6. Fighting the imagination The illiberal training ground cuts across right wing movements of various origins: as we will see a com­mon framework, a playbook, even links Hungarian con­trol over cartoons considered‘queer’ to the far right battles against Peppa Pig. “Gender is a big problem for Europe”: it was Orbán who said this to the international press on the occasion of the 2022 elections which gave him an even bigger par ­liamentary majority than he’d won at the previous elec­tions. The international mobilisation witnessed in the Hungarian capital in June 2025, in response to‘gay pride’, shone the spotlight on a tried and tested attack launched in synergy with other European formations. It was pointed out to me in an interview that“[t]he Hun­garian anti-LGBT law and Putin’s 2013 law resemble one another” by Áron Demeter of Hungary’s Amnesty. Even before an Orbán-esque law was visited on the Hungarian parliament in 2021, this thread leads us to Poland, where PiS – bound to Orbán by a dense network of political rela ­tionships and to Meloni by their shared membership of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group(ECR) – acted as a forerunner.“LGBT-free zones” – areas“liberated from LGBT ideology” – were already commonplace in the south-east of Poland in 2019. The following year the presi ­dential candidate supported by PiS, Andrej Duda, organ­ised an electoral campaign of unprecedented homophobic ferocity and won a second term. The end of the electoral cycle in the summer of 2020 did not tone down this homo ­phobic tirade and PiS – which also governed the country at this time – stepped up the repression, with an example being the arrests and harassment of those taking part in a Warsaw pro-LGBT march in August that year. This attack on LGBT rights was used as a training ground for both division strategies aiming to fragment society and polarise debate with identity battles against minorities and for repression purposes. In fact the pride march ban was part of a package which encompassed limits on the right to assembly and the political abuse of face-recognition surveillance. Let us now wind the thread back to the beginning. Despite polls not finding Hungarian society to be homo­phobic and LGBT activists describing it as having one of central Europe’s most mature movements, this incessant illiberal barrage began with the advent of Orbán’s shift to authoritarianism. As far back as 2011, Jozsef Szajer – Fidesz’s fourth member and a friend of the prime minis­ter’s since his time as a student in Oxford – contributed to the new version of the Constitution which omitted to recognise gay couples. And a decade later, this same Szajer – by now Fidesz’s official liaison officer with the European Parliament – was caught at a gay orgy in Brussels. This is not the only case of Orbán’s most fer­vently pro-traditional family propagandists tripping up. A further case in point is another of the prime minister’s closest allies, Katalin Novák,(‘traditional’) Family Minis­ter, liaison officer with the World Congress of Families and the backbone of relations with Lega exponents such as the current Italian Presidente della Camera Lorenzo Fontana. Novak chaired the Budapest Demographic Summit which brought Meloni to the stage as premier. Then, in February 2024 she had to stand down from her post as President of the Republic(a role she had held since 2022) after revelations emerged of her having given a presidential pardon to the deputy manager of the Bicske orphanage who had tried to cover up his child abuse by attempting to force children concerned to lie to the courts. This did not stop Meloni from inviting Novak to the Atlantic Council ceremony in September 2024. And the by-then former Hungarian president brought down by this child abuse scandal took selfies of her friendly meetings with Meloni and Elon Musk, under the catchphrase:“Only children can save the world.” Our thread takes us to Orbán’s anti-LGBT law, an example of the way the illiberal mechanism works to distort the public debate, with the prime minister’s par­ty giving a law initially designed to increase the severi­ty of child abuse sentences a homophobic twist. But in early June 2021 – prior to the final vote – Fidesz amended the text, adding bans on contents promoting homosexuality and changing the nature of the law. Under the rallying cry of“defending children’s rights” the law asserted a “ban on making contents deviating from the sex assigned them at birth or which promote homosexuality available to children.” Teachers and educators were to abide by the principle enshrined in the law: only the heterosexual family had Fighting the imagination 11