Romanian Pride goes ahead despite fourth consecutive ban
Bucharest Pride in 2021 (Getty Images)
An LGBTQ+ Pride march in Romania went ahead at the weekend despite it being banned for the fourth consecutive year.
The 25 July march took place in Oradea, a city in western Romania with a population of around 180,000 people.
Ark Oradea, the event’s organisers, reportedly submitted more than 100 potential routes for the march to take, but the city’s municipality rejected all of them and declined to grant permission for the fourth year in a row.
On Saturday, the gendarmes, Oradea’s military police, issued fines before the march even set off. According to Digi 24, many of the marchers began chanting: “I don’t care, I love it,” in response.
Nicu Ştefănuţă, the Vice President of the European Parliament, criticised the gendarmes for their response to the matter.
“It is shameful for the Romanian state of the European unfreedoms what is happening now in Oradea. People from all over Europe and at least eight European embassies are marching. This shame won’t wash away easily,” he wrote on 25 July.
“Romania has started to ban, fine, threaten people who protest peacefully. It seems that from the lesson of Hungary the Romanian state learned exactly the opposite: that he has to tighten the knot so that today’s bankrupt parties can keep power.”
He went on to say that “it’s not just the mayor of the town” of Oradea to blame. “The whole political class in Parliament and Government is to blame, which passively witnesses something that puts a black stain on the map of Europe.”
Ştefănuţă concluded: “These young people are not ‘some LGBT’, they are not ‘a minority’, they are exactly your children, the future of this state.”
Ahead of the march, Ark Oradeo president and co-founder Iulian Dițiu told the Guardian: “Every year the local authorities have managed to find legal or technical excuses to ban Oradea Pride events.”
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