Transcript

Míriam Juan-Torres:

Welcome to (En)Gendering Authoritarianism, a partnership between the Othering & Belonging Institute and Over Zero. In this special series of the Who Belongs podcast, my co-host Laura Livingston, Tara Chandra, and I, Míriam Juan-Torres, speak with practitioners, activists, organizers, faith leaders, and scholars who are responding to the ways political and cultural leaders weaponize gender to advance authoritarian practices.

Hi, everyone. This is the first of a series of conversations that are part of our Engendering Authoritarianism project — a project that explores how political and cultural leaders weaponize narratives and policies on gender identity, women’s rights, and sexuality to advance authoritarianism.

I’m Míriam Juan-Torres at the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, and I’m joined by Laura Livingston from Over Zero. Hi, Laura. Today we’re speaking with Viktória Radványi, president of Budapest Pride and a human rights defender who has been working on the front lines of this struggle in Hungary. As context, Hungary is a country that, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has been classified as a hybrid regime rather than a full democracy.

We’re sitting down with Viktória in the lead-up to the parliamentary election — one that poses one of the biggest threats to Orbán, who’s been in power since he regained control in 2010.

Welcome, Viktória, and thank you for being here with us today.

Viktória Radványi: 

Thank you for having me.

Míriam Juan-Torres: So in June 2025, hundreds of thousands of people defied a government ban to attend the Budapest Pride march. This was, if we understand correctly, one of the largest anti-government mobilizations in Hungary since 1989. The moment laid bare the intimate connection between the targeting of gender and sexuality and the consolidation of authoritarian power. Just to mention a few things: authorities tried to curtail freedom of assembly and deployed AI-powered facial recognition technology to identify attendees. And efforts have continued since the march.
But the Pride march also revealed something equally powerful — that the nexus between gender, queer rights, democracy-building, and belonging can also be a source of resistance. So today we’ll explore how. Viktória, we’ve spoken a little bit about you already, of course, but in your own words, could you tell us a little about who you are and what you do?

Viktória Radványi:

My name is Viktória Radványi. I use she/they pronouns, and I am the president of Budapest Pride. I’ve been working at Budapest Pride for more than ten years now — first as a volunteer, and later it became my profession. We are one of Hungary’s leading LGBTQ NGOs. We have an incredibly diverse team, and we’re building from a grassroots movement, mobilizing hundreds of volunteers every year.

What we’re really good at is mass mobilization, campaigning, talking to very diverse audiences within society, and mobilizing different parts of civil society to come together and co-create various things. Advocacy has always been at the heart of what we do, and our goal is to reach full legal and social equality for the LGBTQ community.

As part of that, we consider our role quite vital in revitalizing and supporting civil society in Hungary, which has been under attack for the past 16 years under Viktor Orbán.

Laura Livingston: 

And you played a critical role, as you were saying — and as Míriam was saying earlier — in organizing the 2025 Pride march in Hungary, which ultimately became a stand-in for democracy, a march against authoritarianism and in support of democratic forms of government.

I’m wondering if you could share more of the backstory of Pride in 2025, and how it ultimately became something of a referendum on Orbán and on authoritarianism.

Viktória Radványi:

The LGBTQ movement has been at the heart of the regime change of 1989. It’s very important to understand, when it comes to Hungary, that when the Soviet era ended, there were incredibly inspired, energetic new movements all over the country that wanted to build a pluralistic democracy — multiple parties, a strong civil society, an independent press, independent courts, all of that.

Even in the 1980s, gay and lesbian organizations were already popping up, producing and distributing illegal newspapers. They created social events, community events, psychological support for LGBTQ people. And we were the first country in the Eastern Bloc to hold Pride marches and Pride festivals. That’s why in 2026 we’re holding our 31st Pride march, and we’re quite proud of the rich history we have in Hungary and in Central and Eastern Europe.

So that’s a bit of context. And that’s why a Pride ban in 2025 seemed quite absurd — because by then we’d already had 29 very successful Pride marches. It wasn’t something new to Hungarians or to the country. But of course, when checks and balances aren’t functioning properly, when rule of law is under attack, an attack like this from your prime minister can be quite frightening.

