The rainbow revolution: How Viktor Orbán’s fight against LGBT rights backfired — and what it could mean for his hold on power

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A blow to the press

The dismantling of Hungary's democratic institutions began in the mid-2010s, but the country’s path towards dictatorship did not draw substantial international attention until 2020, when Viktor Orbán’s government leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic for its own political ends. On March 30, 2020, parliament passed the so-called “coronavirus law,” granting the government the right to issue decrees without parliamentary approval for an indefinite period.

From March 30 to June 18, 2020, more than 150 decrees were issued under this procedure — and not all of them were related to the pandemic or public health. Notably, the government introduced criminal liability for the “dissemination of false information.”

Officially, the law was designed to combat disinformation and prevent panic during the pandemic. However, its language was extremely vague, allowing for widespread persecution of independent journalists.

By that time, however, few independent media outlets remained in Hungary. In 2020, pro-government business groups orchestrated a takeover of Index.hu, one of the country’s largest independent news portals. That same year, the government media regulator revoked the license of Klubrádió, the last major opposition radio station. Most of the country’s media assets ended up concentrated in the hands of individuals close to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his inner circle. In 2024, Reporters Without Borders ranked Hungary 68th in its World Press Freedom Index.

Family values first

The LGBTQ+ community is another target of Orbán’s attacks. “Ideological attacks against the LGBT community and the gender question in general are not specific to Hungary or Russia. This is a global movement — a political, radical, conservative movement,” says Zsuzsanna Szelényi, program director of the CEU Democracy Institute Leadership Academy and author of Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary.

On June 15, 2021, under the banner of combating pedophilia, the Hungarian parliament passed a law banning the “promotion of homosexuality and gender change” to minors. Unsurprisingly, the law was condemned as a violation of the right to freedom of expression by 16 EU member states and the European Commission, but in April 2022, the Hungarian government held a referendum in an effort to demonstrate the domestic population’s support for traditional values. It featured four questions:

1. Do you support holding information events on sexual orientation for minors in public education institutions without parental consent?
2. Do you support the promotion of gender-reassignment treatments to minors?
3. Do you support the unrestricted exposure of minors to sexually explicit media content that may influence their development?
4. Do you support showing minors media content on gender changing procedures?

Thanks to the efforts of human rights organizations, many voters chose to boycott the referendum or to deliberately spoil their ballots. In the end, the referendum was declared invalid, as none of the questions reached the required threshold of 50% valid votes. Nevertheless, the law remained in force.

The next attack began in March 2025, when the ruling majority amended a law on the right to public assembly. From then on, marching in public while carrying LGBTQ+ symbols was considered a violation of the Child Protection Act. The true aim of the law was to put an end to the annual Budapest Pride march.

However, the march not only took place but became the largest political protest in the country in over a decade — this despite government warnings that facial recognition technology would be used to identify participants and hold them accountable. According to various estimates, between 200,000 and 250,000 people took part in the event.

The old and the new opposition

The 2025 Budapest Pride was led by the city’s mayor, Gergely Karácsony, who had been re-elected for a second term the year before. Karácsony is a representative of Hungary’s traditional opposition: from 2010 to 2014, he served as a member of parliament with the Green Party, later headed Budapest’s 14th district, and founded his political movement, Dialogue (Párbeszéd).

His victory in the 2019 Budapest mayoral election was a collective accomplishment of the country’s major opposition forces. Many expected Karácsony to lead the united opposition list in the 2022 parliamentary elections, but he withdrew his candidacy in favor of a much less well-known and less popular candidate — Péter Márki-Zay. As a result, Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party retained power with 135 seats in parliament, while the united opposition secured only 57.

“I think the opposition’s performance at the election was reasonably good,” political scientist Ádám Zoltán told The Insider. “In 2022, the regime had much better opportunities, economic conditions, and international circumstances. And in those circumstances, attaining 35-36% of the vote was not a bad result at all for the opposition.”

