Contemporary Hungary definitely resembles more and more the absurd Hungary of the communist period depicted in The witness (1969) by Peter Bacso, this cult satirical film where the party’s followers are gradually swallowed up by the propaganda machine of a system gone mad. Monday, November 6, it was a loyalist of nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Laszlo L. Simon, director of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, who paid the price.
For having been unable to enforce government orders telling him to bar minors’ access to an exhibition of prints from the famous World Press Photo prize, Mr. Simon was brutally dismissed by the Minister of Culture, Janos Csak. The latter criticized the director, who is himself a former deputy and Mr. Orban’s secretary of state, “for not having respected its legal obligations” arising from a law passed in 2021 to prohibit “to show homosexuality to minors”.
This text, which has given rise to strong criticism from NGOs defending LGBT+ people since its adoption and which has earned Hungary yet another sanction procedure from the European Commission, has had a sword of Damocles hanging over its head for two years. of all the creators of this central European country.
Children’s books in blister packs
In recent months, Hungarian booksellers have been forced to sell children’s books showing homosexual characters in blister packs or are even forced to ban them from their shelves if they are less than two hundred meters from a school or school. of a church.
This time, these are the very harmless images of the Filipina photographer Hannah Reyes Morales who triggered the censorship machine of power. This artist was rewarded in April by the World Press for his work for the New York Times about life in an LGBT retirement community living together in a house in Manila. “Visitors can see men wearing women’s clothes and stiletto heels, and putting on lipstick,” denounced, outraged, opposition MP Dora Duro, who sparked the scandal at the end of October, after visiting this museum primarily devoted to Magyar history.
Vice-president of the openly racist and homophobic Our Fatherland party, this elected official wants to be even more radical than Mr. Orban’s Fidesz on gender issues. She denounced the exhibition in Parliament by asking the Ministry of Culture to enforce the law passed in 2021. The latter complied by requiring the museum to ban minors from entering the exhibition.
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