Torino, Italy, Saturday 8 October 2022
The Portuguese capital Lisbon has been chosen as the host city of EuroPride in 2025.
The bid to host the event was presented by ILGA Portugal, Variações and rede ex aequo at the annual general meeting of the European Pride Organisers Association (EPOA) in Torino, Italy. Lisbon was competing against CSD Magdeburg in Germany, and won with 79% of the vote. Votes were cast by member Prides of EPOA.
Speaking after the announcement, a spokesperson for the Lisbon team said:
“This is an historic moment for us and for EuroPride.
2025 marks the first time that Portugal receives an LGBTI+ large scale event and our organisations are extremely proud to have been entrusted with this task.
We are proposing a paradigm shift for EuroPride, where coalitions of local partners are from the start actively involved in the bidding process and share a common vision of the need to move from abstract, while diverse, experiences to a celebration of our unique and individual characteristics.
Proudly Yourselves is a moment of reconciliation with our communities’ diversity and with the embedded singularities that need to be addressed.
In an ever growing hostile environment, not only towards LGBTI+ rights but to Human Rights in general, we have decided to highlight the need to visibly and boldly occupy public spaces and to call out our paper towns.
Lisbon aims to break the silence chains forced onto our identities, our ethnicities, our bodies, our youth and our families.
Moreover, EuroPride 2025 in Lisboa will impose social and political changes on a national and european level, but also beyond Europe – particularly in the Lusophone space and beyond any neo-colonial perspectives.
A special thank you to the Magdeburg team for the positive and friendly competition.”
President of the European Pride Organisers Association, Kristine Garina, congratulated Lisbon and said:
“After this year’s EuroPride in Serbia there can be no doubt about the importance of EuroPride as a vehicle for change and progress across Europe. This will be the first time the event has taken place in a Portuguese-speaking nation and I am excited to see their plans develop.
“I want also to express my gratitude to CSD Magdeburg for their excellent bid. I am sure EuroPride will go to Magdeburg one day!”
Falko Jentsch, Chair of CSD Magdeburg said:
“EuroPride 2025 in Magdeburg would have been a great opportunity for our city, the region and Europe. The journey for this project began at EuroPride in Vienna back in 2019. A tremendous energy and power emanated from EuroPride and the organising activists at that time.
A EuroPride outside the big metropolises, where queer life is often not visible, was our motivation. At that time, we started the project without realising how much it would push us all to our limits.
In these three years, we were often smiled at for our intentions, and we were often wished good luck: “You will need it“. For us, however, it was a gigantic work assignment that we accepted for the LGBTIQ* community.
Many conversations, thousands of hours of work, countless emails and letters, tens of gigabytes of data and many sleepless nights marked the last three years. Always in our minds: the EuroPride project must not damage our daily work for the community or cause actions to be cancelled.
We were able to win many supporters permanently, and we are happy to have gone this far. The process has brought us a lot. For example, many people became aware of us in the first place. It was the right decision to start this project, and we would like to encourage everyone to do the same. We are part of a very large and strong community, and we have been able to make many people aware of this.
‘Visibility creates security’ is a credo that drives us forward in our daily work. We have been visiting Prides in Copenhagen, LeHavre, Warsaw, London, Prague, Belgrade, Gloucester, Cologne, Berlin and many other cities to learn from them, but also to be visible together.
Much of what we have seen we will use in the future, and we call on all Pride organisers and activists to do the same. Think outside the box. Help those in their regions which need visibility, and visit others to learn from them.
For us, it is clear: we will continue the fight so that in 2025 and beyond, Germany will become a pioneer in queer rights.
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The bids were published in August and can be found on our website.