In the summer of 2024, the Bulgarian parliament introduced a bill banning the ‘propaganda’ of ‘non-traditional sexual orientations’, with MPs across the political spectrum framing ‘gender ideology’ as a dangerous threat. Just a few years earlier, in 2021, Serbia’s ruling majority withdrew a draft law on same-sex partnerships after sustained far-right ‘pro-family’ mobilisation. Most recently, the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education rejected a newly proposed Gender Studies programme at the University of Zagreb, following attacks by anti-gender MPs who denounced queer theory and ‘gender ideology’ as incompatible with the Croatian legal system. Taken together, these examples illustrate a peak of ultraconservative fervour and radical-right influence on policymaking in Southeast Europe. While anti-gender movements are often explained as cultural backlash against advances in gender and LGBTIQ+ rights, the present essay builds on a growing body of scholarship that situates their rise within the context of neoliberal political economy. Drawing on original case studies and qualitative data from interviews1 conducted by the author with anti-gender leaders in Bulgaria, Croatia, and Serbia2, I argue for the need to analyse the political economy and economic policies of anti-gender and radical-right actors. Disentangling what appears to be a homogenous Christian right coalition reveals important contradictions and conflicts over socioeconomic issues, redistribution, and the positioning of right-wing actors in relation to neoliberalism. Southeast Europe is a particularly important site for an analysis of this kind.
First, anti-gender leaders themselves portray the region as a ‘stronghold of resistance in the European Union’, one that, unlike Western Europe, has retained its Christian identity3. Second, the resurgence of public religion, nationalism, and geopolitical rivalries makes right-wing mobilisation here both complex and comparatively successful4. Third, prior research on religious and sexual nationalism underscores the need to examine struggles over collective identity in Southeast Europe, especially regarding gender, homosexuality, religion, and nationhood5. Finally, the region remains underexplored within the fast-growing scholarship on anti-gender politics, which has concentrated largely on Western and Central Europe or Latin America.
Class and/or identity politics?
The anti-gender movement is a heterogeneous transnational network of conservative, far-right, and religious actors who oppose ‘gender ideology’ in the name of ‘traditional values’. How should we conceptualise the cluster of issues around which these movements mobilise under the umbrella of ‘gender ideology’? Political science literature often relies on the concept of morality politics, which refers to highly contested policy arenas ‘related to fundamental questions, such as death, reproduction and marriage’6. Expanding this framework, Mieke Verloo has introduced the concept of cathexis, defined as ‘the system that produces and organises bodies, intimacy, sexuality, sexual reproduction, and kinship, located predominantly in families and private intimate relationships’7. Cathexis is therefore closely linked to political economy, as well as to social and family policy. Yet, this model does not fully encompass issues such as education and children’s rights. For this reason, I propose turning to the broader concepts of biological and social reproduction. These categories cover not only family choice and reproductive rights but also gender roles and the transmission of cultural values and norms to future generations through both primary socialisation and the public education system. To grasp the far right’s politics of biological and social reproduction, we must therefore consider both the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution.
The contemporary rise and institutionalisation of anti-gender movements and neofascist politics represents a direct assault on emancipatory projects and a one-way regression in the rights of marginalised populations. The far right’s battle cry against ‘woke’ or ‘gender ideology’ openly aligns with policies that reassert racist, nationalist, and patriarchal orders across different contexts. By contrast, their stance on political economy is far less straightforward. While no emancipatory working-class politics or solidarities can be expected from the right, its actors nonetheless present themselves as the anti-establishment voice of ‘the people’ and of the ‘forgotten working classes’, positioned against neoliberal cosmopolitan elites. To assess whether these forces oppose or reinforce neoliberalism, and whether they advocate for more or less state intervention, we must situate far-right politics within its oppositional relationship to progressive actors and read it through the evolving logic of capitalist social relations.
As Nancy Fraser has forcefully argued for decades, the left has ‘dropped the ball’ on political economy, narrowing its focus to an ever-multiplying set of identitarian concerns that leave capitalist class relations largely unchallenged8. Since the 1990s, however, many on the so-called ‘cultural’ or ‘postmodern’ left have disputed this diagnosis. Most prominently, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, and others have insisted that the very dichotomy between identity and class politics is itself a product of capitalist ideology — one that obscures more than it clarifies. From this perspective, emancipatory movements have never ceased to demand economic equality and redistribution; they have simply broadened their agendas to include previously marginalised issues and voices within the progressive project9.
