Europe’s Unfinished Upheaval
Cuts through the week's noise.
In this week's newsletter: Jude Jones, editor-in-chief of GAY45, cuts through the week's noise exclusively for subscribers, plus our essential recommendations.
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Europe’s Unfinished Upheaval
By Jude Jones, editor-in-chief
On April 19th, 2026, Bulgaria’s former prime minister Rumen Radev re-seized power in the ex-Eastern Bloc nation’s elections – a landslide victory in a country so fragmented that a party hasn’t held an absolute majority since 1997.
The election – marketed as a referendum on oligarchy – ended the political permacrisis the country has been enduring since April 2021, which has seen eight governments rise and fall over five years amid endemic corruption claims. The most recent paroxysm of protest, induced by the unveiling of a budget – the kind of bureaucratic snore that normally passes unnoticed – sparked what the Washington Post called Europe’s first Gen-Z revolution.
The promised stability of a Radev government, though, is a Pyrrhic victory at best. Last week, Hungary kicked Viktor Orbán from power and thereby strangled Vladimir Putin of his foremost EU ally. Exactly one week later, Bulgaria sweeps to power a pro-Russian politico who stuttered to condemn Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and who has vocally criticised sanctions on the war-lording empire. He was also an opponent of Bulgaria’s accession to the Eurozone, which was formalised at the start of the year.
Elsewhere, Orbán conqueror Peter Magyar raised eyebrows by extending a state-visit invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in celebration of their “special relationship”, despite Israeli attempts to engineer the election against the former Orbán ally. Suspicions were promptly squashed when Magyar announced “that person must be taken into custody”, given Hungary’s status as an International Criminal Court member – which currently has an arrest warrant out for Netanyahu for his role in war crimes in Gaza. Meanwhile, Magyar has remained silent on LGBTQ+ rights.
Last week also marked the one-year anniversary of the UK Supreme Court’s decision to legally classify trans women as men in anti-discrimination legislation – a policy that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide raised a “red flag” to. 365 days later, there has been only legal stasis and cultural stagnation. At the BBC, conservative Svengalis attempted to bully the state-funded media group into eradicating what they perceived as pro-trans bias, despite 70 per cent of trans viewers describing BBC coverage of them as “hostile”; in Europe, transphobic lobbies like the Athena Forum in Vienna have sought to build their own architectures of exclusion based on those of the UK, which now sits 22nd in Europe on LGBTQ+ equality.
Silicon Valley was recently rocked by the departure of Tim Cook from Apple (or, at least, from his role as CEO – he will now serve as “Apple Executive Chairman”). Cook, an openly gay man, has also been a long-term advocate for LGBTQ+ rights in an often illiberal corner of US politics – though he is now joined in those upper echelons by a growing cult of gay tech conservatives such as Palantir’s Peter Thiel and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
A question mark in these ranks is Trump-backing Grindr CEO George Arison, who has thrown his support behind San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan in California’s upcoming gubernatorial elections – a favourite among tech elites. Although Arison has publicly stepped back from politics since his Trump comments got him in hot water, this manoeuvring – plus his recent hosting of a buzzy dinner as part of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner – represented his little-awaited return. Arison has also been criticised for Grindr’s hostile policies toward workers’ rights since he became CEO in late 2022.
MUST READ OF GAY45
POLITICS
From the World: Bulgarian Elections: The Man Who Would Not Veto
Bulgaria goes to its eighth election in five years behind a former president reborn as an anti-corruption crusader. The trouble is that his clearest recent test of character came in August 2024, and he failed it. Now he is the premier elect. Queer people are desperate.
INVESTIGATION
From Germany: The Trans Costume and the Cell
When a German neo-Nazi changed his legal gender to dodge prison, he handed the European far right a weapon no amount of speechmaking could have produced. His arrest at a Czech border village last week has placed the consequences before a judge in Plzeň — and an entire trans community before a gathering backlash.
BOOKS
From the USA: The Wonderful World of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek
Andrew Durbin’s five-year labour of archival devotion recovers the entangled lives of photographer Peter Hujar and sculptor Paul Thek — two men who remade American art from a shared bed, a Sicilian crypt and a loft on Second Avenue, and whose deaths from AIDS, nine months apart, closed a world.
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Political and entertainment quality journalism from Europe and the world.
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