For a country of only ten million inhabitants, Hungary certainly generated a lot of headlines throughout this summer. First the country’s appearance at the Euro football championships ended with a row that dragged UEFA and the mayor of Munich into a stand-off over LGBTQI+ rights. Then Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government passed a law that critics say conflates members of the LGBTQI+ community with paedophiles. One particularly controversial section of the law – which Hungarian LGBT rights NGO Hatterkent (Background) describes as “eerily similar” to legislation passed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013 – says: “this law prohibits the making available to children under the age of eighteen of pornographic content and content that depicts sexuality for its own purposes or promotes deviation from gender identity, gender reassignment, and homosexuality.” In practice this means a complete ban on LGBT content of educational materials in Hungarian schools. European Commission (EC) President Ursula Von der Leyen called the LGBT law “disgraceful”. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte went further: Hungary "has no business being in the European Union anymore. The long-term aim is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue," he said. The EC suspended Hungary’s EUR 7.2 billion Covid-recovery-plan payment and initiated a legal action against Hungary for violating the rights of LGBTQI+ people.
A champion for the paleo-conservatives engaged in “culture wars”
Undeterred, Orban doubled down on the divisive rhetoric by announcing a five-question referendum on LGBTQI+ issues. Putting the subject at the front and centre of domestic politics may prove a risky strategy at home, but numerous international ultraconservative groups are now talking about the Orban government not as illiberal pariahs, but as culture warriors. By mid-August, leading US political pundit Tucker Carlson was broadcasting his Fox News show from Hungary for a week. The paleo-conservative praised the country for not “abandoning Hungary’s young people to the hard-edged libertarianism of Soros and the Clinton Foundation - Orban has decided to help Hungarian families grow,” he added. Carlson ended his week of Orban fandom by giving a speech at an event organised by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a school network that Orban has established to propagate ultra-conservative values.
“For American or Western European conservative circles, Hungary is inspirational,” Andras Biro Nagy, director of Budapest-based think-tank Policy Solutions, told Veridica. “Because Orban has been quite stable over the last decade - he has been able do things they can only dream of, so this is why, for some American and British and other Western, conservative intellectuals, it is tempting to come here. Nowadays there are institutions like the Mathias Corvinus Collegium that can pay many thousands of dollars to come here and do a fellowship here or just appear at a book launch with some Fidesz ministers. And apparently, these Western conservative intellectuals enjoy this opportunity very much - they are glad to come here for good money and to praise the Orbán system,” Biro Nagy added.
Family policy: Hungary’s biggest export product
More than a decade in power has allowed Orban to dominate the culture of Hungary, and create a climate in which traditional families can receive financial support from the state, while sexual and ethnic minority groups are sidelined or demonised in the media and even in schools.
The "key architect" of Hungary’s conservative family values drive is Katalin Novak, for whom Orban created the post of families minister without portfolio. Forbes Hungary reaffirmed Novak as the country’s most influential woman in public life this year, adding that she “is considered the minister closest to the prime minister. Despite the economic downturn, her portfolio is cutting a growing slice of the budget (and) her conservative messages are also increasingly influencing public debates,” Forbes added. Unsurprisingly then, it was Novak who announced that the biannual Budapest Demographic Summit will be held for the fourth time in September, when more than 500 speakers from 16 countries will attend, including Orban and five other heads of state or government “to discuss the importance of supporting families".
“Hungarian family policy”, Novak said, “has almost become our biggest export product”.
“Of course, she is right,” LGBTQI+ activist Remy Bonny told Veridica “that is one of Hungary’s main exports at the moment. Over the last five years she has taken a leadership role, not just with the Budapest Demographic Summits. She is the president of the conservative Political Network for Values, an international organization that questions the rights of sexual and gender minorities. She also is an annual speaker at the World Congress of Families,” he said.
A global, coordinated, anti-LGBTQ+ movement
Bonny originally became interested in Hungary when researching Putin’s attempts to influence LGBTQ+ sentiment in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. However he now sees the movement as increasingly coordinated - and global. “Novak had a lot of collaborations also with the Trump administration: Hungary was one of the main signatories of the Mike Pompeo-initiated Geneva Consensus Declaration last year, where they were saying they would defend traditional family values and prevent or ban abortion. Apart from the US, Hungary, and Poland, mainly Muslim countries signed it,” Bonny said.