It is, of course, undeniable that capitalism has always been entangled with familial relations, control over reproduction, sexuality, and the oppression of women as well as gendered and racialised minorities. Political economy was never separate from cultural patterns, but mutually constitutive with them. Moreover, the earliest waves of identity politics — especially the US struggles for Black liberation and women’s emancipation — advanced profound critiques of capitalism and demanded not only redistribution on a large scale but, in some cases, outright socialist transformation10. Nevertheless, the last few decades have vindicated much of Fraser’s concern. We have witnessed the ascendancy of neoliberal progressivism, the centrist pink-washing of capitalist exploitation, and the depoliticisation and co-optation of identity politics — culminating, paradoxically, in the rise of neo-fascist ‘feminist’ leaders who celebrate breaking the political ‘glass ceiling’ while reinforcing systems of domination.
Co-optation of the feminist and LGBTIQ+ struggles
In the midst of a historical collision between the rise of neoliberalism and the fall of communism, Eastern Europe particularly witnessed a new flavour of Western-funded liberal feminism that detached itself from socialist, materialist issues. Importantly, various forms of feminist and LGBTIQ+ politics that rose in the region after 1989 appeared in the form of institutionalised civil society, as NGOs with top-down, donor driven agenda-setting and funding heavily facilitated (and constrained) by the EU accession process. Largely isolated from a rich socialist tradition and history, these semi-peripheral progressive movements were ready to sponge up a largely depoliticised and co-opted form of identity politics that was increasingly fashionable in the countries of the Western centre. As Cold War politics and neoliberal restructuring increasingly attacked progressive organising around class issues, the left shifted its discourse towards emancipation around the ‘cultural identity’ of oppressed minorities such as women and LGBTIQ+ persons. According to Fraser, financialised capitalism generated an ‘alliance of marketisation and emancipation against social protection’11. Early identity politics in the US that focused on unsettling fixed identities and demanding intersectionality also included class issues when opposing the assimilationist (upper)-middle-class character of the movement of middle-class white gays and women. However, the social, relational understanding of gender and group identity quickly got lost in favour of a neoliberal, individualised politics of increasingly commodified identities. As demands for family and marriage equality were assimilated into a political economic system that favours dumping social protection onto individuals and families, rainbow capitalism and respectability politics took on a sinister function of ameliorating the grievances within the existing system while leaving underlying class relations hidden and unchallenged.12
It is, therefore, not surprising that both the neoconservative wave of the 1980s and the anti-gender wave of the early 2010s repoliticised the liberal technocratic management of diversity, individual identity and freedom, attacking it as a project of uprooted, rich transnational elites, whereby feminist and queer politics are derided as ‘self-centered, individualistic, centered on fun and pleasure and, thus, immoral’13. If liberal identity politics reflect capitalism’s tendency to melt all things solid into air, far-right politics, especially in times of crises, remind us of that other crucial capitalist tendency towards hierarchical exploitation and devaluation of certain categories of workers. Thus, while leftists attack neoliberalism, rightists primarily attack progressive neoliberalism. However, before turning to the complex relation between anti-gender movements and capitalist political economy, what follows is a short detour into the general mass appeal of far-right politics (in Eastern Europe) today, and the uneasy, often confusing boundaries between economic and cultural issues.
The radical right vote — economy or culture?
Debates in political theory over the relative salience of identity and class politics are mirrored in mainstream political science discussions of the drivers behind voter support for populist radical right (PRR) parties. In his seminal work, Cas Mudde famously argued: ‘it’s not the economy, stupid’, contending that nativism, authoritarianism, and populism constitute the core ideological tenets around which PRR support is organised14. The central political issue — anti-immigration — is thus often read through a cultural lens, as a backlash against globalisation, multiculturalism, and perceived threats to national sovereignty and traditional identities. Because the economic agendas of PRR parties vary widely — from neoliberalism to welfare chauvinism to hybrid ‘third way’ positions — there appears to be no single class-based grievance consistently motivating the radical
Mainstream political science tends to define immigration narrowly—as an issue of culture, identity, or sovereignty. This rigid distinction between ‘material-economic’ and ‘postmaterial-cultural’ issues reproduces the capitalist logic of artificially separating economy, politics, and culture.
right vote. In Central and Eastern Europe, support is often explained through a surge of nationalist mobilisations against ethnic minorities (especially the Roma), around ‘traditional values’, and against unresolved historical grievances15.
