Prime minister-elect Péter Magyar of Hungary has started naming his cabinet. As he revealed earlier this week, his administration will have 16 separate ministries. He has already named the leaders of 12 of those 16 ministries.
For the position of Minister of Education and Child Care Affairs, he nominated Judit Lannert.
Lannert has qualifications in economics and social politics, has a PhD in sociology, and was a leading expert in the National Public Education Institute (Országos Közoktatási Intézet), as Magyar has revealed in his Facebook post announcing his pick for Minister of Education.
However, that is not why Lannert got a lot of attention online.
People found her personal Facebook page, where she used a number of filters on her profile picture that promoted left-wing, progressive causes. She professed her support for Ukraine in 2022, and the students protesting against the reorganization of the leadership structure in the Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts in 2020.
However, what got her the most backlash is her use of the rainbow-coloured circle around her face on her social media profile to show solidarity for the LGBTQ community in Hungary in June 2021.
That was the time the National Assembly of Hungary passed the Child Protection Act, banning the promotion of modern gender ideology and the LGBTQ agenda in public schools in the country. That law has recently been struck down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), citing its violation of Article 2 of the Treaties of the European Union. The referenced article states that the EU is ‘founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality’.
Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party are generally viewed as a centre-right political force in the international and Hungarian media. As recently as the day after his election on 12 April, Magyar described himself as a conservative in an interview with the Hungarian cable channel ATV.
His electoral success was, for the most part, due to the massive gains he made for the opposition outside of Budapest. The vast majority of rural Hungarian voters are socially very conservative. Having the person in charge of public education in the country promote LGBTQ activism on social media is, most likely, not something that would have wide appeal among those voters.
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