In his winning campaign, Peter Magyar focused on corruption, the cost of living and Hungary’s place in Europe – but stayed silent on LGBTQI+ rights, which were chipped away under former prime minister Viktor Orban. For Tamas Dombos, a Budapest-based gay rights activist, Magyar’s caution is both understandable and unsettling.
“They very strategically and tactically avoided discussing this topic,” says Dombos, director of the Hatter Society.
"They did not want this topic to dominate the election campaign, they avoided it as much as possible. They focus on issues that are not divisive, such as healthcare or corruption."
The concern, he says, is that Magyar “failed to make very clear commitments to LGBTQI+ rights” – even as he promised to end the erosion of rights seen throughout the Orban years.
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A series of laws
Orban came to power in 2010, and what followed was not a dramatic crackdown but rather, according to Dombos, “a series of [pieces of] legislation being adopted that curtailed the rights of LGBTQI+ people”.
Dombos says the state pushed through laws banning legal gender recognition, restricting adoption, removing gender identity from anti-discrimination rules, limiting minors’ access to LGBTQI+ content and banning Pride-related activities.
“So our work got more difficult, but not to the level of making it impossible,” he says. “The difficulties here came more from banning certain types of activities.”
The impact was especially severe on transgender people and young LGBTQI+ Hungarians.
“Many people decided to leave the country or were considering it,” said Dombos.
Others, he says, stayed and responded by mobilising. “They stood up for their own rights. They started volunteering in organisations.”
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While Hungary never reached the level of open repression seen in Russia, Dombos says the Orban government helped normalise hostility.
“I don’t think it fundamentally changed how people think about the LGBTQI+ question,” he says, “but they did encourage the expression of hatred and negative feelings.”
He recalls one case in which a man threatened a lesbian couple on a tram with a knife, later claiming he was only enforcing the prime minister’s message that homosexuality did not belong in public life.
Shifting public opinion
Hatter, which he describes as “the oldest and largest LGBTQI+ organisation in the country,” responded through legal action, public education and training.
“We have taken dozens and dozens of cases [to] domestic courts,” he said, adding that some are already before European courts.
However, Dombos says the picture was not uniformly bleak: “The political climate was terrible, but the social climate was slowly but increasingly more welcoming."
One campaign on same-sex parenting helped shift public opinion significantly.
“In 2019, only 17 percent of people agreed fully that a same-sex couple can also be good parents. Now over 60 percent of people agree with this statement.”
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For now, the question remains what a new government will do with the legacy activists such as Dombos have been gradually building.
“Our first hope is that after 16 years, there will be change,” he said – but added that the country’s new leadership will have to do more than just stop attacking LGBTQI+ people.
“It’s not enough to just say, OK, we’re no longer targeting the LGBTQI+ community,” he said. “The legislation that has been adopted in the past six or seven years has to be revoked.”
