*Stefanos Evaggelides, Secretary, ACCEPT – LGBTI Cyprus
Aristotle wrote down the instructions. Anyone intending to hold power that does not belong to them, he observed in the Politics, begins in the same place: do not let people meet. Not the assemblies, not the associations, not the shared meals, nothing that puts citizens in a room together. And he gave the reason, in four words that have not aged: ἡ γὰρ γνῶσις πίστιν ποιεῖ, for knowledge produces trust. People who come to know one another begin to rely on one another, and a population that relies on itself is difficult to rule badly.
Then he described the more elegant method. You need not forbid anyone from taking part in public life. It is enough that they have no time left. Keep them occupied and keep them poor, he wrote, and they will be too busy to conspire, and he listed the great building works that kept populations exhausted for generations.
Two mechanisms, then. The crude one and the quiet one. Europe is currently demonstrating both.
The crude one first. In Oradea, Romania, the municipal authority has refused for a fourth consecutive year to permit a Pride march. The organisers filed on time and proposed more than a hundred alternative routes. Every one was rejected, for traffic, for scheduling, for works. In Hungary, a law passed in March 2025 made organising such an assembly a criminal matter, imposed fines on those attending, and authorised facial recognition to identify them. In Istanbul, fifty people were detained on 28 June this year, a journalist among them, and more than 120 organisational accounts were removed from social media platforms in the same weeks, an attack not on an event but on the capacity of organisations to exist at all. And in Berlin, on 25 July, a car was driven into the crowd at Christopher Street Day. A woman was killed. Twenty-nine people were injured. The authorities are treating it as terrorism.
None of this is obscure. All of it happened this summer, inside the European Union and the Council of Europe.
The quiet mechanism is the one that concerns us more directly, because it requires no decision by anybody and leaves no document behind.
A person working two jobs to cover rent does not attend the assembly. They do not go to the public meeting, they do not join the association, they do not march. Not because they have been prohibited, nobody has prohibited anything, but because the afternoon does not exist. The right remains perfectly intact on paper and is exercised by those who can spare the time.
We are accustomed to treating exhaustion as a private misfortune, or at most an economic statistic. It is neither. It is a political outcome with a documented function, and it is among the oldest instruments of tyranny and demagoguery on record. Aristotle identified it 2,350 years ago and it has been in continuous service since. The modern version does not require a tyrant to command it; the housing market performs the same office without instruction, and no one need take responsibility.
Article 21 of our Constitution guarantees the right of assembly and association. It is a fine provision. The question worth asking is who in this country still has the hours in the week to make use of it.
Pride is where the two mechanisms meet. It is an assembly that some in Europe would prohibit outright, and that a great many people simply cannot afford to attend. That is precisely why it functions as a measure, not of a society's tolerance towards LGBTI people, but of whether that society can still deliver the freedoms it claims to hold.
This is the reasoning behind the European campaign launched on 8 July by ILGA-Europe and the European Pride Organisers Association, Protect Pride. Protect Democracy. It asks the European institutions for three things: that restrictions on Pride be treated as indicators of democratic backsliding, alongside judicial independence and press freedom; that the Union respond publicly when Pride events and their organisers are attacked, because institutional silence operates as permission; and that protection of the right to peaceful assembly be strengthened across Europe.
It is worth being precise about what it is. It is not a European Citizens' Initiative and it does not oblige the Commission to reply. It is an open letter gathering signatures, and its weight is political rather than legal, which means it depends entirely on how many people, and how many organisations, are willing to put their names to it. It can be signed at protectprideprotectdemocracy.com.
Cyprus has banned nothing. We should be careful about how much comfort we take from that. The instruction manual has two chapters, and the second one does not require a ban. It requires only that people be tired enough.
Aristotle understood what a state has to prevent in order to govern a people who do not consent: it has to prevent them from knowing one another. Everything else follows. That is what is at stake when an assembly is refused a route in Romania, and it is what is at stake, more quietly, when a citizen here works a second shift on the day of the march.
For knowledge produces trust. It was true when it was written. It is the reason people are still, in 2026, being stopped from meeting.