And what we learned from this — and from many previous experiences, because this wasn’t the first or second attack by Viktor Orbán on the LGBTQ community — is that fascist leaders only understand power. And I think that’s very important. If you keep your head down, if you just hope, “okay, I’m being scapegoated now, but if I stay silent it will go away” — it never works. That’s something we should learn from the Hungarian story: the only response that works is showcasing power, strength, numbers, and pushback.

Many people who research authoritarianism say these regimes don’t really have an ideology — meaning it doesn’t matter to them what happens, or what kind of country they build. The only thing that matters is staying in power, remaining in power forever, and consolidating that power. To achieve that goal, they’re willing to sacrifice anything, anybody. It doesn’t matter. So if a leader starts scapegoating your community and there’s no political cost to that action, you become the perfect victim, and they’ll attack you again and again and again — because last time it worked so well.

And that’s why they go for vulnerable minorities — because we have less social capital, less access to mainstream society, less access to funds, resources, lawyers. The more marginalized you are, the harder it is to fight back. That’s the logic behind it.

When the prime minister announced that he wanted to ban Pride marches, our immediate reaction was that we would march no matter what. There was absolutely no way we were going to allow this to happen, and we started organizing immediately. This is why I told you we had a rich history of movement-building — we had a lot of tools at our disposal.

But what worked was just telling people: hey, if you want to help, sign up to volunteer. If you want to help, donate ten dollars. We need everybody. We created a system where everybody could contribute in some way to make this a success.

People generally don’t want injustices to happen, and most Hungarians interpreted this action as something that’s not fair, that’s against freedom. But general dissatisfaction alone isn’t enough — people need something to join. They need somebody to organize their dissent, their anger, into something constructive and productive. And of course, this is something the LGBTQ movement is quite good at. We operated with messages of strength, messages of hope, and talked about what kind of country we want to build.

Míriam Juan-Torres:

We wanted to connect with something you just mentioned — you said you wanted to create a system in which everyone could help or participate. I think Pride was incredible to watch, both from the ground and from afar, for many different reasons. The display of joy, the numbers, and the fact that it was happening after the ban — it was really astonishing, and I think encouraging for all of us committed to democracy across the world, to see that massive turnout. If I’m not mistaken, previous years also had thousands of people joining, but this time it was in the hundreds of thousands.

So I wonder if you could speak a bit about what the different paths to participation were. Because, if we understand correctly, this brought together the queer community and people who hadn’t previously seen themselves as people who go to Pride — and then they showed up. I’d love to hear about those different paths, and the decisions you made to make that happen.

Viktória Radványi:

In previous years, we had about 35,000 participants — we can consider that the core base. This year we had 350,000 or more, so it grew tenfold. The majority of people who joined Budapest Pride 2025 had never been to a Pride before. This was an incredible opportunity, and we could feel it in the air — that we now had the chance to invite as many people to Pride as possible, so they could see it’s nothing like what they see in the propaganda media. It’s the most joyous protest you can join. It’s very political, and it’s very fun and colorful — all of those things combined. Everybody has a place at Pride.

There were a few key decisions. One was a very well-designed, participatory decision-making process — and I know that sounds very tactical, but bear with me. At the time, we had a team of 16 organizers. Six of us were employed full-time or part-time, and ten were here on a volunteer basis. These 16 people were the ones carrying out different parts of the project. So when the ban was announced, we decided that all major strategic decisions needed to be consensual among these 16 people.

Technically, only our board could have made this decision, but this was intentional, because they were threatening us with jail and huge financial fines. The worst-case outcome was that you could go to jail for a year for organizing Pride. So this was something everybody had to carefully consider. And this kind of approach takes a lot of time — it’s very time-consuming.

We had a lot of in-person meetings. That was partly for security reasons — we didn’t bring any technology with us — and partly for team cohesion. We talked for hours. We invited volunteer lawyers to these meetings and just bombarded them with questions: okay, what happens when this happens, what happens when that happens? Which was sometimes hard, because nothing was normal anymore. This ban was against the Hungarian constitution — if the system worked, if rule of law worked, this law wouldn’t even have passed. So once you’re beyond that point, it’s sometimes hard to speculate: okay, but what would the police do, what would the authorities do in this case or that case, if nobody is following the law anymore?

