LGBTQ rights in Hungary: 'We are very hopeful that changes will be made'

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When Peter Magyar came to power in April’s general election, ending former prime minister Viktor Orban’s 16-year rule in a historic landslide, many Hungarians felt a wave of relief. But for the country's LGBTQ community, the reaction was more measured.

“People are moderately optimistic, but we will have to wait to see changes at the legislative level,” said David Vig, director of Amnesty International Hungary.

Magyar's Tisza Party won 138 of 199 parliamentary seats, securing a supermajority with the highest voter turnout in Hungary's recent history. That margin gives Magyar the constitutional power to overturn anti-LGBTQ legislation passed under Orban. Whether he will use it remains an open question.

“There is definitely optimism,” said Eszter Polgari, the legal programme director at Hatter Society, Hungary's leading LGBTQ rights organisation. “We are very hopeful that changes will be made. But we are more hesitant to say anything concrete when it comes to the timing.”

A legacy of anti-LGBTQ policies

Orban's government built over more than a decade an important web of anti-LGBTQ legislation.

In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a bill stripped trans and intersex people of their right to legal gender recognition, making it impossible to update their official documents.

“Since the end of May 2020, trans people have had to live with their official documents that don't reflect their social reality so there is a really striking dissonance with the papers they need to present for everything,” Polgari said. “Going to the bank, picking up a parcel from the post office, or just verifying their identity is going to be very different from how they appear to the person meeting them.”

According to Vig, this was part of a broader pattern in which anti-LGBTQ legislation was an active, state-funded political tool.

That same year, a constitutional amendment defined “family” exclusively around marriage between a man and a woman, effectively limiting same-sex adoption.

In 2021, parliament passed a law known as the “Propaganda law” banning the “promotion” of homosexuality or gender diversity to anyone under 18, across schools, media and advertising. Bookstores were required to wrap books with LGBTQ themes in plastic foil and ban their sale near schools or churches, a restriction to which Vig said compliance is nearly impossible in small towns where all three often share the same town square.

The legislative pressure culminated in early 2025, when parliament criminalised Pride marches, imposing sentences of up to one year in prison for organisers and authorising police to use facial recognition technology against attendees.

Watch moreInside Budapest’s banned Pride march

Despite the ban, up to 200,000 people attended Budapest Pride last June in one of the largest anti-government demonstrations Hungary had seen in years.

In 2026, Hungary ranked 38th out of 49 European countries on ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Map, which scores nations on legal protections for LGBTQ people, with just 23 percent. Comparatively, France ranked at 60 percent.

Landmark EU ruling

In April, the European Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling finding that Hungary's 2021 anti-LGBTQ law violated EU law on multiple grounds, including, for the first time in any case brought against a member state, a breach of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.

The court found that the law stigmatised and marginalised LGBTQ people by treating them as inherently harmful to children, based solely on their sexual orientation or gender identity. It also found violations of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, including the prohibition on discrimination, the right to private and family life, and freedom of expression.

“That is a very, very strong judgment,” said Polgari. “But we still have everything in force. Nothing has been repealed since the new government came to power.”

For Belinda Dear, a senior advocacy officer at ILGA-Europe, an international LGBTQ advocacy group, Orban’s legacy leaves a lot to be undone.

“We are hoping that at the very least the anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda law and the ban on LGBTQ+ assemblies will be repealed on the basis of the judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU, but then the next priority would be removing the ban on legal gender recognition,” she said.

On May 12, justice minister nominee Marta Gorog told a parliamentary committee that the government would need to carry out a "lawful correction" of the legislation, adding that Hungarian law must reflect international and European legal standards, but the Hungarian government has yet to announce a timeline.

Magyar's strategic tiptoeing

Magyar's campaign deliberately avoided touching heavily on LGBTQ issues. Judit Takacs, a research professor at ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest, argued this silence could have been a political strategy rather than Magyar's actual views.

“He refused to let Orban set the terrain,” she said. “From a practical point of view, he has consistently been following a strategy of not getting drawn into ideological, identity-politics-related issues, in order to win the support of both liberal and conservative voters.”

Magyar did offer signals throughout the campaign. He called the Pride ban a distraction from the suffering of Hungarians and recently argued in Parliament that children are better off being adopted by same-sex couples rather than being in the state care system. In one campaign appearance, when confronted by a father whose gay son had fled Hungary, he explicitly named “state-funded hatred” as a problem he intended to end.

On election night, speaking to his supporters in Budapest, Magyar said he wanted Hungary to be a country “where no one is stigmatised for thinking differently than the majority, or loving differently than the majority”.

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Charges were dropped last week against Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony, who had been criminally prosecuted for allowing the 2025 Pride march to proceed despite the ban and this year's Budapest Pride is scheduled for June 27.

The legal framework, however, remains unchanged. Polgari noted that the government had yet to communicate any timeline for repealing the propaganda law, which she described as “quite strange”.

“We have the Court of Justice judgment very unequivocally stating that this needs to go, yet we haven't heard anything from the government about how they would like to do it and when,” she said.

Takacs said the government could implement “cautious incremental improvement rather than dramatic reform", adding that while the 2021 law may eventually be revisited, Magyar is likely to move slowly and avoid making LGBTQ rights a flagship issue.

"It is surely a relief that the hostile state rhetoric is over," she said, "as well as the weaponisation of LGBTQ+ issues."

On the Hungarian government’s position, Dear agreed that there was considerable uncertainty ahead.

"Although Magyar is obviously a vast improvement on Viktor Orban, it doesn't necessarily mean that he is not conservative enough to be slow to repeal or even choose not to repeal some of these laws,” she said.

With Reuters

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