Hungary Cracks Down on LGBTQ+ Rights as Critics Point to Russian Influence

On 22 March 2025, Deutsche Welle report­ed that Hun­gary has banned Pride parades amid grow­ing con­cerns over Russ­ian influ­ence in the coun­try’s pol­i­tics. The arti­cle begins:

Crit­ics have called out “ris­ing fas­cism” in Hun­gary, say­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s move to ban LGBTQ+ Pride parades is just an attempt to divert atten­tion from cor­rup­tion scan­dals and Vik­tor Orban’s flag­ging pop­u­lar­i­ty. Orban’s gov­ern­ment has can­celed pride parades, call­ing them a threat to the nation’s youth. Nazi uni­forms and black fight­ing gear bear­ing Russ­ian flags, the let­ter Z, SS sym­bols and swastikas — the dress code for hun­dreds of neo-Nazis march­ing at the Buda Cas­tle in the heart of Budapest this Feb­ru­ary was mil­i­tant. The cas­tle, the site of annu­al neo-Nazi com­mem­o­ra­tions, is not far from the office of Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orban. It’s ille­gal to demon­strate or protest in uni­form in Hun­gary, as well as to wear such total­i­tar­i­an sym­bols in pub­lic. But Orban’s gov­ern­ment allows neo-Nazis and devo­tees of Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin to march with impuni­ty every year…

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Key Points

• Hun­gary’s con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment bans Pride parades while neo-Nazi demon­stra­tions con­tin­ue unhin­dered, sug­gest­ing selec­tive appli­ca­tion of laws against cer­tain groups.
• Prime Min­is­ter Orban’s recent rhetoric labels crit­ics as “bugs” to be elim­i­nat­ed, lan­guage that ana­lysts describe as rem­i­nis­cent of total­i­tar­i­an regimes.
• Oppo­si­tion politi­cian Peter Mag­yar, a for­mer mem­ber of Orban’s Fidesz par­ty, has surged in pop­u­lar­i­ty as pub­lic dis­sat­is­fac­tion with gov­ern­ment grows.
• Eco­nom­ic stag­na­tion, high infla­tion, and exposed cor­rup­tion scan­dals involv­ing Orban’s fam­i­ly and allies con­tribute to declin­ing pub­lic sup­port for the government.

Orbán and Hun­gary have fig­ured promi­nent­ly in a devel­op­ing alliance between US con­ser­v­a­tives and Euro­pean nation­al­ists, a poten­tial means for Rus­sia to exert covert influ­ence in Europe and the US using Hun­gary as a plat­form. GIOR has pub­lished a report on this alliance titled “The Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Alliance: An Oppor­tu­ni­ty for Russ­ian Influ­ence?” The GIOR report details the role that Vik­tor Orbán and the Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment have been play­ing in the Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance (GNCA).

The full report can be down­loaded here.

Dis­claimer: The GIOR uti­lizes AI to gen­er­ate sum­maries of news items, includ­ing the intro­duc­tion and the key points that fol­low. Any text fol­low­ing the key points is con­text added by GIOR edi­tors. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they are meant to rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als con­cerned but should not be under­stood as “real-world” photography.