Hungarian lawmakers on Tuesday, March 18, passed a law banning Pride events and allowing authorities to use facial recognition software to identify attendees, continuing a crackdown by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s right-wing populist party on the country’s LGBTQ+ community.
The measure passed in a 136-27 vote. The law, supported by Orbán’s Fidesz party and their minority coalition partner the Christian Democrats, was pushed through parliament in an accelerated procedure after being submitted only a day earlier.
Can the EU please start fucking him hard? I really don’t want our Money to go to that piece if shit any longer
🏳️🌈🖕🏳️🌈
Fuck Orban, fuck the hungarian parliament.
But de facto it is Orban who fucks the whole EU and being paid for that. By EU and Russia.
This is what the extreme right means by „free speech”.
Orbán has apparently also been striking a much more hostile tone:
‘Spring cleaning’
On 15 March, a bank holiday when Hungarians commemorate their freedom struggle against the Habsburgs in the 19th century, Orbán thus addressed a crowd in Budapest: ‘The bedbugs have survived the winter. We dismantle the financial apparatus that used corrupt dollars to buy politicians, judges, journalists, fake NGOs and political activists. We let the entire shadow army flee. (…) They have been here too long. They have survived too much.’
He called for a ‘spring cleaning before Easter’.
This rhetoric is also new to Orbán, says Zsuzsanna Végh, who researches Hungary for the Berlin-based think tank GMF. ‘He did not use such dehumanising language before - previously, for instance, he called dissenters “enemies of the nation”.’
Fascist Arrow Cross movement
Observant Hungarian critics noted that Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the fascist Arrow Cross movement, used the same words when talking about Jews in the 1940s.
The radical language and the ban on the Pride, according to Végh ‘extremely undemocratic and a curtailment of the right to association and freedom of expression’, cannot be separated from the parliamentary elections due in spring 2026.
Orbán faces a new challenger, the conservative Péter Magyar, whose Tisza party has surpassed ruling Fidesz in the polls. While Orbán orated about vermin, Magyar got tens of thousands of Hungarians elsewhere in the capital to demonstrate against the government. Hungary’s economy is also in the doldrums.
Végh sees a ‘confluence’ of the ‘attack on media, NGOs and judges’ and the fuelling of the ‘culture war’. Orbán is thus courting the electorate of the far-right, represented in Hungary by the Mi Hazánk (Our Fatherland) party.
What the actual fuck? 🤯😠
I guess there is uplifting news on lemmy