But it was very important for at least this core team of 16 people to understand the risks of what we were doing, and then decide how we’d proceed — what strategies we’d employ, what the key moments would be when we’d need to make big decisions, and how we’d make them. It happened all the time that we’d be workshopping something for four hours, finally come to a decision, and then the next morning new information would come in and we’d have to make a new decision in two hours. This happened constantly, and I think that was the hardest part for the team — this constant uncertainty, the constant threat, and having to adapt again and again, three times a week for four months.

This isn’t something anybody prepares you for. But what was very important was a level of trust with each other. We knew everybody was here, doing this, because we shared the same goal, and everybody was doing their best. And even if we made mistakes, we were still doing our best — that respect and goodwill toward each other really mattered in the hardest times.

Personally, my goal was that if everything went well, we wouldn’t lose half the team to burnout — because it was really, really hard work, ten-to-twelve-hour days. It was soul-crushing, and it wasn’t something you could really be prepared for. It’s not like an election campaign, where you know it’s coming and you have the resources, the team, and the staff to prepare. This came into our lives abruptly. And I was very happy that of the original 16, 15 people remained. Only one person said, “I’m so burnt out, I have to leave” — which is still a better choice than staying another year and burning out even more.
We also put resources into mental health support. We’ve been having regular supervision for 12 years now — every six weeks we sit down with a therapist and talk through our conflicts, problems, and difficulties. So we already had tools and mechanisms in our system that we practiced regularly, and these were really essential. The pressure was very high, and we also worked to support team members individually — with personal security, personal mental health counseling — for those who had it really hard, because ultimately, if there’s no one to organize Pride, there’s no Pride. So we had this very humanistic focus.

Laura Livingston:

That’s so helpful, thank you. You mentioned how critical it was that there were strong relationships and a level of trust among the organizers, especially in such an uncertain environment. As all of these new threats continue to emerge, we think so much about how building an anti-authoritarian strategy is really rooted in relationships and trust — at its core, it’s a relational strategy. I’m wondering if you could share more about how you built these relationships and developed the sense of trust that’s so critical in a politically tense moment, and your overall approach to that.

Viktória Radványi:

What we usually say is: how could we dream about changing a whole society if we can’t build that ideal society within our own team? If you want a feminist future, if you want gender justice — you have to be able to do that with ten people, or twenty people, first. Otherwise, what are we even talking about? That forces you to work out a lot of internal mechanisms to function.

We were very fortunate to have a lot of organizers who came before us and already laid down a lot of the building blocks — like the idea that, if you’re building a movement, it’s important to know that it’s not a friend group. You don’t have to be friends with everybody on the team. This is a work group — it doesn’t matter if you’re a volunteer, you’re still working. We dedicate our time and resources to work together toward something, and it’s very important to have consensus on what we’re building.

We have a very detailed manifesto — we have a mission, a vision, everything. Even if you’re just a one-day volunteer at Pride, when you join, you have to read the manifesto and accept it. We have to be on the same page about who we are and what we’re doing because if you don't have a strong ideological background, yopu cannot really focus on the operative part. I really believe most of these ideological building blocks were set down even before I came on board, and the team spent months working out how we define ourselves. We define ourselves as a feminist and anti-racist LGBTQ NGO. Who are our constituents? What are we working toward? What are the changes in society we want to see — not just in terms of legal gender recognition, marriage equality, adoption, and other legal changes, but also in our manifesto, where we say that we dream of a world where nobody forces norms on others based on their gender. A larger context — building a larger context of what kind of society you want to live in.

And then you have to think about how you implement that within the team. I think this is how gender justice and anti-authoritarianism really connect: transparency is a very important tool for building trust. Especially when informal groups start to formalize a little, there are a lot of unofficial structures — “oh, this person is usually the one who does this,” “this person is usually the one who says yes or no to that.” If we don’t pay attention, these unofficial structures can accidentally replicate the hierarchies of mainstream society.

Fortunately, we’ve been building these relationships for a very long time within civil society. We’ve been campaigning together with LGBTQ and human rights NGOs for a long time, but especially for the past six years, because we’ve had a lot of anti-LGBTQ laws coming out, and we stood up against all of them in coalition with other organizations. The largest coalition was 14 organizations — that was during the anti-LGBTQ referendum in 2022, which we defeated by convincing 1.7 million people to cast an invalid vote in the referendum.

