Marriage equality is ruled out in the constitution
Long before the Pride ban: how Hungary ruled out marriage equality in its constitution in 2011.
On 18 April 2011, the Hungarian parliament voted on a new Fundamental Law. The result was hardly exciting. Viktor Orbán's ruling Fidesz party had a two-thirds majority and pushed the text through after only about a month of public discussion. Civil society and the opposition were largely left out.
For lesbian, gay and bisexual people, the new constitution contained an unmistakable message. Article L expressly protects marriage as a union of a man and a woman. Registered partnership, which already existed in Hungary, did remain. But the road to marriage equality was now blocked at the highest legal level. In addition, sexual orientation was missing from the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination, even though the government invoked the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which expressly names this very characteristic.
The criticism came quickly and clearly. ILGA-Europe warned even before the vote that Hungary wanted to anchor homophobia in its supreme law. Human Rights Watch spoke of enshrined discrimination and called on President Pál Schmitt to send the text back to parliament. Schmitt signed it anyway, and at the beginning of 2012 the Fundamental Law came into force.
In retrospect, this April day was only the beginning. In the years that followed, the Fundamental Law was amended several times. At the end of 2020, it stated that the mother is a woman and the father a man. A few months later came a law restricting queer content for minors, and in 2025 the government created the basis for a ban on Budapest Pride. Tens of thousands took to the streets anyway.
What looked like a legal question of definition in 2011 thus became the foundation of a policy designed to push queer people out of public life step by step.