How Orbán’s Culture War Built Its Own Enemy
The coalition that outlasted him began as his target
On June 4, 2026, prosecutors in Budapest dropped the criminal case against Mayor Gergely Karácsony for organizing a Pride march the government had banned. The charge fell apart for a plain reason: the law behind the ban had already been struck down. What the wire stories mostly skipped is the longer story underneath that wins, which is not about a court or a mayor at all. It is about a coalition that Viktor Orbán spent sixteen years assembling by mistake.
Gender as “symbolic glue”
Orbán’s strategists had a word for the thing they thought they were fighting. They called gender “symbolic glue, ”a phrase scholars of the Hungarian and Polish right used to describe how the movement bound its scattered targets into one. Feminism, trans people, sex education, same-sex marriage, abortion access, gender studies: file them all under “gender ideology,” and they become a single foreign menace a government can campaign against. The glue was meant to hold the enemies together so they could be fought as a single unit. It worked. That was the miscalculation.
One door, marked “the family”
Watch how the measures landed. In 2018, the government revoked accreditation for gender-studies master’s programs at ELTE and Central European University, with Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén dismissing the field as an ideology rather than a science. In May 2020, Parliament refused to ratify the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, casting the treaty as a vehicle for gender ideology and migration, and ended legal gender recognition for trans people the same month. In 2021, came the “child protection” law that lumped LGBTQ content in with pedophilia. Every one of those blows reached feminists and queer people through the same door, marked “the family” and “protecting children.” Aim a single weapon at two groups, and you teach them, fast, that they share an enemy.
Older than Orbán
The alliance that answered was not a hashtag. Hungarian feminist and queer organizing each long predate Orbán. NANE, the women’s anti-violence group that runs the country’s domestic-violence helpline, has worked since 1994; the legal-aid group PATENT since 2006. Háttér Society, the largest LGBTQI organization in the country, was founded in 1995, and the Labrisz Lesbian Association in 1999. When the 2021 law passed, the Hungarian Women’s Lobby, NANE, and PATENT put out a joint statement condemning it, insisting that “education is not the same as promotion.” Háttér and Labrisz had co-founded Hungarian LGBT History Month back in 2013. The collaboration isn’t a memory: into 2026, Háttér has been running a project it calls “Diverse Feminism,” built with the Nőkért Association, to intentionally keep the feminist and queer movements in the same room.#
Banned, and held anyway
Then the government banned Pride outright. A March 2025 amendment to the assembly law and the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, passed that spring, redefined a person as male or female, elevated “child protection” above the right to assemble, and authorized facial-recognition surveillance of anyone who showed up. The civil society response was coordinated and fast. Amnesty International Hungary, Háttér, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, and the civil-liberties group TASZ challenged the police bans. They published legal guidance for marchers, while Karácsony reframed the event as a municipal gathering, which he argued the police had no power to prohibit. On June 28, 2025, roughly 100,000 people marched anyway, with organizers putting the number far higher. It was the largest Pride in Hungarian history and one of the largest demonstrations against the government in years. A solidarity statement signed by 71 organizations put women’s rights groups such as the Hungarian Women’s Lobby, EMMA, and MENŐK on the same page as queer and civil liberties NGOs.
“Neither freedom nor love can be banned in Budapest.” — Mayor Gergely Karácsony, at the June 28, 2025, march
Vindication in two acts
The vindication arrived in two acts. On April 21, 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Case C-769/22 that the 2021 law breached EU law, and for the first time in its history, found a standalone violation of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, the clause naming the Union’s founding values. That is the EU’s own court in Luxembourg, not the human-rights court in Strasbourg that gets confused with it. Six weeks after that ruling, the charges against Karácsony and against Géza Buzás-Hábel, the gay Roma teacher who organizes Hungary’s only rural Pride in Pécs, were dropped on the same day. Police had already cleared the 2026 march to proceed on June 27.
Weather, not a change of heart
Here is the turn, and it matters. The coalition did not win an ally. It outlasted an enemy. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won the April 12 election, and he was sworn in as prime minister on May 9, 2026, ending Orbán’s sixteen years in power. Magyar speaks about freedom and assembly in the abstract. He has not endorsed Pride, and he has not moved to repeal a single one of the laws Orbán built. The statutes that stripped trans recognition and banned queer content from minors are still on the books. Buzás-Hábel said it without varnish: the main opposition remains quiet on LGBTQ rights, so the movement will have to keep up the pressure. A change of government is weather. It is not a change of heart.
I write this from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where my own statehouse files its own bills naming people like me as a problem to be managed. I came out at fifty-three, which means I have watched a lot of organizing in my own country splinter along exactly the seam Orbán went looking for, the one where someone whispers that the trans people are costing the women’s movement its credibility, or that the feminists were never really allies. The Hungarian record is the rebuttal. The lesson is not that a court will ride in and save you, since courts arrive late, when they arrive at all. The lesson is the glue. Orbán’s people mixed it to bind their enemies into one convenient target. It dried, and it held, and it bound those enemies to one another instead. The cameras are still bolted to the lampposts in Budapest. Pride is still on the calendar for June 27. They wanted one enemy. They built one movement.
Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.