Halikiopoulou and Vlandas highlight how national identity and cultural sovereignty have become increasingly important factors driving PRR support16. This ‘new nationalism’ reflects demands for policies that defend sovereignty and national culture, resonating with electorates unsettled by immigration and globalisation. Brug and van Spanje likewise show how attitudes toward immigration and European integration shape voter preferences17, while Hauwaert and Kessel identify a strong correlation between populist orientations and support for radical-right parties, particularly among voters with pronounced cultural grievances18. Yet the evidence remains mixed: voter support for the PRR varies across time and national context. Other studies stress the role of economic vulnerability. Jensen and Vestergaard find that economically insecure voters are more likely to support parties offering robust unemployment protections and responsive social policies19. Such discontent often fuses with feelings of disenfranchisement, pushing voters toward radical-right actors who present themselves as champions of ‘ordinary people’ against distant elites. Similarly, Hale and Koenig-Archibugi (2016) demonstrate that economic discontent, particularly discontent tied to globalisation, fuels support for radical-right populists, even if their primary focus is on attitudes toward democracy in the EU20.
What matters most for my argument is how mainstream political science tends to define immigration narrowly — as an issue of culture, identity, or sovereignty. This rigid distinction between ‘material-economic’ and ‘postmaterial-cultural’ issues reproduces the capitalist logic of artificially separating economy, politics, and culture. A structural view of migration flows and labour demand in European economies — along with the persistent reluctance of liberal elites to invest in immigrant welfare — shows that immigration is fundamentally a political-economic issue, inseparably tied to both recognition and redistribution. The same holds true for gender relations, increasingly recognised as a crucial driver of PRR support. The performative and rhetorical construction of the ‘gender ideology’ threat cannot be reduced to cultural or identity frames; it is entangled with the crisis of social reproduction and with transformations in family and gender relations under late capitalism.
Anti-gender politics and neoliberalism
The neoliberal restructuring of Europe through fiscal austerity, deregulation, and privatisation has had profoundly gendered effects, dismantling welfare provisions and undermining family and social policies. In Eastern Europe, the post-2008 austerity cycle compounded the earlier traumas of the transition to capitalism, which had already eroded social safety nets, heightened precarity, and driven unemployment21. Because capital depends on the ongoing work of social reproduction, the dismantling of welfare states requires the reinforcement of ‘existing gendered, racialized and class inequality and the exploitation of the workforce of women’22. Within this context, the familialist ideology promoted by anti-gender movements offers women the promise of a ‘shield’ from market forces. That promise resonates, in part, because neoliberal feminism has failed to address the social and labour rights of women workers23, while gender equality is increasingly framed as a neoliberal governance project imposed ‘from above’ by the European Union24. The contemporary anti-gender movement’s celebration of the ‘traditional family’ thus revives and adapts US neoliberal strategies from the 1980s, which ‘reimagined the social world in a way that would fit the new form of capitalism’ — that is, by displacing the costs of neoliberal cuts onto women’s unpaid labour within the depoliticised, private sphere of the family25. As a recent qualitative comparative analysis of 11 Eastern European countries demonstrated, governmental austerity measures are, indeed, a necessary condition for the appearance of anti-gender mobilisation26.
If anti-gender politics supply the ideological fuel for capital’s drive to privatise social reproduction, their simultaneous denunciations of ‘neoliberalism’ appear contradictory, if not disingenuous. Yet, as Korolczuk and colleagues note, social conservatives are not necessarily economic libertarians27. Indeed, conserva-tives often connect critiques of political liberalism with critiques of economic liberalism, viewing individualism, consumerism, and the marketisation of all social relations, not only those of gender, as corrosive to their vision of a Christian, conservative community. Middle-class conservative activists deploy the ‘gender ideology’ frame as a populist appeal to working-class and economically precarious populations28. In Eastern Europe especially, working-class ‘common sense’ and morality are counterposed to ‘overeducated professionals whose knowledge was detached from the real world and who often produce useless concepts (e.g. “gender”)’29. As Payne and Tornhill observe:
Notions of gender equality and women’s empowerment have come to underpin and legitimize corporate profit accumulation […]. Here, declared commitments to gender equality coincide with the increasing normalization of inequalities as the prioritized principle of competitiveness is generalized across an ever-wider spectrum of relations30.
