The Unfortunate Politics of LGBT Rights: Why Politicians Across Eastern Europe Abuse the Rights of Sexual Minorities
Tbilisi, Georgia. Lekso Lashkarava, cameraman for a private television station, was about to cover the events of a LGBT parade planned for 5th of July. Instead, right-wing extremists, encouraged by the clergy of the Georgian Orthodox Church, violently assaulted Lekso and other journalists preparing to cover the march, and then they occupied the headquarters of two LGBT organisations. Symbolically, the attackers burned the flags of the LGBT movement and of the European Union. Lekso Lashkarava was among those severely injured in the events, and a few days later died aged just 36.
This is just one tragic story on the life of minorities and independent journalists in Eastern Europe. According to a country ranking compiled by IGLA-Europe, an LGBTI rights watchdog, Eastern European countries are significantly behind their Western counterparts in terms of respecting the rights of LGBTI people. While no Eastern European countries are ranked in the top ten safest countries in Europe, they dominate the least safe places for sexual minorities.
Where did all this violence come from?
Politicians are partly to blame for this situation. In Georgia, the government failed to ensure the physical safety of journalists and sexual minorities, restricted the right to free expression and freedom of assembly by subsequently canceling the Pride March, and even rhetorically aided anti-LGBT groups in an attempt to increase electoral support ahead of local elections that are seen as a referendum on the ruling Georgian Dream. The government also sought to legitimise breaking a deal on judicial and electoral reform brokered by the European Union and the United States, two allies who spoke out on the violent events at the Tbilisi Pride.
In fact, Lawmakers across Eastern Europe, and not just in notable Hungary and Poland, have defied the criticism of LGBT activists and European authorities by introducing laws that restricted the rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, and even single women, men, and gender-neutral people. Other leading politicians, including those in the Czech Republic, Romania, and Bulgaria, adopted anti-LGBT rhetoric and framed Christian and traditional family identities as under attack.
Critics interpret these messages as ‘dog-whistling’, a way of signaling support for extreme views without explicitly defending them. A notable example, popularized by French writer Renaud Camus, is the ‘great replacement theory’ conspiracy which claims that ‘white’ Europeans are being replaced by ‘brown’ immigrants. In Georgia and Moldova, countries seeking European integration, such rhetoric endangers the European and anti-corruption path that their populations are otherwise committed to.
Widespread exclusion and discrimination
While not all hate crimes against the LGBT community end as tragically as Georgian cameraman Lekso Lashkarava’s case, the extent to which they affect the community is undeniable. Even in Western countries, people who belong to the LGBT community, especially teenagers, are at high risk of depression and other mental health issues stemming from social exclusion and stigmatization. Laws that restrict access to information on LGBT identities for young people, like the “anti-pedophilia” law in Hungary, only harm young people and their development, says ILGA Europe. Hate crimes aimed at members of the LGBT community are also less likely to be prosecuted if the identities of the victims are not recognised by the law, as is the case in Hungary and other Eastern European countries.
Many members of the LGBT community, feeling unsafe, lacking the ability to legally change their gender, or to get married, simply decide that it’s best to leave their home countries. This is the case of Boldizsar Nagy, author of a children’s storybook that covers ethnically diverse and LGBT families, who decided to leave Hungary after receiving death threats over her book covered by the government ban on LGBT content. Studies have even shown that countries worldwide lose out on billions of dollars due to productive workers who flee from places they experience as unwelcoming towards the LGBT community.
Political polarization: or how to divide and conquer
When politicians attack the rights of LGBTI minorities, they are usually trying to distract the electorate from other issues they may be performing poorly at, or they try to polarize the electorate in order to introduce autocratic measures that populations would usually oppose. Viktor Orban’s Hungary is a case in point of these strategies. Most recently, Hungarian lawmakers introduced a law restricting the public portrayal of homosexuality or non-conforming gender identities in schools and the media, which critics say conflates homosexuality with pedophilia and introduces restrictions to the rights of members of the LGBT community.
Civil society, and even academics at the Corvinus University, led by allies of PM Viktor Orban, declared the law to be discriminatory. In a meeting with European leaders, Dutch PM Mark Rutte declared that Hungary “has no business being in the European Union anymore”. Viktor Orban has likely anticipated much of the backlash to the child protection law. Then why was the law initiated? For a number of reasons.
First, the Hungarian government was already involved in a number of less popular scandals.
One was the government’s leaked plan to build a Chinese university in Budapest with €1.5 Billion loans from a Chinese state-owned bank, more than Hungary spent on the entire Higher education system in 2020. Other unpopular issues included placing Hungary’s motorways under concession for 35 years and privatizing, and the poor pandemic management of the government that led to one of the highest mortality rates in the world.
Second, Viktor Orbán attempted to divide the six-party opposition ideologically diverse alliance that seeks to unseat him in the upcoming 2022 elections. Only Jobbik, the formerly far-right but now self described Christian conservative party, voted for Viktor Orban’s law. And although Jobbik was criticized for its decision, the issue abated after the party announced its boycott Viktor Orban’s plan for a referendum on the anti-pedophilia law. The referendum, announced just after evidence surfaced of his government’s involvement in the Pegasus surveillance scandal, may be timed to distract attention from the oppositions’ plans for a second round of primaries that will decide its prime minister candidate.
Why fighting against LGBT rights may backfire
Viktor Orbán’s strategy may not be perfect. Polls already suggest that after a long time, the Hungarian opposition is neck and neck with Fidesz-KDNP, Viktor Orbán’s political alliance. They also show that Hungarians are already becoming more and more progressive, with 46% supporting same-sex marriage, according to an IPSOS poll. Furthermore, Hungarians may sense that Viktor Orban’s fight against ‘LGBTI ideology’ is disingenuous, and then decide to vote against him.
This is probably what happened in socially conservative Romania in 2018 when the ruling social-democratic party (PSD), facing a fall in popularity, initiated a ‘referendum for the family’ that sought to constitutionally meaning define the family as the marriage between a man and a woman, even though gay marriage is not legal in Romania. Although conservative groups, some funded by their US counterparts, supported the initiative, along with the influential Orthodox Church, the initiative failed after low turnout invalidated the referendum.
Change from the outside? Not really
Under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the European Union should have been a strong promoter of LGBT rights in Europe and beyond. The 2020–2025 LGBTIQ Equality Strategy of the European Commission sought to enforce the European Union’s motto: ‘unity in diversity’. Even in states outside the European Union, the Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), seek to guard over the rights of LGBTI people across 47 European states.
The European Union has tried to convince Poland and Hungary into complying with European Law and LGBT rights, but with limited impact. In response to the Polish ‘LGBT-free zones’, the European Parliament declared the EU to be an ‘LGBT freedom zone’. In response to the Hungarian law against the portrayal of LGBT people in schools and the media, the European Parliament declared Hungary to be in breach of ‘EU values, principles and law’ and the European Commission initiated legal action against Hungary.
Another European Parliament non-binding decision asked European member countries, including Romania, to legalise same-sex marriage. Sources say the European Commission is planning on opening an infringement process against Romania for not respecting EU law and the verdicts of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on matters of same-sex marriage. Despite these pressures, Hungary plans to hold its referendum on LGBT portrayal, and there are no plans in Romania to introduce same-sex marriage, and most municipalities in Poland are still ‘LGBT-free’, despite threats that the EU will withdraw funds from the regions.
Change must come from within
More effective change can come from the inside. In Moldova, a country on the path to further European Integration, former President Igor Dodon, financially supported by the Kremlin, sought reelection by appealing to ‘traditional values’ and anti-LGBT rhetoric. Dodon tried to defeat Maia Sandu, a pro-European politician educated at Harvard, by spreading rumours about Sandu’s sexuality (she is a single woman without children, he would remind his conservative electorate).
Moldovans knew better and elected Maia Sandu in the presidential election and then gave her pro-European party a sweeping victory in the parliamentary election. Although Moldova has not transformed itself into an LGBT paradise, common sense has overruled the use of discriminatory rhetoric, proving that change can come from within, even in a state characterized more by patronage than freedom of assembly or expression.
Sources for my articles can be found here
