BUDAPEST – Pride in Japan has never needed permission. Each summer, hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ rights supporters and allies gather in Tokyo for a festival of color, corporate sponsorship and careful celebration. There are no bans to defy, no police barriers to test. And yet, beneath the ease, there is an absence: the legal recognition that would make that visibility equal.

That absence was on my mind during the annual Budapest Pride march, which I attended here last month. The students I spoke with at the June 27 march had not come for the reason the cameras assumed. They had come, they said, to defend freedom of expression and assembly — rights the previous government had trampled. What the march stood for was larger: the right to gather without permission and to be recognized as who you say you are.

The mood was lighter than a year ago, and that lightness is the news. This was Budapest’s 31st Pride march, the first since Viktor Orban, who spent his final year in office trying to outlaw the march, was voted out April 12 by an overwhelming majority. After 16 years, the strongman is gone. The cameras that ringed last year’s march — a surveillance effort to identify participants — are gone with him.

The problem is that the law that tried to ban the march is still on the books.

That sentence contains the whole story. In March 2025, Orban’s government classified Pride as a banned assembly, with fines for attendees, up to a year in prison for organizers and police authorized to use facial recognition on the crowd. The march went ahead anyway. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people came — many first-timers, many straight — in the largest anti-government protest in years. Budapest’s mayor was charged for defying the ban. The case was dropped only in June, after a European court struck the law down, not after Parliament repealed it.

This year, the machinery was switched off. Police authorized the march, ruled there were no........

© The Japan Times