The anti-gender critique of corporate power and commodification can be read as a response to neoliberal governmentality, which imposes a depoliticised, technocratic management of social and economic life while offering emancipation only to upwardly mobile, middle-class women. In Eastern Europe, where private property, market relations, and gender-equality policies were introduced simultaneously through the EU integration process, anti-gender actors portray neoliberalism as the common root of all social problems.
Yet the right-wing invocation of ‘neoliberalism’, a notoriously loose and float-ing signifier, should not be mistaken for a critique of capitalism itself, nor of the structural inequalities and market hierarchies it produces. Anti-gender movements do not challenge capitalism per se; rather, they target one of its specific forms: liberal, cosmopolitan capitalism. As Ayoub and Stoeckl argue, the far right’s regressive vision longs for a return to a ‘market-town’ capitalism, characterised by ordered socio-economic relations anchored in nation-states, religious communities, and the patriarchal family home in which women are expected to provide unpaid labour with joy31. In line with this vision, many anti-gender actors in Eastern Europe advocate economic nationalism, protectionism, welfare
The familialist ideology promoted by anti-gender movements offers women the promise of a ‘shield’ from market forces.
chauvinism, and social benefits tied to the male breadwinner model. Crucially, as both the history of fascism and the contemporary example of Trumpism demonstrate, far-right appeals to working-class discontent do not preclude the implementation of neoliberal economic policies once in power. State intervention and welfare provision may appear, but only in racist and patriarchal forms designed to protect white, heterosexual ‘natives’ from racialised and gendered ‘others’. The contradictions in the economic discourse of anti-gender and far-right actors become clearer if we understand them, as Hank Johnston does, as loose coalitions of ‘status movements’, mobilising identity grievances among majoritarian groups. These status claims function as symbolic substitutes for structural critiques:
For the right-wing demagogues of the twenty-first century, invoking the emotions linked to status identity is a discursive strategy that spins distant structural shifts such as off-shore manufacturing, global immigration patterns, and increasing concentration of wealth away from economic claims and political interests into expressions of lost status that are simpler and easy, such as ‘Your country is being destroyed’, ‘Your families are not safe’, ‘And they are doing it to you’32.
Johnston’s analysis of the MAGA movement exemplifies a broader left-wing interpretation of far-right and anti-gender identity politics: as the displacement of economic insecurity, anxiety, and precarity onto status politics that scape-goat minorities. Within the hegemonic neoliberal ‘extremism of the centre’, class and property relations are obscured, while identitarian cleavages — ethnic, gendered, racial, or religious — are offered as the primary explanatory lens. As Svatoňová argues, the moral panic over ‘gender’ can thus be read as the fear of losing what remains of the last safety net for many in an increasingly impoverishing and exploitative system: the family.
Anti-gender movements in Southeast Europe
Since the 2008 financial crisis, Southeast Europe has emerged as a distinct semi-peripheral region shaped by the EU austerity regime and marked by a pervasive sense of powerlessness, deepened by ‘unresponsive elites and a (perceived) lack of agency over larger socio-economic processes’33.
In Bulgaria, the post-communist transition was characterised by elite-driven reforms rather than mass mobilisation. Yet in recent years, the country has become more of a ‘protest society’, with recurrent anti-government demonstrations. The 2012–2013 protests against corruption and socioeconomic inequality provided the template for early anti-gender campaigns. These were not direct reactions to feminist or LGBT+ advances but far-right reinterpretations of anti-statist grievances. Bulgaria’s rushed EU accession in 2007 had imposed liberalisation of gender and sexual equality policies through top-down technocratic processes, with little grassroots debate or support. This approach fueled backlash, enabling far-right actors to merge anti-gender, anti-EU, and populist narratives while positioning themselves as defenders of ‘the people’.
In Croatia, the post-Tuđman democratic transition of 2000 ushered in the professionalisation of civil society, as feminist and LGBT organisations strategically used EU accession leverage to push gender equality policies, particularly in the areas of domestic violence and same-sex unions. As in Bulgaria, these reforms were top-down and technocratic, lacking strong grassroots backing. This left them vulnerable to backlash, later reframed as democratic resistance against elite-driven liberalisation. During the 2000s, the ruling center-right HDZ moderated under Ivo Sanader, adopting progressive legislation despite internal far-right opposition. When Sanader was arrested in 2010 on corruption charges, mass protests erupted, creating fertile ground for Eurosceptic and anti-establishment mobilisation. On the very day of his arrest, the anti-gender party HRAST was publicly launched, linking family values with the promise of political renewal.
