The political and media coverage of the recent car ramming attack at Berlin Pride seems to focus exclusively on the Islamist threat in the midst of European societies. That the attack was directed specifically at queer visibility and the fact that the incident left one Polish woman dead is often sidelined. If, in 2025, Friedrich Merz justified the rainbow flag not flying from the Bundestag during the Berlin Pride, saying that parliament was not a “circus tent”, and if he now stands in solidarity with the queer community, it is safe to say that not all the support currently voiced is necessarily genuine.
Conservative parties claim to defend the liberties, also of queer people, while historically they have depicted queer communities as a threat to the family and Christian morality. Now they publicly lament LGBTIQIA+ people as civilian (not queer) victims to promote tighter surveillance of Islamist groups and more restrictive migration policies.
The reaction of right-wing political forces to the attacks is emblematic. Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, released a statement in which she made no mention of queer pride but emphasised the need to protect “the freedom and security of our citizens”.
Homonationalism in Europe
Are we witnessing “homonationalism 2.0”, or is it a new form of discursive exclusion and lack of visibility of queer individuals in the public sphere?
The term “homonationalism” was introduced in the early 2000s to describe the increasing intersection of LGBTIQIA+ policies with nationalist and Western-centric agendas. In the wake of the Berlin attack, this concept needs to be reconsidered or refocused, as it can adapt to various xenophobic discourses driven by actors that utilise unmentioned queer concerns to serve an ulterior motive. It is no longer LGBTIQIA+ actors themselves who adopt exclusionary stances in response to extremist threats. The queer voice is entirely absent when queer people’s precarious acceptance in Europe is employed as mere lip service and as a political tool to justify the exclusion of non-European and Muslim subjects.
Looking more broadly at violence experienced by queer subjects within European societies complexifies our understanding of concepts like freedom or violence.
Queer history shows that both state and domestic violence are unfortunately common and intertwined in modern Europe. From harassment targeting the first public demonstrations of LGBTIQ+ people in the 1970s or openly gay politicians, like Herbert Rusche in the 1980s, to neo-Nazi attacks on queer people in the 1990s, the list is endless and continues today. Same-sex desire was, in actual fact, a criminal offence up until 1994 in West Germany, when paragraph 175 finally disappeared from the German Criminal Code.
Focusing only on the public spheres ignores other kinds of violence, which are private, invisible and structural.
As the ILGA rainbow map which ranks 49 European countries on their respective legal and policy practices for LGBTI people, from 0-100%; eloquently shows, numerous countries fail to include sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics in their hate crime and hate speech legislation as an aggravating factor.
Hungary has long been in the spotlight over state violence against queer citizens. Data shows that state authorities tend to categorise hate crimes against queer, Roma, Jewish people and other minorities only as “breach of peace”.
The country’s 2021 Propaganda Law fuelled (further) discrimination and hate against the LGBTIQIA+ community, curtailing queer representation in schools and the media. Following previous prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Pride ban in 2025, the Hungarian capital celebrated a successful anti-governmental Pride march, while the organiser of a similar, peaceful event in Pécs (Southwest Hungary) faced criminal charges for his activism. The example of Géza Buzás-Hábel, a queer Roma activist and human rights defender, is a case in point for state violence, but also for the importance of intersectional, local activism.
Anti-LGBTIQ+ violence: Islamism is not the only problem
A broad social spectrum of people perpetrate anti-queer violence.
Islamism is but one aspect of the problem. Things have got better for LGBTIQ+ folks in many places, also due to EU policies and interventions from European courts, but fear of and encounters with hostility remain part of everyday life for people in Europe’s queer communities.
Democratic majorities need to be gathered that resist cis-hetero-sexist oppression and the imminent de-funding of initiatives like the queer youth organisation Lambda in Berlin. In building broader coalitions, queer activists should not fall for “false homonationalist friends” who support their cause only to further their discriminatory agendas. An alternative would be to work toward unexpected alliances that include queer, feminist, anti-racist and other inclusive societal causes.
Homonationalist responses to the vicious attack on Berlin Pride detract attention from such conversations and cooperation across supposedly unbridgeable gaps.
Queer migrant and queer of colour initiatives like ADEFRA, LesMigraS and Sportello Migranti Sarah Hegazi as well as queer Muslim communities can lead the way in this respect and teach societies to develop more open understandings of Europe and to tackle anti-queer, race-related and other forms of violence.
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