poll from the European Council on Foreign Relations found that 77% of his voters supported an ambitious climate policy, and 71% supported the new government protecting the rights of LGBTQ people.
The movement should look to the mass defiance from 2025 Pride as the way forward. Despite his reactionary crackdown, the strength of the 2025 protest prevented Orbán from enforcing his laws en masse. The movement was so strong that he could only crack down on Pride organizers after its momentum died down.
The movement blocked key undemocratic laws from being enforced, but in order to wage an offensive struggle for queer rights, the Hungarian working class needs its own mass party. This party would do more than the country’s existing “socialist party,” which refused to run any candidates, instead endorsing Tisza candidates as the “lesser of two evils.” What is needed is a party that would organize a relentless struggle in the streets and in the halls of power by connecting the fight for LGBTQ liberation with broader working-class demands such as fully-funded socialized healthcare with accessible gender-affirming healthcare. Ultimately, to achieve real system change, a mass party of the Hungarian working class must take on the whole capitalist system and fight for a socialist world, free of all divide-and-rule oppression.
Photo: Nerdyko, Wikimedia Commons