In Serbia, the fall of Milošević in 2000 triggered rapid NGO-isation of civil society, funded heavily by foreign donors. Democratisation became synonymous with professionalised, donor-dependent organisations. Liberal NGOs adopted a non-partisan stance, while nationalist actors portrayed themselves as patriotic mass movements — even as they borrowed strategies from NGO organising.
Feminist groups, also organised as NGOs, faced state neglect and financial precarity due to dependence on foreign funding. EU accession negotiations beginning in 2006 accelerated gender equality reforms, leading to the establishment of institutions and key legislation by 2009. These reforms, however, sparked backlash from the Church and far-right actors. The mass anti-government protests of 2011 allowed groups like Dveri to recast family values and anti-gender rhetoric as effective electoral mobilisation tools.
In conclusion, despite national differences, anti-gender contention in Southeast Europe has followed three common stages. First, gender equality reforms were introduced through top-down, technocratic channels, largely as EU accession requirements. These measures overlooked entrenched socioeconomic inequalities and lacked grassroots legitimacy, leaving them politically fragile and detached from everyday life. Second, economic crises and mounting disillusionment with pro-EU political elites fueled waves of mass protest, which created fertile ground for anti-gender mobilisation. These movements capitalised on broader anger at corruption and external imposition, framing themselves as democratic resistance to elites. Third, anti-gender activism evolved into a broader critique of systemic political and economic failures. While presenting themselves as defenders of ‘the people’, these movements contained deep internal contradictions: their economic visions ranged from neoliberal market advocacy to welfare nationalism. This heterogeneity underscores that anti-gender politics are not simply moral crusades but flexible coalitions positioning themselves as systemic alternatives, even as they reproduce the inequalities they claim to resist.
Serbia
In 2011, mass protests erupted in Serbia against the ruling centre-left Democratic Party. While the nationalist SNS spearheaded the mobilisation, the anti-gender NGO Dveri seized the moment, framing it as evidence of a profound social, economic, and political crisis. Rejecting all parties as corrupt, Dveri cast civil society as the true arena of politics and advanced a dual strategy: grassroots activism paired with a political platform centred on ‘social patriotism’ and ‘family values’. Their anti-establishment framing depicted mainstream parties as traitors colluding with Western elites against the Serbian people. Tycoons were blamed for privatisation and the destruction of the economy, while media elites were denounced as their enablers. The financial power of both was portrayed as contaminating elections and public service, hollowing out democracy, and producing resignation and low voter turnout34. An injustice frame crystallised around a unified enemy dubbed ‘the united monopolies of Serbia’:
Serbia is in chains […] under the united monopolistic domination of Western embassies, predatory foreign banks, domestic tycoons, corrupt politicians, and controlled media, all of which brutally exploit Serbia as their colony35.
Although Dveri frequently invokes structural issues such as neoliberalism and privatisation, it primarily presents Serbia’s crisis as moral. This aligns with the displacement thesis developed by critical scholars, which shows how class problems are refracted into identity crises. Among nationalist and conservative actors, patriotism, preventing demographic decline, and anti-abortion stances have been tightly intertwined, with Dveri framing family as the foundation of both national survival and security. Over time, its rhetoric shifted from overt religious nationalism to a more secular discourse of parental rights and the family as an active social agent — though the underlying objective of safeguarding the biological survival of the Serbian nation has remained unchanged. Dveri’s proposed solution, ‘national capitalism’, emphasised subsidies and protectionism for native workers and small businesses, paired with Church-backed social services. Thus, while Dveri denounces neoliberalism as the source of many ills, its solutions remain embedded within a neoliberal model of society — one re-shaped in an illiberal and ethnonationalist form. Indeed, Dveri’s valorisation of civil society and family values aligns neatly with the neoliberal rollback of the welfare state and the transfer of social and political responsibility to families and civic organisations36. As Lassiter shows in his analysis of the 1970s US ‘family values’ discourse, conservatives interpret the breakdown of the family as a cultural crisis caused by feminists, gay movements, and the sexual revolution, rather than as a symptom of deeper economic transformations37.
