World leader says Trump’s election freed him to crack down on LGBTQ+ people

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán credited Donald Trump for his country passing a bill banning Pride celebrations last week.

In 2021, Hungary passed a “child protection” law that bans depictions of homosexuality to people under the age of 18. This includes mentioning LGBTQ+ people at schools and depictions in the media of “gender deviating from sex at birth.”

But Pride was still allowed in the Eastern European country. Last week, Parliament voted for a bill to ban Pride celebrations and allow law enforcement officials to use facial recognition technology to track down people who attend.

When asked what had changed since 2021, Orbán cited the election of Trump in the U.S.

Orbán said that Pride “shouldn’t have existed earlier” but that the U.S. ambassador to Hungary in the Biden administration — David Pressman, who is gay and a vocal critic of Hungary’s democratic backslide —marched in Budapest’s Pride festivities, “which clearly showed that the world’s great powers supported it.”

But the election of Trump took the “American boot” off Hungary’s chest and allowed them to “breathe,” Orbán’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyas told journalists.

“But now the world has changed, and…

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