Budapest Braces as Nationalists Plan to Disrupt Gay Pride March

Posted on July 7, 2008
Filed Under Gay News Blog

Budapest police, tested by street violence five times in two years, are bracing for more clashes as nationalist groups plan to disrupt tomorrow’s Gay Pride Parade, calling it a provocation against Hungarian culture.

The march, part of the city’s weeklong Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Festival, will pass through the heart of the capital tomorrow. Laszlo Toroczkai, who heads nationalist youth group 64 Counties, is calling on Hungarians to stop it.

“What we’re against is men walking around in pink miniskirts, half naked, kissing each other and desecrating the Bible on the street,” Toroczkai said in a phone interview. “Hungarian children don’t need to see that.”

Toroczkai, 30, and fellow protest organizer Gyorgy Budahazy, 39, were among the leaders of anti-government demonstrations in September 2006 that turned into Hungary’s worst street violence in 50 years. Since then, police have regularly had to use tear gas and water cannons to disperse protests on national holidays, with 11 people injured in the most recent clashes on March 15.

The anti-government sentiment that initially sparked the riots has since been replaced by a taste for violence, according to Judit Takacs, a sociologist at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

See Budapest Braces as Nationalists Plan to Disrupt Gay Pride March
Bloomberg - Jul 3, 2008