What Hungary’s Pride march revealed about the limits of Orbán’s control
Orbán issued the threats, and then nothing happened. A system designed to make people stay home discovered, briefly, what it means when they don’t.
Viktor Orbán tried to ban Budapest Pride on Saturday to project strength before the 2026 election, but triggered the largest anti-government protest in years, handed momentum to the opposition, and shot himself in the foot in full view of the world.
Organisers had hoped for forty thousand. Instead, between 180,000 and 200,000 people marched across Budapest’s Elisabeth Bridge in defiance of a government ban, waving rainbow flags and chanting under facial-recognition cameras.
It was the largest Pride march in Hungarian history and the biggest anti-government protest since Fidesz came to power in 2010.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had outlawed the event using new legislation, promised legal consequences for participants, and warned them not to come.
But families, students, pensioners and first-timers flooded the streets in what became not just a Pride march but a mass demonstration of democratic opposition.
The weaponisation of “child protection”
Viktor Orbán has ruled Hungary since 2010, gradually turning it into what the European Parliament calls a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.”
His Fidesz party, a nationalist conservative force with near-total control of state institutions, has spent fifteen years hollowing out the country’s democratic checks: capturing courts, muzzling the media, and rewriting the constitution to entrench power.
LGBTQ rights have long been one of Orbán’s chosen battlegrounds. In 2021, his government passed a so-called “child protection” law banning the “promotion” of homosexuality to minors, echoing similar legislation in Russia.
Earlier this year, Fidesz amended Hungary’s Assembly Act to prohibit LGBTQ events entirely, authorised police to use facial recognition to track marchers, and threatened organisers with fines of up to €500 and a year in prison.
Budapest Pride 2025 became the first event banned under the new law and the first Pride event ever to be banned in the EU.
The justification, protecting minors, masked the strategic goal to intimidate, polarise, and force the opposition into a trap ahead of next year’s national elections.
According to Ivana Stradner of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, this development mirrors what she calls “the Russian path to banning LGBTQ rights.”
Hungary’s new law restricts any gathering that could be seen as “promoting homosexuality”, exactly how similar policies were first introduced in Russia. “This is how it started [in Russia],” Stradner said in an interview on TVP World.
Orbán’s real target, though, was Péter Magyar, the former Fidesz insider turned insurgent challenger. His Tisza party has surged in the polls, opening an 11-point lead over Fidesz among declared voters, placing Magyar as the most serious threat Orbán has faced in over a decade.
Budapest defied the ban
On Saturday afternoon, Budapest’s Elisabeth Bridge disappeared under a human tide. Rainbow flags, placards, music, and heat. Organisers had expected 40,000. Between 180,000 and 200,000 came.
Families pushed strollers. Pensioners walked beside teenagers. Some held posters with Orbán’s face crossed out. Others wore shirts reading “We are the majority.” A group of students marched behind a banner that said simply: “Enough.”
The mood was defiant, but also festive. Protesters marched for LGBTQ rights, but they really marched for freedom of assembly, for visibility, and in opposition to a system that had ruled through fear for fifteen years.
Mayor Gergely Karácsony stood in front of the Technical University and told the crowd: “They don’t have power over us.” He had taken a political risk by reclassifying the march as a municipal event, shielding it from the national ban.
Police, who had threatened enforcement for weeks, backed off. They cordoned off far-right counter-protesters and kept the route open. Orbán’s state stood down.
Orbán set the trap, then walked into it himself
This was supposed to be a calculated move. The idea was to polarise by rallying the conservative base, baiting the opposition into looking out of touch, and forcing Péter Magyar to align himself with the LGBT movement, which Orbán could then use to attack him in the run up to next year’s key election.
As Ivana Stradner put it in an interview on TVP World, “Orbán is the typical populist. He used legal threats against LGBTQ rights activists to mobilise his base.” But the size of the turnout collapsed the strategy.
Magyar stayed away from the march itself, but refused to condemn it, denying Orbán the soundbite he wanted.
Tisza members were careful not to use the acronym LGBT. As one of the party’s MEPs Zoltán Tarr put it on TVP World: “People are upset. These events showed that Hungarians will not accept bans on freedom of assembly, no matter how hard the government tries.”
“He allowed this huge group of people to march between legal boundaries and eventually to march in safety,” she added.
The government scrambled and for most of Saturday it was quiet. By Sunday, Fidesz-aligned analysts at the Nézőpont Institute published a different story.
This was no blunder, they insisted. It was a “master plan.” Orbán had lured the opposition into aligning itself with Pride and now had them where he wanted them.
The claim didn’t hold. “What happened wasn’t marginal,” said former OSCE official Tanya Domi on TVP World. “The [size of the] crowd tells you how many people reject Orbán’s vision of LGBTQ life in Hungary.”
The contradictions piled up. If the law was enforceable, why did the police retreat? If this was a win for Orbán, why did his spokesmen spend two days denying failure?
A rupture in Orbán’s illusion of control
The Budapest Pride march exposed clear limits to Fidesz’s deterrence strategy. No force was used and no fines were issued. Police redirected far-right counter-protesters but did not intervene in the march itself. The Interior Ministry has since confirmed that footage is under review, but no charges have been announced.
In the aftermath, attention turned to the political fallout. A Závecz poll published the morning after the march showed Tisza party leading Fidesz by 11 percentage points among declared voters, 46% to 35%.
The survey was conducted before the march, but Zoltán Tarr argued that it does not yet reflect the “clear reaction” from the public.
Gergely Karácsony’s role in enabling the march has also changed his political standing. Katalin Cseh, an MEP from Momentum, a socially liberal and pro-European opposition party, said he “found a legal solution to make the march possible… through political courage and his brave countering of government policy.”
The reclassification of Pride as a municipal event is now being studied by other local leaders looking to shield public gatherings from national bans.
Pressure on Orbán from the right
Fidesz, meanwhile, faces pressure from the political right. The far-right Our Homeland, a nationalist group critical of Fidesz, condemned the police’s passive stance and accused the government of “cowardice” for failing to act.
The international dimension also shifted. More than 70 Members of the European Parliament took part in the march.
Katalin Cseh added that foreign participation may have discouraged police action: “It was not clear whether the march would be protected… but I don’t think the government wanted images of EU officials under threat in Budapest.”
The regime is still standing
None of this means Fidesz is finished. Its electoral machine remains strong. Its media dominance is untouched. Public broadcasters ignored the march, and pro-government outlets pushed the line that Pride was a “foreign-backed provocation.”
The legal ban on LGBTQ gatherings has not been repealed. The law still authorises facial recognition, and police confirmed they are reviewing footage from the day. As one marcher told weekly independent newspaper Magyar Hang, “We were safe today. But they could still come for us tomorrow.”
But the political choreography failed. Orbán issued the threats, and then nothing happened. A system designed to make people stay home discovered, briefly, what it means when they don’t.
A version of this article first appeared at TVP World
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