Again, personal relationships matter. When you work together with someone, it’s really good to get to know them — who do I call at that organization if we need to greenlight a press release, for example? Sometimes it’s worth just going out for coffee and talking about how their dog is doing, because you need that kind of relationship by the time a crisis hits — so you can trust each other, ask for help, tell others when you’re really tired or overworked.

And about politicians — of course, we had to make the final decision to work together with the mayor, but we’d already had an elaborate strategy for many years. Once a year, we go away for a whole weekend and, from morning till evening, we work and strategize together. It’s a very collaborative process — we have a schedule we design ahead of time, and everybody leads different sessions, so it’s not one boss-type person talking over everyone else. Every session is facilitated by somebody different, every session has a note-taker, so every idea we come up with gets implemented in the long run. This is again with the same 16 people — even though we have an executive board that makes day-to-day decisions, the big two-year and five-year strategies are built with as many people involved as possible, which of course makes people more committed to executing the strategy.

With the mayor’s office, we’ve been working together since this mayor got elected in 2019. Before that, we had a mayor from the governing Fidesz party who was one of the most homophobic figures in that party, so we didn’t approach him. But we started working on small things. Putting the rainbow flag on city hall? Yes, thank you.. Maybe doing a reception together for politicians and diplomats before Pride. 
While you’re working on small things, you get to know each other, and you build trust, which goes both ways. 

Miriam Juan-Torres:

This working on little things was with the previous mayor?

Viktória Radványi:

No, this [current] mayor. We’d had this relationship for about seven years — small projects, small initiatives, maybe an exhibition one year — always something to keep the relationship moving and alive.

We were always very transparent and honest about what we wanted to do and what we didn’t want to do. Politicians sometimes want to take advantage of movements, and it takes time and practice to be able to sense that — we always take meetings with multiple people from our side so we can debrief afterward. But there are people who genuinely want a better city or a better country, and they want this job because it’s the job they want to do. It’s worth finding these people and figuring out the mechanisms around them — who their advisors are, how it all works.

We were fortunate with this mayor, because he’d already been attending Pride events when he was a political nobody — nobody knew him. He was the green politician with the glasses, and he was already in the front row at our events. So we knew these values were personally important to him, that he wasn’t just putting on a show to get a few votes, and that he understood the weight of the situation — that we’re fighting for everybody’s freedom of assembly, something much bigger than him, or me, or anyone currently working on this. He made a commitment early on that he would never make a decision without consulting us first, and would never communicate about anything without talking it through with us. That’s very rare from a politician, but it’s what’s needed, because civil society has a natural distrust toward those in power — and I think it’s important to stay critical of those in power. But it was also essential for us to secure the support of everybody willing to engage with us. That was the strategy: bring everybody on board, make it a big tent.

Laura Livingston:

A few times you’ve mentioned how this wasn’t just an attack on the LGBTQ community — though it was certainly that — but also about freedom of assembly for everyone, everybody’s freedoms. That’s not a connection everyone is able to make, but you were able to make it quite successfully and effectively. I’m wondering if you can share more about your communication strategy, and how you were able to frame this both as a human rights issue relating to the LGBTQ community and people who wanted to celebrate Pride, but also as implicating much bigger issues around freedom of assembly and everybody’s freedoms.

Viktória Radványi:

Our strategy was to make the communication first and foremost authentically queer, because it’s still about the LGBTQ community — we’re the ones risking prison to exercise our right to freedom of assembly. But at the same time, we needed to involve as many people as humanly possible. Our goal was to make the biggest Pride Hungary has ever seen. Our internal goal number was something like 70,000 to 80,000. Some of my colleagues thought maybe 100,000 — I wasn’t that optimistic, but we made security plans for 100,000, just to be on the safe side. And then we had 350,000. That was totally beyond our dreams.

