A Good Week for Queer Europe, Not for Us
Notes on a fracture nobody planned
Saturday morning, May 9, 2026. In Budapest, a former Fidesz insider, Péter Magyar, took the oath of office and became Hungary’s first post-Orbán prime minister in 16 years. Two days later, in Brussels, the twenty-seven foreign ministers of the European Union voted unanimously to sanction Israeli settler organizations, doing what Viktor Orbán had personally blocked for almost two years and what President Trump had explicitly undone on his first day in office. Two days before all that, in England, Wales, and Scotland, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK gained 1,244 council seats and took fourteen English councils. The latest YouGov Westminster poll, fielded May 10–11, put Reform on 28 percent, eleven points ahead of every other party.
Three stories. One week. One continent and one ocean.
Most take these events as a single mood. Populism is winning. The right is rising. Fasten your seatbelts. I’m here to argue the opposite. Read together, these three stories show that the trans-Atlantic populist alliance Donald Trump and JD Vance have been trying to anchor is actively coming apart. Not collapsing. Fracturing. Splitting along fault lines that were always there.
I’m writing from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is the wrong place to be a transgender woman in 2026 and the right place to watch the global authoritarian turn happen in real time. South Dakota was the sixth state to ban gender-affirming care for minors. I have to leave my own state for routine medical care. I’m not coming to this story from the cheap seats. I’m watching the people who want to delete me from public life try to build an international coalition, and I’m watching that coalition trip over its own contradictions.
The thesis: the Magyar government, the EU settler sanctions, and the Reform surge are not three data points on the same trend line. Three different trend lines are running through the same week. The Vance-aligned populist lost in Hungary. The Vance administration’s most reliable European blocker on Israel policy is gone. The British populist who once campaigned with Trump is now Britain’s most popular politician precisely since he has begun to put distance between himself and the White House. Each development would complicate the story of a unified right-wing international in its own way. Together, they break it.
What they do not break, and this is the part American liberals keep getting wrong, is the underlying social conservatism of the European electorate.
I. Hungary
On April 7, 2026, five days before the Hungarian election, US Vice President JD Vance stood on a stage in Budapest next to Viktor Orbán and decided to talk about my body. “Across the left, there is a band of radicals,” Vance told the rally crowd. “They reject mothers and motherhood, fathers and fatherhood in the name of liberation. They condemn children to mutilization and sterilization in the name of gender care.” The trans journalist Erin Reed called it the most aggressive anti-trans rhetoric ever delivered by a sitting US official on foreign soil. Trump endorsed Orbán on Truth Social, promising “the full Economic Might of the United States.”
Orbán lost anyway. Tisza won 141 seats out of 199. Turnout was nearly 80 percent. The OSCE noted that there was “no level playing field,” meaning Orbán cheated in every legal way available to him and still lost by 20 points.
Hungary spent five years building one of the harshest anti-LGBTQ+ legal regimes in Europe. In 2020, Orbán’s government banned legal gender recognition for trans people. In 2021, parliament passed the so-called child protection law. In March 2025, parliament criminalized Pride marches. In April 2025, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Fundamental Law constitutionally enshrined the Pride ban and declared that Hungarian law recognizes only two sexes. That architecture was built by people who treated American conservatives as students. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, asked about the inspiration for Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law, said the quiet part out loud: “We were watching the Hungarians.”
Here is where the story gets harder. Magyar’s Tisza party did not campaign on rolling back that architecture. The Hungarian LGBTQ rights organization Háttér Society stated flatly that “the party’s election program does not address LGBTQ+ issues.” Magyar refused to attend the 2025 Budapest Pride. He declined to denounce the Pride ban by name. The day after Magyar was sworn in, the European Council on Foreign Relations published a post-election poll. 71% of Tisza voters supported the new government that protects LGBTQ+ rights. Magyar himself has not promised to protect them.
This is the contradiction. Magyar has a two-thirds supermajority, the same constitutional weapon Orbán used to entrench his regime. He has the legal capacity to repeal the trans recognition ban, restore Pride rights, and reverse the Fifteenth Amendment. As of the day his government was sworn in, he has committed to none of those things. Nine days before the swearing-in, the CJEU ruled in Commission v Hungary that Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBT law violated Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and Article 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The ruling sits on Magyar’s desk. He could comply. He could comply partially. He could let Háttér’s pending Strasbourg cases work their way through the system and do nothing himself. The next year will tell us which Magyar we got.
What the Hungarian election did, unambiguously, was break the Vance-Orbán axis. The American right has lost its European model.
II. Brussels
Hungary, under Orbán, had spent two years as the EU’s sole holdout on sanctions against violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The bloc operates by unanimity on foreign policy, meaning that one government can block twenty-six others. Orbán used that veto for Benjamin Netanyahu, his closest non-American ally.
Two days after Magyar was sworn in, that veto was gone. Twenty-seven foreign ministers adopted, unanimously, sanctions targeting “extremist and violent” Israeli settler organizations and their leaders. The list includes the settler organizations Amana, Nachala, Hashomer Yosh, and Regavim, as well as leaders Daniella Weiss, Meir Deutsch, and Avichai Suissa. Weiss called the sanctions “ridiculous.” Netanyahu, posting from his official account, said the European Union “exposed its moral bankruptcy.”
The most important sentence in the news coverage came from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas: “Under the Biden administration, the United States sanctioned multiple settler leaders, settler groups, and West Bank outposts in 2024. Trump canceled the sanctions a day after reentering office in January 2025.” The European Union is now sanctioning the same individuals that the previous American administration sanctioned and that the current American administration unsanctioned. The trans-Atlantic alliance that for two generations meant Washington led and Brussels followed is now running in reverse.
That speed is the tell. The sanctions had been ready for months. They were waiting for Hungary. The unanimous vote includes Italy under Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has historically been one of Israel’s most reliable European partners. It includes Germany under Friedrich Merz, whose CDU/CSU government has historically treated criticism of Israel as politically untouchable. It includes France under Emmanuel Macron, whose foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot said: “It’s done.”
This is what a fracture looks like. The European populist right is not unified on Israel. Meloni and the German CDU support Israel. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez wants to suspend the EU’s trade agreement with Israel entirely. Reform UK is unambiguously pro-Israel. The AfD is openly hostile to Israeli policy and to Trump’s Iran war. Magyar is in the process of resolving Hungary’s question the other way from Orbán. His party platform commits Hungary to joining the eurozone by 2030. His first major foreign policy action as prime minister was to drop the veto Orbán had been holding on to on Netanyahu, which is to say, the veto Orbán had been holding on to on Trump. He did it two days into the job.
