Hungary's LGBTQ+ community marches for its rights after years of rollback

BUDAPEST, June 24 - As Hungary's LGBTQ+ community readies for the annual Pride march in Budapest on Saturday, activists and members of the community want to see their rights restored after an erosion during Viktor Orban's former government that ruled for 16 years.

Last year's Pride march, which police tried to ban under Orban, turned into a mass anti-government demonstration that attracted tens of thousands of people.

This year, with Orban having been defeated by Peter Magyar's centre-right Tisza party in April, the ban has been lifted and the march is authorised to go ahead. But organisers say there is still work to do.

"Last year, our love of freedom and our courage forced authoritarian power to retreat... But we have not reached our goal yet," the organisers said ahead of Saturday's event.

Orban, who cast himself as a defender of what he called Christian values from Western liberalism, passed laws ending the change of gender in personal documents, halting adoption by same-sex couples and banning materials in schools seen as promoting homosexuality or gender transition.

The erosion of LGBTQ+ rights had a traumatic effect on the community and will take time to heal, Adam Andras Kanicsar, an LGBT activist and writer, told Reuters.

"I'm still processing the Orban regime, I guess, and then I will process it for years. And I'm not alone with it," he said during a film shoot in a vintage shop in Budapest.

"In these last 16 years ...working as an LGBTQ journalist and writing and speaking about LGBTQ people meant that I always had to go that one extra mile, every time...And I will never get back these miles in my life."

Magyar, a conservative, has asked for patience when asked by Hungarian media about changing legislation that curtailed the rights of the LGBT community.

But he told Orban's Fidesz party in parliament "to leave the bedrooms of the Hungarian people as soon as possible" and denounced Fidesz's move to curb the right to assembly to ban the Pride march. REUTERS