What was important for us was not to repeat the false accusations — I think that’s very important in politics. Over the past six years, we’ve had to really learn how to understand politics and how to campaign. What Viktor Orbán was saying is that Pride is dangerous for children. We all know that’s just complete nonsense — there’s never been a scientific study that would even suggest it’s dangerous for anyone to see Pride. But this narrative plays very heavily into existing prejudice, and in cases like this, it’s important not to repeat what they’re saying about you. We said these were false accusations — that it’s crazy, unscientific, and just a way to crack down on the majority’s rights too.

This is something Hungarians have experienced before — this is how it worked in the socialist era. Sometimes they come after a small minority, and nobody bats an eye because “okay, I’m not part of that minority.” But what we learn from history is that crackdowns on minority rights are usually trial runs for cracking down on majority rights. So we started talking about this immediately: if you can falsely claim Prides are dangerous for children — which is obviously not true — then the next day you can claim a teachers’ protest is dangerous for children because the teachers aren’t teaching, they’re protesting. If we allow a government to start banning demonstrations based on whether the prime minister likes the content, they’ll be able to ban any type of demonstration — an opposition party’s demonstration, for example. Or what if somebody curses on stage at a demonstration — then maybe that’s “dangerous for children” too, and you shut down the whole demonstration. It’s a very dangerous path to go down.

What we learned to understand was the very specific political moment and context we were in, and what our options were. That requires reading a lot, and staying immersed in the political analysis of the moment. When Viktor Orbán made this move, he had been losing in the polls for four months — that was very important context. He was panicking, really scared he was going to lose the 2026 elections. His voter base was very unenthusiastic, not ready to go out and vote. He was grasping — trying to bring up something that would give his own voter base purpose and determination, because the economy was going down the drain and people couldn’t afford groceries or housing. It was very bad. So we understood that was the context.

Míriam Juan-Torres:

So you’re situating it in the political context, as you’re saying. You also mentioned the calculations around what the police would or wouldn’t do, and how that connects to Hungarian temperament and experience with security forces. Could you speak to that a bit as well?

Viktória Radványi:

Yeah, definitely. I emphasize this because our strategy can’t be copy-pasted — it really needs to be rooted in the local context, history, and the values of the people. Hungarians are very, very horrified by police violence — it just doesn’t fly in Hungary. In 2006, we had a previous government, a social democratic government, that went down the drain, and people were furious at the prime minister. There were huge protests, and the police used unnecessary excessive force — tear gas, many times. In the most horrific case, a person lost an eye from a rubber bullet. Fidesz was in opposition back then, and Fidesz was one of the political forces really mobilizing people for those protests.

So when Viktor Orbán got into power, it was very important to the image he was building that under his rule there would be no police violence — he portrays himself as the one who brings law and order and peace to the country, and that everybody stays in line, with no cases of someone suffering a life-altering injury from police violence.

So we knew there was a red line. We mobilized local and international media tremendously — we knew there would be huge international attention on the Pride march. We mobilized local and international elected officials, politicians, and observers tremendously, because — going back to authoritarianism — transparency, and the press covering events, really matters. The watchful eye of the press. We knew that politically, they couldn’t afford to have the police use excessive force or violence against peaceful protesters waving rainbow flags. Maybe a tiny minority would like that, but the majority of Hungarians want security, peace, protection, and order. Police hurting peaceful protesters doesn’t play well.

We knew this, and of course it’s also dangerous for the police themselves. The Minister of the Interior is a former police officer, which brings its own problems, but we knew that protecting the police force itself was very important to him, and that he wanted everything to go as predictably and safely as possible, to protect the police officers, who would also be in a dangerous position if things escalated. And they know us — we’ve been organizing Pride for 30 years. Our goal, in this sense, is the same as theirs: a peaceful, nonviolent march where everybody is safe, no one gets hurt, and everybody gets to exercise their right to assembly and share their political opinions. They know this is how we organize ourselves and how we control our crowd. That was an important strategic point.

Laura Livingston:

That’s so important. You mentioned earlier how authoritarians only really respond to a show of force or power. Another key strategy of authoritarians is to inspire a sense of hopelessness or powerlessness in the public — to make people feel there’s no other choice, or to drive them to disengage from public life and retreat into their private lives. Pride itself was a rejection of that. And it occurred in this larger political moment, where there’s also an opposition candidate threatening Orbán’s power — both of these things are piercing this veneer of absolute power that Orbán tries to project. I’m wondering if you can speak to that, and also tie it to this electoral moment Hungary is in right now.