Bulgaria
The mass protests in Bulgaria in 2012 and 2013, fuelled by socioeconomic grievances and framed as a revolt of civil society against a corrupt state, played a crucial role in shaping the rise of anti-gender mobilisation. The first protest against the Child Act in 2012 did not emerge as a reaction to feminist or LGBT+ advances but as part of a broader anti-statist sentiment attacking a perceived government overreach in empowering the authority of child-protective services. Far-right actors reframed this discontent by portraying the pro-EU government and its policies as dictated by liberal elites in Brussels. The Bulgarian radical right reflects a broader Eastern European pattern: combining cultural conservatism with economic protectionism and welfare chauvinism. Yet tensions within the Bulgarian anti-gender movement expose the difficulties far-right actors face in positioning themselves on economic questions. One Protestant leader lamented the lack of authentically conservative forces in the country:
Those nationalists… I wouldn’t call them right-wing because they’re not right, they are pro-state. You need to be in support of a small state if you’re right-wing. So, they are socially right, economically left, and they depend on the state to introduce their political platform — they do not rely on empowering individual people and their freedom (Interviewee B2)38.
From the nationalist perspective, however, outsourcing social welfare to ‘private’ NGOs is itself deeply problematic. Nationalists are wary of Protestant-based charity organisations, often perceived as proselytising. One leading member of an anti-gender NGO voiced particular distrust: I was confused to see that maybe 90% of the organisations [anti-gender] were some Baptists. OK, I myself, I’m Christian Orthodox and I think that such people ... They have a different worldview. They have other NGOs promoting children’s rights but also providing social services that they charge. But us, we were trying to fight against paid social services, so this is always a conflict39.
This internal value clash maps onto a broader divide between ethnonationalist Orthodox actors and Protestant organisations. Protestant-led groups, often inspired by US conservative ideas, call for minimal state intervention and interpret family decline as a cultural problem caused by feminism, LGBT+ rights, and the sexual revolution. By contrast, nationalist Orthodox actors advocate strong state involvement, particularly in childcare, education, and social benefits. Conflicts thus emerge over whether family policies and social services should be publicly funded or provided by private charities — with nationalists distrusting Protestant charities for proselytising and charging fees. Despite these differences, opposition to ‘gender ideology’ functions as a unifying banner holding the movement together. Yet these examples of economic conflict within the movement underscore a central point: to understand far-right politics, we must
The anti-gender critique of corporate power and commodification can be read as a response to neoliberal governmentality, which imposes a depoliticised, technocratic management of social and economic life while offering emancipation only to upwardly mobile, middle-class women.
take seriously their political economy, not just their cultural rhetoric. Gender remains at the heart of this entanglement.
Croatia
The Croatian anti-gender movement secured its most visible victory in 2013, when the referendum it initiated succeeded and the constitution was amended to define marriage exclusively as a heterosexual union. This achievement rested on two distinct pillars. On the one hand, the movement drew on Catholic lay networks, right-wing radicals, and a longstanding tradition of nationalist, anti-abortion activism dating back to the early 1990s. On the other hand, a new generation of middle- and upper-class activists, linked to the international Christian Right, Catholic integralists, and Opus Dei, introduced innovative strategies, framing their agenda through the language of human rights, ‘family values’, parental rights, and the protection of children against ‘gender ideology’. Although unified in their mobilisation against ‘gender’, these factions diverge in their approaches to economic policy and neoliberalism.
The libertarian strand, represented by organisations such as Vigilare and the Centre for the Renewal of Culture, forges a direct link between the state’s regulatory role in human rights, the regulation of women’s bodies, and economic freedom. They demand a sweeping transformation of the state along the principles of so-called ‘limited government’40. Advocating a small state, they depict state authority as repressive — both in curtailing human rights such as freedom of speech and assembly, and in promoting abortion or in vitro fertilisation, as well as in restricting economic liberties. Drawing inspiration from the international neoconservative right, they invited figures such as Chicago School economist José Piñera to TradFest, where he promoted privatisation of the pension system. In line with this agenda, the libertarian faction envisions support for families not through state welfare but through voluntary networks of charities, private foundations, and Church-based services.
