Irish Examiner view: EU has to challenge Orban’s homophobia

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, centre, talks to Bulgaria's President Rumen Radev, left, and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades during an EU summit at the European Council building in Brussels This week. Hungary's anti-LGBTI policies have come under attack from some EU leaders. Picture: Olivier Hoslet

The tension between diversity and solidarity can be the grit in the oyster that wears away common purpose. That unease can be managed or allowed to wreak its own kind of havoc. On Wednesday, European leaders in Brussels confronted a deepening, deliberate divergence from the core principles of tolerance, humanity, and individual rights and protections, when they challenged Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. 

Orbán’s government has introduced a law aimed at LGBTI people that is so offensive to EU values that the meeting heard unprecedented calls for Budapest to quit the community if it feels it necessary to reject its culture, values, and rules. Orbán’s legislation, purportedly about combatting paedophilia, bans the depiction of LGBT people and “gay propaganda” in media content prepared for children. Frustration with Hungary — and Poland — has been building because of Orbán’s dilution of democratic freedoms. This includes serial rejection of EU conclusions on human-rights issues. The conflict spilled into passionate confrontation when Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, asked Mr Orbán why Hungary did not leave the EU if it rejected its laws — blunt language rarely, if ever, heard at a European Council meeting.