Thousands of far-right protestors marched through Serbia’s capital Sunday, demanding authorities ban the EuroPride parade scheduled for the next weekend.
Brandishing a massive Serbian flag and shouting nationalist slogans, the protestors flooded Belgrade and called for authorities to cancel the Sept. 17 march, Reuters reported. As protestors marched to Belgrade’s St. Sava cathedral, a column of bikers revved their engines as a show of support for the right-wing crowd.
Patriarch Porfirije, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, said in a sermon at the cathedral that the Pride celebrations jeopardized marriage and families.
“They want to desecrate the sanctity of marriage and the family and impose an unnatural union as a substitute for marriage,” Porfirije said.
Although police subsequently announced this Tuesday that they were banning the EuroPride march for security reasons, organizers of EuroPride said that they would march anyway and contest the ban in court (other Serbian Pride bans have previously been struck down in court). Kristine Garina, the president of the European Pride Organisers Association, criticized police for waiting until “the last possible moment” to ban the march.
“The ban is futile. Thousands of LGBTQ+ people and their allies are already in Belgrade to take part in EuroPride,” Garina said. “We will gather on Saturday, even if we cannot march. We urge everyone who supports LGBTQ+ equality and human rights to take a stand, and join us on Saturday. It’s time for change and it is time for Belgrade. We are here and we will gather.”
Garina also criticized Ana Brnabić, the country’s first out lesbian prime minister, for failing to defend the EuroPride celebrations, despite promising that the government would support them.
“This ban displays a complete failure of her political leadership and the complete failure of Serbia to protect its citizens [sic] most basic freedoms,” Garina said of Brnabić. “No self-respecting country would give in to bullies.”
This isn’t the first time that Belgrade’s 2022 EuroPride festivities have come under attack. A similar protest against the march had happened on August 28 and was also supported by the Serbian Orthodox Church. President Aleksandar Vučić announced on August 30 that the march would be banned, sparking backlash both from EuroPride organizers and from the U.N. Françoise Jacob, the U.N. resident coordinator in Serbia, had told Reuters that the move violated its “human rights commitments.”
Although LGBTQ+ Serbians have been able to hold Pride events peacefully in the past, many have been met with violence. The worst instance occurred in 2010, when Serbian police fought with a crowd of hundreds of far-right protestors trying to disrupt a Pride parade; over a hundred people were injured in the clash.
The attacks on Pride reflect broader homophobia in Serbia, where same-sex marriage is illegal, and where almost 85 percent of people identify as Orthodox Christians. A World Values Survey conducted from 2017 to 2020 found that 67.1 percent of Serbians believed that homosexuality was “not justifiable.” A Pew Research Center survey found that 83 percent of Serbians opposed same-sex marriage; that same survey found that 75 percent of Serbians believed that society should not accept homosexuality.
The European Pride Organisers Association had chosen Belgrave to host the 2022 EuroPride festivities three years ago, in hopes that it would advance LGBTQ+ rights in the conservative Eastern European country.
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