Protesters block four Budapest bridges for hours due to restrictions on the right of assembly

For the third week in a row, on Tuesday late afternoon, independent MP Ákos Hadházy and the opposition party Momentum held a demonstration in Budapest to protest the recently adopted Hungarian law banning Pride.

The protest, attended by thousands, started at Erzsébet bridge in downtown Budapest, one of the busiest thoroughfares between Pest and Buda.

"We must finally come to understand why we are here" – Ákos Hadházy said, addressing the crowd. The government's goal with the law that banned Pride is not to have fewer people attending Pride. Instead, their objective is to ensure that there would be fewer people showing up in front of the prison in Gyorskocsi Street when the police start arresting opposition politicians, and fewer people would protest in Kossuth Square when they blatantly rig an election. According to Hadházy, standing up against the law is necessary to prevent the authorities from daring to rig elections.

Catholic theologian Rita Perintfalvi also addressed those gathered. In her speech she praised Alexei Navalny, whom she called her role model for his courage in confronting Putin’s rule of terror. Quoting Navalny, she stressed that freedom and social progress require sacrifice, and that if we allow the authorities to suppress our rights, they will eventually take them away from everyone else too.

She also criticised the government for conflating members of the LGBTQ community with paedophile criminals, while failing to actually protect children from genuine harm. She pointed out that two thirds of the children growing up in the care of the state end up being victims of prostitution and slammed Prime Minister Orbán for doing nothing about it. She called on the Prime Minister not to talk about protecting children until he and his wife Anikó Lévai have taken responsibility for their role in the clemency scandal.

The organizers also played a video message from the former governor of the Hungarian National Bank, Péter Ákos Bod, in which he said that the right of assembly is not a luxury. He also stressed that when a government pits people against each other, and seeks to pit one group against another, when leaders are using dehumanising language, they real goal is to try to divert attention from the problems of their governance: from the fact that the trains are not running as they should, that there aren't enough doctors, and that the country is performing poorly while a small group of people continues to prosper – a reference to the business circles with close government connections, and the unusually fast enrichment of the family members of some members of the government, including the Prime Minister.

Once the speeches had concluded, the organizers broke the crowd up into several groups, which then walked to some of the other bridges. During the course of the evening, late into the night, four bridges had to be temporarily closed to traffic due to the protesters blocking them.

The protest ended shortly before midnight. Previously, when concluding his speech, Ákos Hadházy had stressed: “We must continue calling for the law to be repealed and we must not stop protesting.” He added that for this reason he had announced a 24-hour protest to the police for next Tuesday.