Viktória Radványi:

Of course, all of these factors mattered. For us, it was a very important goal to show all Hungarians — not just LGBTQ people — that we’re actually able to stand up for ourselves and our communities, that if there’s an unjust and illegal law, we don’t have to accept it, we don’t have to obey.

At the end of the day, power is in the people’s hands — our representatives serve us, not the other way around. We wanted to construct a moment in this movement when everybody could feel in their skin that yes, we’re doing this, and we’re doing it in a way that aligns not just with the LGBTQ movement’s values, but with Hungarian values too — peaceful, nonviolent, everybody safe. We don’t have to fight the police; we can do this in a very peaceful, constructive way.

It also mattered that people had it on the horizon that we’re maybe not going to live under this regime forever, because that really limits your political imagination — it limits what you can imagine, what you think is possible. When we say hope needs to be built, this is what I think about: when everybody feels there’s no point in protesting, that it’s hopeless, you need to build up people’s political imagination to believe that the world they dream of is actually attainable, and that it becomes achievable by mobilizing such masses and driving people forward constructively.

We talked a lot about, and analyzed a great deal, what values matter to our fellow Hungarians. It’s not an easy thing — freedom matters, of course, but also tradition, patriotism, security, and — what else — family. There’s a lot of nuance to it, and a lot of research on this, but these are the core values that matter most to most Hungarians. It was important for us to step away a bit from international human rights language — it’s so out of touch. Nobody understands what these terms mean. It doesn’t move any emotions, doesn’t connect with what people know about the world or learned in school. It feels like a niche subject people write long posts about on Facebook.

So we built our communication and our connection with society around these values. We talked about how there were several freedom fights and revolutions in Hungarian history — in 1848, when Hungarians revolted against the Habsburg Empire, wanting freedom from censorship, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly. Or in 1956, when Hungarians rebelled against Soviet oppression, wanting the same things. We talked a lot about how we’re honoring the memory of these national heroes, carrying on their spirit and their message — protecting the same values: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, freedom from discrimination based on political views. These are not Western imports — that’s a classic move from anti-gender authoritarians, claiming all this gender-justice talk is a Western import. We said no — this has always been important to Hungarians, and we’re carrying on this fight, and we need everybody to join it. Our slogan was “We Are Home” — saying the LGBTQ community was always at home here, and we want to feel at home in our own country.

Míriam Juan-Torres: 

By the time this conversation comes out, we’ll know the results of the upcoming election. We’re wondering how this has played out in what you’re seeing on the ground right now, in terms of how people are engaging with the current election cycle — of course, we know there’s a very uneven playing field, that Orbán has significant control over the media landscape and so on. But in terms of that show of hope — Pride did seem to be a serious show of force, and, as you mentioned, it built people’s political imagination. Is that something that’s continued and is playing out now, in the lead-up to the election? Do you have any reflections on that?

Viktória Radványi:

It’s a bit hard to know, because the opposition leader avoids talking about LGBTQ altogether — it’s not really in the public discourse right now. But I think, especially for people who attended, or LGBTQ people who were watching the livestreams and seeing the photos, it had a really major impact — maybe even a lifelong impact. We got hundreds of messages from Hungarians, living in Hungary and abroad, saying that seeing this Pride was the first moment in years, maybe decades, that they felt proud to be Hungarian — including Hungarians who’d left the country because of the state of democracy here, and who were proud to say, “look what we did on the streets, look how we protested, look how Viktor Orbán simply couldn’t ban Pride — he failed miserably.”

I really hope it had a long-lasting impact on what Hungarians believe to be true, because this is what authoritarian regimes do — and I think it’s the same thing patriarchy does to women and LGBTQ people. Patriarchy makes you accept that you’re a second-class citizen, that you’ll never have equal rights, safety, security, or freedom — that you just have to be happy that things aren’t getting worse. It’s a very classic example, similar to how the far right sometimes appeals to conservative gay voters — [it’s the same premise:] they insinuate you’ll never be equal to “us,” but that they’ll protect you from some other threat — homophobic migrants, vote for me — the same way they do with women voters. If these leaders can make you believe you’ll never have the freedom and security you really want, they can say things like what Orbán says — that if the opposition wins, they’ll take your sons and they’ll die in the war in Ukraine.

