Braving soaring temperatures, thousands of revellers set off from outside the State Opera House on Saturday for the 31st Budapest Pride Community Festival march, a vibrant celebration winding through the heart of the capital.
This year’s Budapest Pride started
A float blaring music led the procession, with dancers on its platform and marchers waving rainbow flags. The event drew support from the Budapest city government, which provided a bus, while NGOs including Hatter Society, Tilos Radio, Momentum, and Amnesty International contributed floats of their own, MTI wrote.
The route, starting at the Opera, will take marchers along Andrassy Avenue, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Road, Deák Ferenc Square, Astoria, and Kossuth Lajos Street, before crossing the Elizabeth Bridge and ending at Vérmező Park, where speeches and performances will take place on a main stage.
Organisers laid out a giant EU flag in front of the Opera and a rainbow flag along Andrassy Avenue. The Swedish Embassy set up a water station at the starting point, handing out bottles labelled “LGBTQ rights are human rights”.
The march is being accompanied by ambulances due to the extreme heat, with first-aid stations set up along the route. Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony is scheduled to address the crowd.
New Medián poll: Supermajority of Hungarians support child adoption
A new Medián poll released ahead of the Budapest Pride march has found that more than two-thirds of Hungarians support child adoption by LGBTQ couples. The results, reported by hvg.hu, also indicate a significant shift in attitudes across Hungarian society on the issue.
The outlet noted that in 1997, at the first Budapest Pride, there were only 300 participants, whereas last year, when the event became a key symbol of resistance to the Orbán government, more than 300,000 people took part. This year’s march carries the slogan: “Let’s finish the regime change together!”
Court drops charges against Mayor Karácsony over Budapest Pride march
A Budapest court has dropped criminal charges against Gergely Karácsony, Budapest’s mayor, for allegedly violating assembly laws by supporting last year’s Pride march. The Pest Central District Court terminated the case on June 17, citing a European Court of Justice ruling that Hungary’s child protection law — used as the basis for the charges — violated EU law. Karácsony announced the decision on Facebook, noting that the prosecutor’s office had already dropped the case on June 4. The ruling can still be appealed.
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