Criminal Charges Pressed Against Budapest Mayor After Hundreds of Thousands Defy Pride Ban

“Despite threats or punishment, I will continue to fight. Freedom and love cannot be banned.”

Budapest Pride

Mayor Gergely Karácsony of Budapest did not ask for permission. He led by example, standing alongside hundreds of thousands of Hungarians pouring into the streets of his city for the 30th annual Pride Month celebration last year.

Meanwhile, the country’s authoritarian right-wing government made public displays of queerness illegal.

Now, Mayor Karácsony is being charged for organizing an unlawful assembly despite a prohibition order, PBS reports. The Budapest Chief Prosecutor’s Office said it will seek to impose fines without a trial.

“I refuse to be intimidated or silenced,” Karácsony wrote in a Jan. 28 post on X. “I will never accept that standing up for freedom, free speech, or love can be treated as a crime. Despite threats or punishment, I will continue to fight. Freedom and love cannot be banned!”

Ahead of the March 2025 Pride event, Hungarian authorities threatened organizers with years of imprisonment. They also said they would deploy facial recognition software against attendees to track them and impose fines, but after 350,000 people marched on Budapest (as per organizers, although crowd estimates vary), police backtracked.

Earlier that month, the country’s authoritarian right-wing party, shepherded by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, passed a law barring any public assembly that “promotes and displays deviations from the gender identity corresponding to the sex at birth, gender change, and homosexuality.”

In April, a constitutional amendment was added in a similar vein, enshrining the right of children’s “moral development” as the foremost law of the land, superseding nearly every other right.

In reality, this rhetorical cudgel wherein extremists pearl-clutch about “the children” is, as it is in many authoritarian regimes, a convenient scapegoat. The real goal is to attack the LGBTQ community, and to repress free speech more broadly.

“The spurious justification for the passing of this law—that events and assemblies would be ‘harmful to children’—is based on harmful stereotypes and deeply entrenched discrimination, homophobia and transphobia,” said Dávid Vig, Director of Amnesty International Hungary at the time.

But organizers are maintaining a defiant tone. In emails with Erin in the Morning, they said they’ll be coming back this year for Pride 2026, this time in June.

“At Budapest Pride, we will continue to stand firm in our support of the fundamental freedoms that everyone is entitled to,” a spokesperson said. “We stand up for ourselves, we stand up for each other, because we want to live in a free, peaceful and equal country.”

Hungary has been in the news a great deal recently due to its anti-LGBTQ policies, as it was the first contemporary EU country to enact a Pride ban. Romania soon followed.

“For the first time in its 13-year history, setbacks in human rights of trans people across Europe and Central Asia now clearly outweigh progress,” a TGEU (Trans Europe and Central Asia) report found in May. “This regression signals more than just a crisis for trans communities—it is a broader crisis of democracy and fundamental rights across the region.”

Furthermore, Orbán has become a disturbing fixture in American politics, helping lawmakers here in the States pioneer new and creative ways to antagonize LGBTQ people.

“About the Don’t Say Gay law, it was in fact modeled in part on what Hungary did,” Rod Dreher, an editor at the American Conservative magazine, said during a panel interview in Budapest. Vox first reported this story.

“I was told this by a conservative reporter who […] said he talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, ‘Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.’”

Meanwhile, CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference, a highly influential yearly gathering of (largely American) conservatives—was co-hosted last year by Hungary and Poland. The headlining keynote speaker was Prime Minister Orbán.

“The Trump tsunami swept through the entire world,” Orbán said. “We are no longer suffocating in the woke sea.”

The risks facing LGBTQ people across the world in this political moment are dire. At the same time, the fact remains that authoritarians—no matter the continent—rule by fear.

As seen at Budapest Pride, many of their threats cannot be carried out to scale. There’s more of us than there are of them.