What I hope this Pride gave people is the ability to believe that we actually deserve to live in a normal country, that we deserve fundamental human rights. I hope we’ll see the implications of this — not just in terms of the election, but let’s play with the idea that there will be a new government after April 12th. What happens after? For me, it’s much more important that if there is a new government, people in Hungary shouldn’t just say, “okay, we’re done” — because we’re really not done. We need to always demand that leaders give us the freedoms, security, and basic human rights we want, and we need to be very active, engaged participants in public life. I hope that will be the result.

Míriam Juan-Torres:

It’s interesting talking to you, because it reminds us — as we’ve seen over and over in this project — that there are a lot of commonalities across countries in the narratives being deployed. A lot of what you’re describing echoes how Vox uses similar arguments in Spain, and of course the MAGA coalition uses some as well. But there’s also a local translation — the importance of local context, and of learning from each other, of transnational cooperation. You mentioned the possibility of a next government — we’ll see what happens, obviously — but we can also learn from the example of Poland, which formed a coalition that faced a lot of challenges, and from the importance of preparedness and maintaining coalition strength.

Laura Livingston: 

Everything you’ve said about the importance — the necessity, even — of political and civic imagination is really beautiful and powerful, particularly for other places that, as Míriam was just saying, are experiencing similar scapegoating alongside government crackdowns and consolidating control. Pride 2025 happened 15 years into Orbán’s return to power and his tightening grip on it, and there’s probably so much you learned over the course of those 15 years, in the lead-up to this moment, that informed how you navigated the demonstration in 2025 — and so much you could share with organizations in other places experiencing these types of crackdowns and scapegoating. So this is a long way of asking: what advice would you give to organizations and countries facing similar contexts, who want to show the public what’s possible and continue to hold out hope for a different kind of politics and future, and to make the case that this is an issue that affects everyone?

Viktória Radványi: 

I think what happens in these authoritarian regimes is that civil society has to become really versatile and really resilient. What I mean by that is, maybe you might need to learn new things over a weekend — you have to be able to adapt very quickly, both to technological challenges, like cybersecurity, and to a rapidly changing political landscape. If you bring up the example of Hungary, Tisza opposition party didn’t exist two years ago; things can change very rapidly. You have to be able to adapt, and you have to earn the trust of your constituents — the people you’re asking to volunteer or donate. You have to be able to show that you’re actually able to create and deliver on your plans.

And that comes with a lot of technicalities, but I think it’s very important to have a good infrastructural foundation — and it’s not really about money, because sometimes it doesn’t cost anything. It’s about taking the time to learn: okay, what do I do about security, how do I prevent hackers from attacking my website? They try every year — we’re used to it by now. But you have to come up with solutions. The same is true for campaigning: if you don’t believe in yourself, that you can do it, why would you ask others to believe in you and join your protest, or donate their time or money?

So I think building hope and strength always comes from within. Dismantling patriarchy, dismantling authoritarian logic, starts in our hearts, and then it expands — to our circle of activists within the movement, and then to bigger circles. Our goal was to involve public figures — that’s when you can feel you’re really touching a lot of hearts, when you can bring on board celebrities, famous musicians. You have to create low-barrier entry points, because of course you can’t expect a famous 85-year-old actress to read your manifesto — but having her on stage is absolutely vital for a lot of people, because they all grew up with her.

Creating this easily accessible, self-sustainable, adaptable movement — sometimes even your mere survival sends a message of hope, if they can’t destroy you. The Hungarian government has done absolutely everything it can to make LGBTQ activists and human rights activists burn out, disengage, leave the country, give up activism and, I don’t know, go start a flower shop somewhere. But the fact that you always come back, that you keep building, and have attainable goals that you actually reach — that can be a message of hope that reaches more and more people. That’s what we’ve done, and I hope it works.

Laura Livingston: 

Thank you for joining us for this episode of (En)Gendering Authoritarianism, a special series of Who Belongs. The Engendering Authoritarianism Project is a partnership between the Othering & Belonging Institute and Over Zero. For more information on the project, and to check out our additional resources, visit us at engenderingauthoritarianism.com.