Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Beyond waving rainbow flags

Evelyne Paradis 30th June 2021

Using the rainbow flag to symbolise an east-west divide in Europe risks playing into the hands of authoritarian leaders.

rainbow flag,LGBTI,Hungary
Evelyne Paradis

Last week the international symbol for the LGBTI community, the rainbow flag, took centre stage in European politics and media. The Union of European Football Associations provoked a critical storm when it denied a request from the mayor of Munich to have the Bayern Munich stadium lit in rainbow colours, during the Germany versus Hungary European Championships game, as a protest against legislation just introduced in Hungary banning the inclusion of LGBTI people in material in schools or in media for under-18s. Suddenly, from football players to politicians to businesses, everyone was waving rainbow flags, rowing in on the human rights of LGBTI people and the chastisement of Hungary.

Meanwhile, political wheels were spinning in the European Union and, before the week was out, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, denounced the Hungarian legislation and pledged to use all the powers of the commission to ensure the rights of all EU citizens were guaranteed. Since then, 16 countries have supported a statement urging the commission to take action against the Hungarian law and LGBTI rights have been pushed to the top of the political agenda, with an EU heads-of-state meeting discussing the Hungary situation.

Major caveats

This large wave of solidarity and political commitments is as welcome as it is overdue. But that comes with major caveats.

Considering some of the exchanges of the past week—from media outlets using the rainbow as a symbol of an apparent east-west divide on LGBTI rights in Europe, to leaders such as the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, telling journalists that ‘Hungary has no place in the EU any more’—there is a real risk that the rainbow flag could end up antagonising rather than uniting.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

Allowing the flag and LGBTI rights to become the symbol of an ‘us and them’ argument will not play out well. At the weekend, Poland announced it was working on a similar anti-LGBTI bill to the Hungarian one—a clever strategic move designed to exploit the rainbow divide which came to a head last week.

The political machinations in both countries are as well-trodden as they are clear. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, want to create internal enemies to distract from their own failures and thereby maintain power. The internal enemy they have largely created is LGBTI people, and now they are instrumentalising the same minority to turn their populations against the European values everyone in the ‘forward thinking’ part of Europe is defending. In using the rainbow flag as an instrument to castigate whole countries, we might thus unwittingly contribute to isolating LGBTI people in countries such as Poland and Hungary, rather than bringing people along in support of equality.

Support growing

And public support for LGBTI communities is growing across Europe. In the wake of Orbán’s latest anti-LGBTI legislation, thousands of Hungarians took to the streets to protest. Thousands turned up in Warsaw the same week, to participate in the Pride march or support it from the sidelines. We should foster popular support where it is continuing to grow, working first and foremost with and on behalf of the LGBTI communities directly affected by this law and other violations of fundamental rights across Europe.

We cannot allow the rainbow flag to become a distraction from this work. Symbolic acts, such as lighting buildings and waving flags, do matter of course. They send a message of support, they help prompt conversations and they create political momentum to discuss LGBTI issues. But they risk drawing attention from what really matters. Beyond making us feel good, what is the impact of posting a picture of a rainbow on our Twitter or Facebook profile, for the community in a country such as Hungary? What are EU politicians doing concretely to translate into action the declaration of the EU as an ‘LGBTI freedom zone’ by the European Parliament in March?

It is much easier to wave a flag than to work out how to make sure infringements of EU procedures are tackled or how to change the financial regulations to make sure LGBTI activists in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria have much easier access to the funding they need. Amid the rainbow distraction, the danger is of failing to act where policy-makers can, and should, do so—and thus of losing public credibility and trust.

All EU figures need to think through carefully how they talk about the current situation for LGBTI people across Europe. It’s a lot more complex than a blanket statement such as Rutte’s or simply waving a rainbow flag to show one is on the ‘good’ side. Opinion formers and political leaders alike need to address what needs to be done in an inclusive rather than divisive way—walking the walk as well as talking the talk as they step on the rainbow crossing.

rainbow flag,LGBTI,Hungary
Evelyne Paradis

Evelyne Paradis is the executive director of ILGA-Europe.

You are here: Home / Politics / Beyond waving rainbow flags

Most Popular Posts

meritocracy The myth of meritocracy and the populist threatLisa Pelling
consultants,consultancies,McKinsey Consultants and the crisis of capitalismMariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington
France,pension reform What’s driving the social crisis in FranceGuillaume Duval
earthquake,Turkey,Erdogan Turkey-Syria earthquake: scandal of being unpreparedDavid Rothery
European civil war,iron curtain,NATO,Ukraine,Gorbachev The new European civil warGuido Montani

Most Recent Posts

gas,IPCC Will this be the last European Gas Conference?Pascoe Sabido
water Confronting the global water crisisMariana Mazzucato, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Johan Rockström and 1 more
Hungary,social media,women Hungary’s ‘propaganda machine’ attacks womenLucy Martirosyan
carbon removal,carbon farming,nature Environmental stewardship yes, ‘carbon farming’ noWijnand Stoefs
IRA,industrial policy,inflation reduction act The IRA and European industrial policyPaul Sweeney

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


WATCH HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube