Hungary Votes to Scrap Orbán's Anti-LGBTQ Rules
Hungary's parliament voted 139 to 51 to remove a 2021 ban on showing or "promoting" homosexuality and gender change to anyone under 18, the first major reversal of Viktor Orbán's curbs on LGBTQ people since he lost power; a ban on legal gender change and a decree on wrapping books remain.
Hungary's parliament on Tuesday voted 139 to 51 to amend a 2021 law that banned showing or "promoting" homosexuality and gender change to anyone under 18. The old rules had reached into schools, the media and bookshops. The new text drops that ban and instead protects children from material that could "seriously impair" their development, whoever it is about. The governing Tisza party of Prime Minister Péter Magyar, which defeated Viktor Orbán in April, passed it with its two-thirds majority. Orbán's Fidesz party and its Christian Democrat partners voted against.
Why it matters: The European Union's top court ruled in April that the 2021 rules broke EU law. Minutes after the vote, the government said the EU had agreed to release €4.2 billion in frozen funds. Other Orbán-era rules remain, including a ban on legal gender change and a government decree requiring books with LGBTQ content to be wrapped in plastic.
The hopeful detail: Tamás Dombos of the Háttér Society, which fought the law for five years, told the BBC: "We are still knocking on a closed door, but at least they are listening on the other side."
Budapest — Hungary's parliament on Tuesday, October 13, voted to remove the anti-LGBTQ provisions of a 2021 "child protection" law adopted under former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the first significant reversal of his government's restrictions on gay and transgender people.
The bill passed 139 to 51. Prime Minister Péter Magyar's Tisza party, which defeated Orbán's Fidesz in April elections, holds a two-thirds majority and passed it without opposition support. Fidesz and its partner, the Christian Democrats, voted against.
What the 2021 law did
The 2021 law was presented as a crackdown on pedophilia. It also banned the "portrayal or promotion of homosexuality or transgenderism" in content available to under-18s. Its reach spread into other laws, including those on education and the right of assembly. In practice, even age-appropriate books on these subjects could be sold only in black plastic wrapping with warnings. In 2025 the law was amended again to serve as the basis for banning Budapest's annual Pride march; the march went ahead anyway, drawing an estimated quarter of a million people.
In April 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU's highest court, ruled that the provisions censoring LGBTQ content violated EU law and the bloc's fundamental values.
What the new law says
Tuesday's amendment repeals most of the 2021 provisions. Instead of banning the portrayal or promotion of sexual and gender diversity, it protects under-18s from material that can "seriously impair the child's physical, intellectual, emotional or moral development." Protection of minors from sexually explicit or violent material stays.
"Fundamentally, our goal was to move away from a flawed paradigm, linking child protection in any way to sexual orientation or gender identities, and shift to a framework that is truly about children and protecting children," Szilvia Gyurkó, a state secretary at the Ministry of Social and Family Affairs, told AFP.
Magyar himself has kept his distance from gay and transgender rights. Before the vote, he described the change not as a restoration of rights but as stronger child protection "regardless of sexual orientation." "I'm very cautious," he told the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat in an interview published on Saturday.
The Christian Democrats said in a statement that "there is no place for the promotion of LGBTQ content in schools or the media."
The money
Minutes after the vote, the Hungarian government said the EU had agreed to release €4.2 billion of funds frozen in the last years of the Fidesz government. "We welcome this important signal of commitment for our common values," EU commissioners Michael McGrath and Hadja Lahbib said.
One man's five years
Tamás Dombos works for the Háttér Society, a Hungarian civil rights group that has fought the law since it passed. "We are very happy that this got adopted," he told the BBC. "We've been fighting this so-called child protection law for five years. There have been problems with the bill submitted to parliament, but most of those problems have been fixed."
He is not finished. He wants full recognition of same-sex marriage, adoption rights for same-sex couples and a restored right for transgender people to change their names on official documents. "We are still knocking on a closed door," he said, "but at least they are listening on the other side."
What it means in practice
ILGA-Europe, a federation of LGBTQ rights groups, said the amendments remove the legal barriers to showing LGBTQ people and their stories in Hungarian media and let inclusive sex education return to schools.
Not everything has changed. ILGA-Europe said the government decree requiring books with LGBTQ content to be wrapped in plastic and restricting their sale still needs to be repealed. Human Rights Watch said the bill left intact discriminatory language in Hungary's constitution, known as the Fundamental Law, and the assembly-law restrictions that have been used to ban Pride. A 2020 ban on legal recognition of transgender people's gender identity also remains.
What happens next
Rights groups will press the government on the book-wrapping decree, gender recognition and the constitution. The European Commission said last month that the Magyar government had addressed several rule-of-law breaches affecting the EU budget and urged EU leaders to readmit Hungary to the Erasmus+ student-exchange and Horizon Europe research programs.