7. God, nation, family and control The 2021 anti-LGBT law cast light on the tendency – still a feature of movements on the far right in their various forms – to use an illiberal playbook to strike at social bodies. It is, in fact, indirectly an anti-NGO law, as it bans bodies held not to fall into line with the Orbán ideology. To cite from the law,“NGOs with controversial orienta­tions” must not be sex education providers. This use and abuse of identity propaganda as a dissent-­repression mechanism was even more glaring in 2025, a year after the new elections, when the Orbán regime was feeling under pressure from a former party acolyte, Peter Magyar, who had decided to break away from it and form his own party, Tisza, and whose popularity in the polls was overtaking that of Fidesz. Orbán’s radicalisation thus took the form of heightened repression and in February 2025 he announced a Pride ban the following month, with an amendment designed to ban meetings which “promote and exhibit deviations from gender identity corresponding to birth sex, gender reassignment and homo­sexuality” with fines for those breaking the ban. The Constitution was changed, too, on the basis of the party’s large parlia­mentary majority, according“children’s right to suitable development” precedence over all other rights. Fidesz thus slipped a bomb into the debate capable of jeopardising the right to assembly which, together with the use of face-recognition surveillance to identify those breaking the rules, showed the true nature and goals of these various mechanisms – the introduction of a powerful repression mechanism. The effectiveness of this illiberal barrage is founded on its step by step nature. In the case of Hungary it is especially clear that that the Orbán system has availed itself over the years of mechanisms which can then be activated at a later stage. The Pride ban was based on an earlier anti-LGBT law and used traditional family rhetoric to bring in dissent control by the back door. Other key European sovereignist buzzwords such as ‘nation,‘sovereignty’ and‘security’ can similarly be used for authoritarian purposes. There are many instances of this, and they range from Hungary to Italy. In autumn 2022, when the Meloni government had only just been elected, and the very same days in which a crowd had gathered undisturbed in Predappio to cele­brate Mussolini with a Fascist salute, a new anti-gather­ing law known as the‘anti-rave’ law was drawn up. Not long afterwards, in 2025, Giorgia Meloni‘proudly’ used emergency powers to approve – with a decree law proce ­dure – a measure which had actually already existed as a draft law for over a year. Meloni argued that the meas­ure“put words into practice against burglars” and that this was a “law necessitated by commitments made to citizens and with those called on to defend our security on a daily basis.” But the‘security’ label was used by the governing majority as a cover for sections which are, at the very least, unsettling, such as the contents of article 31 which gives the secret services powers to infiltrate and perform surveillance on associations whose ends are terrorist or subversive. This is not a matter of defending police officers from criminal attacks or protecting the more vulnerable sections of the population, despite Meloni’s claims, but of protecting high-level intelligence bodies from the public eye and from punishment. In Orbán’s Hungary, the word‘sovereignty’ is one of the most frequently distorted to cover up dissent-repres­sion mechanisms. In the spring of 2025 Hungary’s par ­liament drew up a draft law known as the‘transparen­cy in public life’ law which was soon stigmatised by critics as a‘Russia law’, on the grounds that it used the ‘foreign agent’ argument to repress dissent. In addition to banning political and social bodies, including the press, from receiving foreign funding(including Hun­garians with dual citizenship) without authorisation, it also handed over investigations into, and lists of, such cases to a Sovereignty Protection Office to be presided over by a prime ministerial appointee(and one of his allies). The‘sovereignty threat’ is defined by this body in terms of whether or not individuals and bodies abide by certain of the principles enshrined in the Orbán Constitution, such as those in which Hungary is referred to as democratic or its heterosexual family basis. God, nation, family and control 13