However, after the parliamentary elections, the opposition coalition collapsed. None of the existing parties could compete with Fidesz on their own, creating an illusion that Hungary’s fate was sealed. But soon, a new player unexpectedly appeared on the political stage: Péter Magyar.

The “none-of-the-above” candidate

Ironically, the most serious challenger to the family-values-driven government emerged in the wake of a pedophilia scandal. In 2016, an investigation by independent television channel RTL revealed that János Vasárhelyi, the director of a children's home in the small Hungarian town of Bicske, had been committing acts of sexual violence against the children in his care for decades.

Orphanage employees reported their suspicions to the authorities as early as 2011, but nothing came of it at the time. The children who had suffered abuse retracted their statements, though it was later revealed that they did so under pressure from deputy director Endre Kónya, who helped the director cover up the crimes. In 2019 both the director and his deputy were handed prison sentences, and when Kónya received a presidential pardon in 2023 from Fidesz politician Katalin Novák, it sparked widespread public outrage..

The scandal led to the resignation not only of Novák, but also of Justice Minister Judit Varga. “[Orbán] wanted to put a stop to the dissatisfaction at this point, but it was not possible because at this moment Péter Magyar gave his famous interview,” András Bozóki, a professor of political science at Central European University, explained.

At the time, Magyar was better known as Varga’s ex-husband (the couple divorced in 2023) than for his own minor accomplishments as a member of Orbán’s party. However, shortly after his ex-wife’s resignation as Justice Minister, he gave a surprise interview to the independent YouTube channel Partizán, announcing that he was refusing to continue playing a supporting role in a political system “where the real leaders hide behind women’s skirts.” He also sharply criticized the corruption permeating the regime.

“Corruption was always on the agenda of the Hungarian opposition for 15 years, because it's so incredible [in scope],” Szelényi notes. “But the thing is that someone who is coming from inside saying these things just seems to be more legitimate for many people. And he suddenly became very popular.”

Bozóki added: “His popularity was zero. Nobody knew him in early February [2024]. And in early June he got 30% in the European parliamentary election. That is unprecedented in the history of Hungary, that somebody could generate such a big sympathy and big following in three or four months.”

Unlike the old opposition, which mainly appeals to educated residents of Hungary’s largest cities, Magyar is targeting the core electorate of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party: people living in small towns and villages.

“He knows this party very well from the inside, so basically he's using their own tactics against the regime. He's very fast, incredibly responsive, and very provocative. He is tireless. He is going to small settlements, focusing on the medium-sized towns, because he knows exactly that this is where Fidesz has its base. It's a new tactic and it makes him very successful — and very dangerous for the regime,” Bozóki continues.

The failure of “Greater Hungary”

Magyar is even flirting with Orbán’s most controversial idea — the vision of a “Greater Hungary,” a reference to the country’s pre-1918 borders, before it lost much of its territory under the post-WWI Treaty of Trianon. In 2010, Orbán passed a law granting simplified citizenship not only to ethnic Hungarians but also to any descendants of citizens of the former Kingdom of Hungary.

The law affected millions of people in Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, and Serbia. In just the first four years after it was enacted, the number of Hungarian citizens grew by more than 700,000. Only a small portion of them chose to move to Hungary after receiving citizenship, but population growth was never Orbán’s goal.

Instead, he sought to create what sociologist Tamás Kiss called “ethnic parallelism” — a system of institutions in which Hungarians living abroad could go about their daily lives as if they were in Hungary: receiving education in Hungarian, consuming Hungarian-language media content, and so on.

The ideas of “Greater Hungary” strained Orbán’s relations with neighboring countries, whose governments were reluctant to host national autonomies, predictably seeing them as potential sources of separatist sentiment. However, this vision, along with Orbán’s strong anti-immigrant stance toward Middle Eastern migrants, helped him win the support of right-wing sympathizers.

