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The divide widens the further one moves west to east, said Jacob Poushter, Pew's associate director for global attitudes research.įar-right protesters clash with police during a gay pride parade in the Polish city of Lublin in 2018. In nearly all Eastern European countries - with the exception of the Czech Republic - the majority oppose it. People in Western and Eastern Europe differ in attitudes to the LGBT community, polling numbers show.Ī majority of those polled in all Western European countries support same-sex marriage, according to polling data from the Pew Research Center. However, homosexuality remained illegal in Serbia and Kosovo until 1994, in Macedonia until 1996, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina until 1998. Yugoslavia began chipping away at its anti-homosexual laws. Three years later in 2001, the country decriminalized homosexuality while harmonizing its laws with the EU to gain membership.
WHEN IS GAY PRIDE MONTH IN EUROPE FREE
In Romania, the last person imprisoned for being gay walked free in 1998. Bulgaria followed suit seven years later in 1968. Hungary decriminalized homosexuality in 1961 as did then-Czechoslovakia. Poland, for instance, decriminalized homosexuality in 1932, which was really early," said Agnieszka Koscianska, a visiting professor at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, in an interview with RFE/RL. "In the former East Bloc, these countries were really progressive towards LGBT rights. Going back even further, many countries in the region were at the vanguard of advancing such rights, at least on paper. At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Central and Eastern Europe was generally welcoming to LGBT people. It wasn't so long ago that things were different. It shows signs of an establishment of some sort of a new Iron Curtain," said Marko Milosavljevic, a professor of journalism and media policy at the University of Ljubljana, in comments to Reuters back in July. "I think that the whole attitude of this alignment is very anti-European. It highlighted a wider rift across the continent, with some analysts arguing an "Eastern European Union" is emerging based on positions that contradict fundamental EU values such as the rule of law, human rights, media rights, and LGBT rights.
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EU leaders condemned the new Hungarian legislation with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen calling it a "shame." But nearly all the leaders of former communist Eastern Europe refused to sign a letter condemning the Hungarian law. Much outrage was directed at the new Hungarian legislation, which critics say equates homosexuality with pedophilia, but which Budapest and its nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban argued would protect children and families. Low points of the year included an attack on a LGBT community center in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, led by a far-right leader who ran in the country's presidential election a new law in Hungary banning information in schools deemed to promote homosexuality and gender change and several so-called "LGBT-ideology free zones" continued to operate in Poland. In the past year, we've seen increased political repression against LGBT people, a stark rise in socioeconomic hardship, and the spreading of LGBT-phobic hatred on the streets and online across the region," Paradis told RFE/RL in e-mailed comments.
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It was, however, part of a wider trend over a wider swath of Europe, argues Evelyne Paradis, executive director of the European branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA-Europe). Populist governments in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere were able to exploit frustrations and fears, some stoked by church leaders, some by the grinding COVID-19 pandemic, to push through anti-LGBT legislation. From physical attacks to online abuse and legislative setbacks, the LBGT community in Central and Eastern Europe had little to cheer about in 2021.