After the EU Ruling, Péter Magyar's First 100 Days Are Now a Test on LGBTQ+ Rights
Hungary's incoming prime minister campaigned on vague promises of tolerance and almost no direct commitments on queer rights. The European Court of Justice has just forced the question onto his agenda.
When Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won a two-thirds supermajority in Hungary’s April 12 parliamentary election, ending sixteen years of Fidesz rule, LGBTQ+ Hungarians greeted the result with the guarded optimism of people who had learned, over a decade and a half, not to expect much. Magyar had run a centre-right campaign that deliberately sidestepped queer-rights questions. The Tisza manifesto did not mention the 2021 “propaganda” law. His victory speech offered a single sentence — that Hungary had decided to be a country “where no-one is stigmatised for loving differently than the majority” — and no specifics.
Nine days later, on April 21, the Court of Justice of the European Union handed down the ruling that now makes those specifics unavoidable. The court found Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ+ law in violation of core EU values and ordered the government to repeal it. Magyar is expected to take office in mid-May. The law he inherits is one the court has now told him he has no choice but to unwind.
What Magyar actually said on LGBTQ+ issues during the campaign
Very little, and that was the point. Throughout the campaign Magyar avoided direct commitments on LGBTQ+ rights, calculating — according to analysts at the LSE’s European Politics blog and ILGA-Europe — that Tisza could not afford to be portrayed as serving what Fidesz’s media apparatus called a “globalist gender and LGBT agenda.” Instead, Tisza campaigned on economic mismanagement, corruption, and Orbán’s strained relationship with Brussels, presenting itself as the party that would unfreeze roughly €18 billion in EU funds held up by rule-of-law concerns.
The LGBTQ+ law was one of those concerns. Brussels had frozen Hungarian funds in part because of the 2021 legislation, which banned schools, broadcasters, and advertisers from depicting same-sex relationships or gender transition to anyone under 18, treating queer content the same way as pornography. Unwinding that law was therefore always implicit in Magyar’s promise to repair relations with the EU. It was simply not a promise he was willing to make out loud.
The court has now made that distinction moot.
What the ECJ ruling actually requires
The ruling is unusually concrete in what it demands. It does not merely declare the law inconsistent with EU obligations — it orders Hungary to repeal it, and it warns that continued non-compliance would expose Hungary to daily financial penalties set by the court.
In practice, that means three things for the incoming Tisza government:
First, the 2021 law must be formally repealed by act of parliament. An administrative pause or a ministerial instruction not to enforce it would not satisfy the court, because the legislation is still on the books and produces real legal effects — including the legal basis Hungarian police cited when they banned Budapest Pride in 2024 and 2025.
Second, any subsidiary regulations built on the law — content classifications, broadcasting restrictions, school curriculum guidelines — must be withdrawn or amended.
Third, the ruling leaves open the question of remedies for harms already caused by the law. Booksellers fined for displaying queer-themed literature, broadcasters that paid penalties for airing cartoons with same-sex parents, activists prosecuted under the statute — these cases do not automatically reverse. Tisza will have to decide whether to legislate an affirmative remedy, leave remedies to individual court challenges, or attempt a partial amnesty.
The first 100 days
Magyar will assume office with the two-thirds supermajority required to amend the constitution without negotiation. That is a wider mandate than any post-1989 Hungarian government has held outside of Fidesz, and it gives him the parliamentary numbers to repeal the propaganda law in a single legislative session if he chooses.
Whether he chooses to move quickly is the real test. The political incentives cut in two directions. Moving fast — attaching repeal to the first omnibus EU-compliance bill of his term, alongside judicial reforms and anti-corruption measures — frames the law as a Brussels-driven obligation rather than a Tisza-driven rights agenda, and lets Magyar claim credit for unfreezing EU funds without a prolonged public argument about gender and sexuality.
Moving slowly, by contrast, might buy room with Tisza’s more conservative voters and with the rural ethnic-Hungarian constituencies Fidesz still dominates. But it would also mean defying an ECJ order, accepting daily fines, and spending the honeymoon period of a new government fighting Brussels in precisely the way Orbán did. Nothing in Magyar’s campaign suggested that is a fight he wants.
The expected path, then, is repeal as part of a broader “EU alignment” package within the first 100 days. ILGA-Europe and the Hungarian advocacy organisation Háttér Society have both indicated they will press for exactly that framing, and for public commitments that go somewhat further — including a new hate-crimes law that explicitly covers sexual orientation and gender identity, and the restoration of legal gender recognition, which Fidesz abolished in 2020.
What this does not guarantee
Repeal of the 2021 law would be significant. It would not, on its own, restore Hungary to where it was a decade ago. Civil partnerships for same-sex couples remain the only form of legal recognition. Adoption by same-sex couples is prohibited. The constitutional amendment Fidesz pushed through in 2020, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman and parenthood on the basis of “the mother is a woman and the father is a man,” is still in the constitution — and Magyar’s two-thirds majority is theoretically enough to amend it, but nothing in his campaign suggested he intends to.
For queer Hungarians, the ECJ ruling is a floor, not a ceiling. It removes the law that was used to ban Pride, fine booksellers, and force LGBTQ+ content behind pornography-level age gates. It does not, and cannot, create marriage equality, adoption rights, or legal gender recognition. Those remain political questions, and the politics of the next hundred days will tell us how much of Magyar’s vague promise about loving differently he actually intends to redeem.
