The Different Facets of Pride Politics in Times of ‘anti-LGBTQIA+’ Backlashes

The law passed on 18th March 2025 by the Hungarian Parliament banning Pride Events in the country and allowing the use of facial recognition to identify organisers and participants has sent shockwaves across the European continent and beyond. In Russia or Turkey bans on Pride Events have been a reality for a few years already, a situation that has attracted widespread condemnation from LGBTQIA+ activists, political actors, and civil society more in general.

The ban enacted by the Hungarian Parliament, however, is seen by many as opening a new fault line at the heart of the European Union. Whilst Hungary has been under special surveillance for many years already, because of the rise of authoritarian and discriminatory policies enacted by the Orbán Government (Hanelt 2024), this homo- transphobic piece of legislation is particularly worrying in the current global political conjuncture, which sees the dangerous move by President Trump in the US of rolling back any initiative related to ‘DEI’ (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion).

To date, the response by the EU has been somehow delayed. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has been criticised by several Human Rights organisations for her lack of firm response to the actions of the Hungarian Parliament. While the Advocate General of the EU Court of Justice, Tamara Ćapeta, has recently delivered a legal opinion that condemns the effects of the anti-LGBTQIA+ law passed by Hungary in 2021, and which has been used to bring into effect the ban on Pride Events, the road to equality remains uncertain for LGBTQIA+ persons in the country.

The danger is that across the world more leaders will be tempted to take a leaf out of Orbán’s and Trump’s book and start limiting or attacking the rights of LGBTQIA+ persons, alongside other groups that are often an easy target for conservative, far right, and populist governments, such as migrants, refugees, as well as national, and ethnic minorities.

Around the world, Pride Events have often morphed in joyous, celebratory, and colourful events, compared to the politically engaged marches that are echoed by the legacy of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City (Armstrong and Crage 2006). Yet, these can never cease to be political, when they continue to represent a crucial element to bring the experiences of LGBTQIA+ persons to the forefront in a world which is governed by hetero and cisnormative canons.

Activists carefully negotiate between the global politics of LGBTQIA+ rights, often pursued at the level of the United Nations (Kirichenko 2024), and their local settings, where legal, political, and social obstacles may present serious challenges to the exercise of freedom of expression, assembly, and association for these groups. The recent law passed by the Hungarian Parliament shows that LGBTQIA+ activists need to keep their guard up and safeguard these spaces, even when they think that their events have become institutionalised in the local social and political landscape. This was precisely what has happened in Hungary, where the first Pride Event was organised back in 1997.

In my book ‘The Politics of Pride Events: Global  and Local Challenges’ (Bristol University Press, out in October 2025), I have spoken to sixty Pride organisers from across thirty different countries around the world, from the Global North and the Global South, asking them about the challenges and opportunities that they encounter in the organisation of their events, the role that activism plays in their personal life, as well as their vision for the future of Pride Events.

The picture that emerges is one of great heterogeneity: Pride organisers navigate difficult social and political landscapes, where political actors directly or indirectly threaten the expression of LGBTQIA+ subjectivities and rights claims, or put in place obstacles that hinder the full participation of individuals to these gatherings.

At the same time, Pride organisers face significant financial pressures to organise their events in a landscape where economic resources can make the difference between being able to offer an event to the local LGBTQIA+ community and scaling back or cancelling altogether the planned activities. The recent case of Liverpool Pride, in the UK, where organisers have had to cancel the 2025 edition because of financial constraints represents a painful illustration of this problem.

As interviews with Pride organisers carried out for my book have suggested, these events had already experienced a drop in corporate donations from sponsors during the 2020-2021 Covid-19 Pandemic. Some of these Pride organisations have not fully recovered from the effects of this drop in financial resources.

The recent full frontal attack initiated by President Trump in the US against any form of ‘DEI’ initiative, has further deepened the financial challenges of some Pride organisations, as dozens of corporate sponsors to have dropped partly or entirely their funding for Pride Events in 2025. These effects have been felt also outside of the US, in countries such as Italy or Germany. This contraction of corporate sponsorship shows an important vulnerability existing for some Pride Events, whose organisation has become strongly dependent on corporate money. When these contributions disappear, is the LGBTQIA+ community still able to take to the streets and mobilise?

The seemingly unstoppable rise of conservative, far-right, and populist forces directly threatens the rights of LGBTQIA+ persons around the world and can erode the confidence of local communities in relation to their ability to fight back and resist. Pride Events are crucial sites where this resistance can be articulated but can only be constructive if done by broadening the field of action, building intersectional and cross-issues alliances with anti-racist groups, environmental activists, feminist actors, as well as other groups that fight for political and social justice issues, such as in the case of Palestine. LGBTQIA+ liberation can only occur where multiple axes of discrimination and injustice converge in our analysis of ‘what can be done’ and propel us forward into fighting for a more effective compliance with human rights standards across the world.

By Francesca Romana Ammaturo, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and International Relations, London Metropolitan University