Pride organisers vow to march in Romanian city that has blocked event four years in a row

Campaigners in a Romanian city have vowed to go ahead with plans for a Pride march after local authorities denied them permission for the fourth consecutive year.

Since 2023, campaigners in the western city of Oradea – population 180,000 – have sought authorisation for Pride events. Each year, however, they have come up against opposition, turning Oradea into the only major city in the EU where local authorities have repeatedly blocked Pride plans.

“Every year the local authorities have managed to find legal or technical excuses to ban Oradea Pride events,” said Iulian Ditiu, the co-founder and president of ARK Oradea, the local organisers of Pride.

In 2024, for example, they were told that none of the city’s parks were available at the times requested, he said. The following year, campaigners provided local authorities with 12 potential routes for the march, only to be told that none of the routes were possible.

Before this year’s proposed march, slated to be held on Saturday, organisers submitted more than 100 route options. On Wednesday the city said that none of the routes were viable as they overlapped with other events or with major public infrastructure works.

The city’s mayor, who is from a party that describes itself as liberal, conservative and Christian democratic, did not reply to a request for comment from the Guardian.

Ditiu pointed to the wider significance of the consecutive bans. “It feels like the message that they are trying to send our way is that we’re not welcome here,” he said. “They have never said out loud that they are banning Pride for LGBT reasons. They’re always hiding behind technical reasons.”

As organisers grapple with the possibility of another ban, their plight has attracted international attention. Before this year’s march, 152 organisations from 30 countries signed a statement calling on officials to allow the march to take place in “complete safety” and in line with EU law.

“After four consecutive years in which the Pride march has been unable to take place, there can be no question of administrative or logistical difficulties,” the statement noted. “When an authority consistently prevents a community from assembling peacefully, a principle that concerns all citizens is undermined.”

Their appeal, delivered recently to the local administration in Oradea, drew a direct comparison between Oradea and Budapest, where Hungary’s former leader Viktor Orbán and his rightwing populist movement had sought to ban Pride events. “In recent years, the restriction of Pride marches has become, in several European states, an indicator of democratic backsliding and the weakening of the rule of law,” the statement said.

Ditiu said that he and other organisers were planning to go ahead with the march on Saturday despite the lack of permission, in a repeat of the decision made last year. In 2025, between 500 and 600 people turned up to an unauthorised march, with nine people later receiving fines that amounted to the equivalent of about €4,000 (£3,420) he said.

This time representatives from several diplomatic missions have already said they will participate, as well as the Romanian ombudsman, he said.

The resulting situation was both “encouraging and disappointing”, said Ditiu. On one hand, “the institutions that are supposed to protect the rights of every community are trying to use our community as a scapegoat”, he said. “But many more people are behind us, many more people understand what the stakes are.”

He pointed to the wave of international solidarity they had received as an example. “This is not an LGBT issue. This is a democratic issue, it’s about the freedom to public assembly,” he said. “And if the local LGBT community here in Oradea can be denied this basic human right without any repercussion, it can happen pretty much anywhere in Europe for pretty much any community.”