Budapest Pride, or Budapest Pride Film and Cultural Festival, is Hungary's largest annual LGBT event. Of the week-long festival, the march is the most visible event. The march has historically been known under several names, including Budapest Gay Dignity Procession (), and has taken place each year since 1997, usually on the first Saturday of July, proceeding along Budapest's most expansive thoroughfare, Andrássy Avenue, between the City Park (Városliget) and Elizabeth Square (Erzsébet tér). Though much smaller in scale than similar gay pride parades in Western Europe and the Americas, around one to two thousand marchers typically participate in the Budapest procession. Radical right-wing demonstrators and hooligans have severely disrupted the Budapest Pride marches held in 2007 and 2008, casting uncertainty over the future of the event. However, Budapest Pride has been held successfully in the intervening years, with minimal incidents.
In November 2021, Budapest Pride board member Viktória Radványi was honoured with a "Generation Change Award" at the 2021 MTV Europe Music Awards in Budapest.
Festival
Although the march is the best known aspect of the festival, the Budapest Pride Film and Cultural Festival includes many other events, such as its film festival, discussions, exhibitions, theater productions, author readings, picnics, speeches, religious events, concerts, and parties. In 2011, the festival had over 100 events.
Counterprotests
Early years
There was only a smattering of public protest against the first eleven Budapest gay parades, until the one held in July 2007. In 2003, prominent right-wing radical György Budaházy and a group of about 30 anti-gay protestors blew whistles and chanted slogans such as "dirty queers" at marchers as the parade crossed the Elizabeth Bridge. In 2004, a few activists from the center-right Christian-Democratic Hungarian Democratic Forum political party stood along the route of the procession blowing whistles and holding signs displaying quotations from the Bible, while police took one man into custody for throwing a rock at an officer at the beginning of the parade. In 2005, about 10 neo-Nazis taunted paraders at one point along the route, while the notorious blogger, inciter and media manipulator Tamás Polgár (known by the alias "Tomcat") rigged to a pillar of the Chain Bridge a rolled-up, egg-filled sign, which he intended to unfurl via remote control as the procession crossed the bridge, thus dropping its contents down onto the marchers. However, the remote-control malfunctioned, forcing Tomcat and an accomplice to climb up the pillar to manually disengage the sign reading "stupid queer gays" (hülye buzi melegek), though only after the parade had passed underneath. In 2006, about a dozen activists from the radical right-wing Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary) political party and another dozen protestors affiliated with the right-wing extremist Hungarian Self-Defense Movement (Magyar Önvédelmi Mozgalom) heckled participants in the parade.
2007
The 12th Budapest Gay Dignity Procession held on July 7, 2007, was the first to encounter substantial, belligerent protest. Some 2000 participants marched from Procession Square (Felvonulási Tér) past Heroes' Square down Andrássy Avenue. Several balloon-decorated flatbed trucks marshaled the parade down the avenue, blaring techno-pop from mounted speakers and carrying the standard array of shirtless young men, transvestites, neo-punk lesbians and campy-costumed figures, including a man in tight shorts, a black shirt, and a clerical collar, who held a big pink book bearing a cross and was later to become the focus of attacks from the far-right media, particularly Kuruc.info.
Several hundred police escorted the procession in full riot gear, ready to protect participants from expected aggression en route to the parade's destination at a dance club located on the Pest side of the Danube called Buddha Beach. Just as in 2006, the extraparliamentary Jobbik party and the Hungarian Self-Defense Movement had organized demonstrations against the gay parade. However a culture of right-wing public protest and violent hooliganism had emerged in Hungary during the intervening year with the outbreak of massive anti-government demonstrations known collectively as the "fall disturbances" (őszi zavargások) in September and October 2006, prompting police to expect that the 2007 protests against the gay parade would be much more extensive and aggressive.