Good morning,
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has put gay-bashing front and centre in his re-election campaign by fining Budapest mayor Gergely Karácsony on Wednesday (without trial) for holding a Pride march in June in defiance of a ban.
Orbán's homophobia is nothing new and probably appeals to the kind of young Hungarian men who follow the online 'manosphere' or older, church-going types.
Escalating the clash on LGBTI-rights ahead of the election will get him lots of Russian-bot fuelled "engagement," while any negative EU reactions will add grist to his eurosceptic mill.
But for his part, Karácsony said on Wednesday he was a "proud defendant".
"When people who want to live, to love, to be happy are betrayed by their own country, betrayed by their government, resistance is a duty," he said.
Orbán's Fidesz party is currently a massive 10 points behind in polls, as people look to a younger, more EU-friendly candidate following 15 years of one-man rule by the 62-year-old prime minister.
And if the Karácsony fine bumped Orbán's incel/geriatric vote, then he risked losing any swing votes among the friends, families, or sympathisers of the 200,000 people who went to the Pride march.
In any case, respect for minorities - whether Jews, Roma, or gay people - is enshrined deep in the EU treaties, because World War II showed that persecution of such groups is a precursor to fascism and conflict.
So I do hope the EU throws the book at Orbán based purely on merit, election or no election.
Meanwhile, it's always worth remembering that Orbán's former right-hand man, József Szájer, was once caught out at a gay orgy in Brussels, exposing the hypocritical hollowness of Fidesz's values.
"The more conservative people are in public, the more perverted they are behind closed doors," the orgy organiser, David Manzheley, told EUobserver at the time.
Rumours have long swirled around the sexuality of one Orbán cabinet member.
So wouldn't it be delicious if there was a Szájer 2.0, thrown-out-of-the-closet moment in the run-up to the 12 April vote?
- Andrew Rettman, foreign-affairs editor
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