For many years, the far-right flank of Hungary’s political spectrum was occupied by the Jobbik party, which had a tense relationship with Orbán’s government. The Fidesz leader resolved the issue of competition by shifting further to the right, attracting the relatively moderate segment of Jobbik’s electorate while creating a manageable alternative for the more radical voters — the “Our Homeland Movement” (Mi Hazánk Mozgalom). As a result, Jobbik — the country’s second-largest party in 2018 — lost its influence.

However, in 2025, the balance of power shifted once again. On May 9, during the opening ceremony of the renovated Benedictine Abbey of Tihany, Orbán unexpectedly voiced support for George Simion, a presidential candidate in Romania who had previously organized anti-Hungarian rallies. This was seen as a betrayal of the Hungarian minority in Romania and caused many right-wing supporters to turn away from Orbán. Magyar seized the moment and, just a few days later, set off on a walking march from Budapest to the Romanian border in a show of solidarity with ethnic Hungarians in Romania.

Will Orban choose the “Russian scenario”?

In 2011-2012, after Vladimir Putin announced that he would be running for a third presidential term, Moscow saw its largest protest wave since before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In response to the Bolotnaya movement, the Russian authorities decided to curb the opposition's traction at any cost, launching a brutal crackdown on political events while arresting — and even assassinating — key opponents. The symbolic prosecution of participants in the Bolotnaya protests demonstrated to would-be demonstrators that no one who took to the streets in opposition to Putin was immune to prosecution — not even those who did so peacefully. Could Orbán, who closely studies and borrows from the experience of his “big brother,” follow the same path? Experts interviewed by The Insider believe this is unlikely to happen.

And the first consequences of the Pride march seem to confirm this. On July 3, the first administrative case was opened against a Pride participant — a young activist named Lili Pankotai. However, by July 9, the case was dropped, and the police officially announced they would not prosecute Pride participants. A Hungarian version of the “Bolotnaya case” did not materialize — at least, not yet.

“I think this is very critical that Orbán never uses violence, open violence,” Szelényi says. “He never puts anyone into prison, and no one in Hungary is beaten or killed. They have a constitutional supermajority gained by elections — even if these elections are falsified and unfair, they are still elections. Orbán doesn’t come from the secret services or the KGB, but from the 1989 democratic opposition. His entire political career is built on a freedom speech he delivered on June 16, 1989, when he spoke up against the regime and in favor of democracy. So whatever happens, his profile always has to remain that of a freedom fighter. He cannot openly become a dictator. His charisma would break in a minute, and he would lose everything in a minute should he use violence.”

Ádám Zoltán points out that the only time in the country’s post-socialist history when serious violence was used against protesters was in 2006, under the leadership of Socialist Party head Ferenc Gyurcsány. “It is also important that the Orbán regime uses 2006 as an example of enemy action,” the political scientist notes. “The Orbán government and the regime as such were building up their legitimacy as opponents of police brutality back in 2006. Using police brutality against opposition demonstrations would lead to further loss of political support and legitimacy. And I don't think that they are prepared to go down that way.”

This is not to say that Orbán’s reign is democratic. However, instead of using overt force, Fidesz relies on political and economic pressure. In May 2025, for instance, the government presented a bill “On the Transparency of Public Life,” which would grant it broad authoritarian powers to punish those it deems a threat to national sovereignty. Organizations receiving foreign support — whether through private donations or grants, including EU grants — may be fined up to 25 times the amount received in the event that they operate without government approval.

In short, Hungary's regime has completed its gradual slide into authoritarianism — while remaining within the EU. Orbán’s government has systematically dismantled democratic institutions, using every crisis as a pretext to expand its power.

And yet, the success of the 2025 Budapest Pride and the rise in popularity of Péter Magyar show that Hungarian society is reluctant to go along with the country’s authoritarian drift. According to a poll conducted earlier this year by the Republikon Institute, 79% of Hungarians would vote to remain in the EU if a referendum were held. In another survey, published on July 1, 68% of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the direction the country is heading.

Orbán’s party has ruled in Budapest since 2010. If it is still in power a year from now, it will mean that Fidesz survived what is shaping up to be its most serious political challenge yet.