five months in, hungary's new government named the first orbán law it will undo, and it's the gay adoption one
via Reuters, with background from NBC News, Human Rights Watch and France 24.
Péter Magyar has been prime minister of Hungary since May, which is long enough that people had started asking the obvious question out loud: you won, so when does any of it actually come off the books? On Saturday, at a briefing in Budapest, he finally named one. The 2020 adoption rule, the one that took gay parents out of Hungarian law without ever using the word gay, is going.
He framed it as a competence problem rather than a civil rights one, which is its own kind of tell. The decision in an adoption case, he said, should not rest with "the minister, a politician," but with "professionals capable of determining the conditions" a child needs to grow into a happy adult. No dates. No bill number. Just the first brick anyone in this government has agreed to touch.
what the 2020 rule actually does
It is a beautiful piece of bureaucratic nastiness, and worth understanding, because it never says what it does. Hungary has never allowed same-sex couples to adopt jointly. What it allowed, up to 2020, was for one partner to apply as a single person, and everybody involved understood the arrangement. So Orbán's Fidesz did not ban gay adoption. It passed a law requiring every single-person applicant to be personally signed off by the family affairs minister, and let the minister's inbox do the rest.
That went through in December 2020 alongside a constitutional amendment redefining a family as a mother who is a woman and a father who is a man. We covered the same device running in the other direction earlier this month, when Ecuador's courts told single gay people they could not adopt either. The wording changes country to country. The mechanism does not.
what magyar did not say
Everything else. The 2021 law restricting how schools, broadcasters and advertisers may show gay and trans people is still standing, even after the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in April that it violates EU law by stigmatizing and marginalizing the people it names. In June, France 24 found no repeal timeline at all. The 2025 constitutional amendment allowing the government to ban LGBTQ public events, which passed 140 votes to 21 and put a year in prison on the table for Pride organizers, is also still there.
he has the votes and is choosing the order
Magyar's Tisza party has 141 of 199 parliamentary seats. He does not lack the votes. He is choosing his order, and he has chosen to start with the quietest, most technical, least chantable item on the list, the one that can be sold to a Hungarian voter as taking politics out of a children's file rather than as doing anything for us. Fine. Bulgaria's top court got there through paperwork too. We have learned to take the win in whatever grammar it arrives in.
Somewhere in Budapest there is a lesbian couple who filed as one person years ago and have been waiting on a minister's signature ever since. They are the point. Not the briefing.
