Budapest Pride is expected to take place again this year, but Hungary’s new Government has signalled that it will not immediately move to repeal legislation introduced under former prime minister Viktor Orbán that was used to restrict the event.
Richárd Barabás, co-chair of the green Párbeszéd party allied with Budapest’s mayor, said that the police were already monitoring preparations for this year’s Pride celebrations.
“The police chief answered my question: they are taking note of the Pride here!” Barabás wrote on Facebook today, suggesting authorities are aware that organisers intend to proceed with the event despite ongoing legal uncertainty.
This year’s Budapest Pride is scheduled for June 27, with organisers having registered the parade with police in advance.
The event has remained sensitive in Hungary since the Orbán government amended Hungary’s Child Protection Act, legislation critics said was aimed at restricting LGBT-themed public events and content involving minors.
Hungary’s new interior minister, Gábor Pósfai, said recently that Pride “must be made possible” in Hungary. Though he also stressed that changing the country’s assembly laws would not be among the Government’s immediate priorities.
“We must make it possible to hold Pride within a legal framework,” Pósfai said.
The 30th-anniversary Pride march in 2025 was at the centre of a major political and legal dispute.
Held on June 28 despite a police ban, it drew between 100,000 and 200,000 people — by some Hungarian estimates considerably more — making it the largest anti-government demonstration since Fidesz came to power in 2010 and, according to rights groups, the first Pride event ever banned within the European Union.
After police initially banned the demonstration, the organisers later partnered with Budapest mayor Gergely Karácsony, arguing that because the capital itself was involved in organising the march, the event no longer required the same police approval process.
The national authorities disagreed, and criminal proceedings were later launched against Karácsony.
The organisers, however, signalled they intend to keep pushing for broader changes beyond simply holding this year’s march.
“Last year, our love of freedom and our courage forced authoritarian power to retreat. But we have not reached our goal yet. As long as even one community in Hungary is deprived of its rights, the whole society lives without them,” the Pride organiser said.