The Catholic social strand, centered on In the Name of the Family and Voice of Parents for Children, aligns more closely with the social teaching of the Catholic Church. These groups emphasise solidarity with mothers, arguing that the state has a duty to provide concrete measures to reconcile family and professional life, and to offer direct assistance to women considering abortion for economic reasons. Their agenda crystallised in the radical-right party HRAST, whose programme included premiums for early decision-making regarding childbirth, the institution of ‘mother educators’ for women with four or more children, increased maternity benefits, subsidies for kindergarten fees, and organised childcare for families unable to secure kindergarten placement. Additional measures included the right to Sunday rest, subsidised textbooks and school supplies, affordable access to a first family home, and employer-provided in-house childcare. Importantly, despite their differences, neither faction is anti-capitalist; both are vocal in their support for pro-business and pro-entrepreneurial policies.
As in the Bulgarian case, these dynamics reveal two distinct forms of familism. Neoconservative familism, embodied by Vigilare and the Centre for the Renewal of Culture, upholds individual responsibility as paramount. From this perspective, a ‘properly’ functioning family has no need for state intervention. The role of the state should be minimal, while family values are cultivated through education, culture, natalist discourse, churches, NGOs, and private Christian service providers. This orientation frames the state as inherently repressive — whether in relation to human rights or economic freedoms — while endorsing privatisation and market-based reforms such as pension restructuring.
By contrast, nationalist familism, championed by In the Name of the Family and Voice of Parents for Children, envisions the state as a central actor in pro-natalist policy. Here the state is tasked with sustaining women’s caregiving roles, investing in childcare and social services, and implementing policies designed to reconcile family and professional life. Unlike the libertarian model, this approach embraces active state intervention, but with the nativist goal of reproducing and strengthening the Croatian nation.
To conclude, in looking at the entanglement of anti-gender politics with neoliberalism and political economy in Southeast Europe we have seen that, while often treated as a cultural backlash against feminism and LGBT+ rights, anti-gender mobilisations are best understood within the broader dynamics of capitalist restructuring, austerity, and social reproduction. Drawing on debates between class and identity politics, we see how neoliberal progressivism, anchored in technocratic governance and elite-driven reforms, has depoliticised feminist and LGBTIQ+ struggles, rendering them vulnerable to co-optation and far-right contestation. Anti-gender movements in Southeast Europe function not merely as moral or cultural crusades but as flexible coalitions that reinterpret structural economic crises as identity-based grievances. Their contradictions reveal how far-right politics appropriate critiques of neoliberalism while ultimately reinforcing capitalist logic through patriarchal, nationalist, and exclusionary forms of social reproduction.
Notes
1 A total of 51 interviews were conducted in the three countries with leaders of anti-gender NGOs, citizen’s initiatives, and radical-right parties.
2 Ivan Tranfić, God and Country: A Comparative Study of the Emergence of Anti-gender Movements in Southeast Europe, PhD Dissertation, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2024.
3 Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff, ‘Gender as “Ebola from Brussels”: The Anticolonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43(4) 2018, pp. 797–821, https://doi. org/10.1086/696691.
4 Michael Minkenberg, The Radical Right in Eastern Europe: Democracy under Siege?, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
5 Srđan Sremac and Reinder Ruard Ganzevoort (eds), Religious and Sexual Nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe: Gods, Gays, and Governments, Leiden: Brill, 2015.
6 Isabelle Engeli, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, and Lars Thorup Larsen, Morality Politics in Western Europe: Parties, Agendas and Policy Choices, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
7 Mieke Verloo and David Paternotte, ‘The Feminist Project under Threat in Europe’, Politics and Governance 6 (3), 2018, pp 1–5, https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v6i3.1736.
8 Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, ed. Brian Milstein, London: Verso, 2023.
9 Gary Dorrien, ‘Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young, and the Intersections of Justice: Equality, Recognition, Participation, and Third Wave Femi-nism’, American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 42(3), 2021, pp. 5–34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48678002.
10 Marie Moran, Identity and Capitalism, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2015, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473910560.
11 Fraser and Jaeggi.
12 Stanley Aronowitz, ‘Against the liberal state: ACT-UP and the emergence of postmodern politics’, in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 357-383.
13 Eva Svatoňová, ‘“We Want Justice and Equality, Not Gender”: Translating Class Struggle into Anti-gender Discourse’, Totalitarianism and Democracy 19(1), 2022, pp. 111–26, https://doi.org/10.13109/tode.2022.19.1.111.
14 Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492037.