Later this year, Novak will organize an event called the Transnational Demographic Forum for the Political Network For Values, an ultra conservative network between Latin American and European policymakers. “She is now the chair, and as we know from previous conferences, it's often the same faces. The Italian far-right politician Matteo Salvini attends as well as Brian Brown, the guy behind the anti marriage equality campaign in the US, as well as policymakers from Latin America,” Bonny added. “This expansion into Latin America is a more recent thing. There is a link with its Traditionalist Catholic movement Tradition, Family, Property (TFP).” Founded in Brazil in 1960, TFP has “a lot of money for financing ultra conservative organizations,” Bonny said. “At all these events they portray themselves as a very positive movement so they don't say anti LGBTI+, they say pro family issues. It's not anti abortion: they are pro-life. But if you look behind these, then it's obvious that this is pure homophobia,” Bonny added.
Turning the propaganda machine against “the enemy within”
Populist nativist governments do not have a monopoly on alliances, though. As the anti-LGBTQI+ law was being passed by Hungarian MPs, activists from Hungary, Poland and Belarus gathered in Budapest for a roundtable discussion at the cultural and community centre Aurora to compare notes on sliding LGBTQI+ rights in Europe. “So far no Nazis,” Veridica was told on arrival, a nod to the tendency of far-right groups to disrupt liberal and left-wing lectures at the venue, which also hosts NGO offices, art exhibitions and concerts, and offers after-school care to kids.
The most notorious incident at Aurora occurred in 2019, when a group of neo-Nazis led by Gyorgy Budahazy pushed their way into the venue and disrupted an event co-hosted by the Hungarian LGBT Association and Labrisz Lesbian Association. They harassed guests and threw a dead rat into a restroom, while police officers looked on. After three hours Budahazy and his cohort left. “Job done,” he said.
For the roundtable, however, Aurora was declared a “Tyrant-free Zone” - a nod to Poland’s “LGBT-ideology free zones”, which have also resulted in the EC issuing an infringement procedure in tandem with Hungary. Belarusian LGBT activist Nick Antipod’s account of recent events in Minsk was a warning from an authoritarian state that borders on the totalitarian. “The military were brought on the street and then the terror started. They started to torture people in detention centres, rip their clothes. A lot of people were raped – men, women – they were actually raped,” he said. LGBT activist and filmmaker Bart Staszewski was so struck by Antipod’s story that they decided to focus on Belarus together – the result was their documentary “We Have not Lived In Vain”.
Staszewski warns, however, that “Poland and Hungary are going step by step towards the two things that are happening in Belarus: authoritarianism and kleptocracy. Hungarian LGBT activist and refugee case officer Zsolt Szekeres said Orban is now turning the same propaganda apparatus on Hungary’s LGBTQI+ community that he employed during and in the aftermath of the 2015 Refugee Crisis. “The difference now is that the group they are targeting is not from outside - it is the enemy within,” Szekeres said.
Why Orban’s latest gamble might not pay off
Orban’s political allies have not always been exemplars of Christian virtues, however. In July 2020, Hungary’s former ambassador to Peru, Gabor Kaleta, received a one-year suspended prison sentence and was fined HUF 540,000 for possession of 19,000 paedophile photographs. Then in November, Fidesz MEP, party co-founder and creator of the 2011 Constitution, Jozsef Szajer, was caught escaping from a gay sex orgy that broke Covid regulations in Brussels. Other Fidesz scandals have included leaked footage of the mayor of Gyor, Hungary’s sixth largest city, taking part in a cocaine orgy with two prostitutes on a yacht. Mate Kocsis, the politician who initially presented the anti-LGBTQI+ law to Parliament, lost a court case in 2016 to an openly lesbian former liberal MP, who had publicly claimed that he and Szajer were both homosexual.
With the referendum, however, Orban has firmly nailed his colours to the mast. The plebiscite will be held in January or February, shortly before the national elections in April, with the five questions including “Do you support presenting media content of sex changes to minor age children?” and “Do you support the popularisation of sex change operations for minor age children?”.
Campaign funding will not be a problem: the government information drive for Hungary’s last referendum on migrant quotas in 2016 cost more than the combined budgets of all of the UK’s Brexit campaigns. Moreover, Orban now controls around 90% of Hungary's media. “Everything is coordinated,” according to Biro Nagy. “They will come out with the same message in all media outlets, and on their Facebook sites. It is a very well functioning machine - and they have the funds to finance it.”
However one “habitual Fidesz voter”, speaking to Veridica on condition of anonymity, has been distinctly unimpressed by Orban’s anti-LGBTQI+ drive. “Even in the old days most friendship groups contained a gay friend, including mine, and no one minded,” the Fidesz voter said. “This time they are really insulting the intelligence of Hungarians.”