15 Minkenberg, The Radical Right in Eastern Europe.
16 Daphne Halikiopoulou and Tim Vlandas, ‘What Is New and What Is Nationalist about Europe’s New Nationalism? Explaining the Rise of the Far Right in Europe’, Nations and Nationalism 25(2), 2019, pp. 409–34, https:// doi.org/10.1111/nana.12515.
17 Wouter Van Der Brug and Joost Van Spanje, ‘Immigration, Europe and the ‘New’ Cultural Dimension’, European Journal of Political Research 48(3), 2009, pp. 309–34, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2009.00841.x.
18 Steven M. Van Hauwaert and Stijn Van Kessel, ‘Beyond Protest and Discontent: A Cross-national Analysis of the Effect of Populist Attitudes and Issue Positions on Populist Party Support,’ European Journal of Political Research 57(1), 2018, pp. 68–92, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12216.
19 Carsten Jensen and Mathias Bukh Vestergaard, ‘Government Responsiveness to Voters’ Economic Vulnerabilities: Evidence from 17 European Democracies’, West European Politics 45(2), pp. 223–41, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/01402382.2020.1861822.
20 Thomas Hale and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, ‘Are Europeans Ready for a More Democratic European Union? New Evidence on Preference Heterogeneity, Polarisation and Crosscuttingness’, European Journal of Political Research 55(2), 2016, pp. 225–45, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12136.
21 Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment, London: Routledge, 2021, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003133520.
22 Alexandra Scheele, Julia Roth, and Heidemarie Winkel (eds), Global Con-testations of Gender Rights, Bielefeld University Press, 2022, https://doi. org/10.1515/9783839460696.
23 Weronika Grzebalska and Andrea Pető, ‘The Gendered Modus Operandi of the Illiberal Transformation in Hungary and Poland’, Women’s Studies International Forum 68, May 2018, pp. 164–72, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. wsif.2017.12.001.
24 Marta Rawłuszko, ‘And If the Opponents of Gender Ideology Are Right? Gender Politics, Europeanization, and the Democratic Deficit’, Politics & Gender 17(2), 2021, pp. 301–23, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X19000576.
25 Graff and Korolczuk, Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment.
26 Maja Gergorić, ‘The Emergence of Anti-Gender Movements in Post-Communist Europe’, PhD. Dissertation. University of Zagreb, 2024.
27 Elżbieta Korolczuk, Agnieszka Graff, and Johanna Kantola, ‘Gender Danger. Mapping a Decade of Research on Anti-Gender Politics’, Journal of Gender Studies 23 April 2025, pp. 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2025.2489584.
28 Dorit Geva, ‘Non Au Gender: Moral Epistemics and French Conservative Strategies of Distinction’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 6(4), 2019, pp. 393–420, https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2019.1660196.
29 Svatoňová, ‘“We Want Justice and Equality, Not Gender”‘
30 Payne Gunnarsson and Sofie Tornhill, ‘The Enemy’s Enemy: Feminism at the Crossroads of Neoliberal Co-Optation and Anti-Gender Conservatism’, Journal of Political Ideologies 28(1) 2023, pp. 62–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.1921937.
31 Phillip Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl, The Global Fight against LGBTI Rights: How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities, New York: New York University Press, 2024.
32 Hank Johnston, ‘The MAGA Movement’s Big Umbrella*’, Mobiliza-tion: An International Quarterly 28(4), 2024, pp. 409–33, https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-28-4-409.
33 Florian Bieber and Dario Brentin (eds), Social Movements in the Balkans: Rebellion and Protest from Maribor to Taksim, London: Routledge, 2021.
34 Interviewee S6, Tranfić, God and Country.
35 Interviewee S4, Tranfić, God and Country.
36 Ankica Čakardić, ‘Who Cares? Neoliberalism, Informal Labour, and Life-Making,’ Sociologija 64(4), 2022, pp. 503–18, https://doi.org/10.2298/ SOC2204503C.
37 Matthew D. Lassiter, ‘Inventing Family Values’, in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctv1n 3x1bs.
38 Tranfić, God and Country.
39 Interviewee B4, Tranfić, God and Country.
40 Mario Kikaš, ‘Antidržavna desnica ili o političkom uvozu’, Libela.org, 2014, https://libela.org/sa-stavom/antidrzavna-desnica-ili-o-politickom-uvozu/.